Dthat Uganda is a country where homosexuality is punishable by death, that President Yoweri Museveni shot fifty civilians in 2020 because they were protesting and that this whole asylum seeker plan is a futile maneuver to divert attention from the fuss over emergency law, about it I wanted to write in detail today, but it’s a shame. It’s not there.
Since I saw the NOS video on Thursday in which Reinette Klever traveled through Uganda in a cream-coloured dress, resembling Doctor Livingstone in the hope of accommodating some asylum seekers who had exhausted all legal avenues, I could only think of the utter confusion. which his host Jeje Odongo must have felt that day.
Therefore, it was almost inevitable that Odongo, Uganda’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, woke up that morning feeling very angry. Because yes, this is another representative of a country that first exploited its continent for centuries and then criminalized its poverty.
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Jarl van der Ploeg is a journalist and columnist de Volkskrant. He previously worked as a correspondent in Italy. Columnists have the freedom to express their opinions and do not have to adhere to journalistic rules for objectivity. Read our guidelines here.
When he heard on the radio moments later how Mrs. Klever praised the ‘long and good relationship with Uganda’, his face inevitably red. Because he made fun of them? He himself was a minister when they concluded a disastrous tax agreement with the Netherlands in 2004, after which hundreds of Ugandan companies opened letterbox companies in Amsterdam and have been paying their taxes there ever since. Telecom giant Airtel alone avoided dividend taxes of $25 million in three years. That is the annual salary of twenty thousand Ugandan teachers, with your long and good relationship.
I’ll tell you the truth, he thought when Minister Klever finally stood before him. But then he started talking and suddenly everything changed.
Hah, do you see Odongo thinking? At the end of August, the same minister had refused with great fanfare to donate a small amount of MPOX vaccine to his country and now, less than a few weeks later, his twin brother suddenly gave away a fantastic revenue model for free. ?
Is this a joke, he whispered to his assistant. So what we have to do is send a few unemployed young people by ship to Europe every year, then wait a few months, after which the Dutch will politely send them back to Kampala on KLM flights and in return we will receive millions of euros. ?
Odongo looks confused, because the Netherlands is a country that creates beyond creation, right? The only person in the world whose plan is better than nature’s plan? They were able to create a habitable plot of land in a place that for millions of years had only functioned through the instincts of fish and the laws of water. Why don’t they just build a new province if it’s so busy there?
Maybe it was some kind of reparation, his assistant also suggested in a whisper. That they feel sorry for the last election because of the boatload and this time they want to send some people home?
Odongo looked at Klever’s business card: ‘Overseas Trade and Development Assistance’ was written on it. His assistant was probably right. In fact the Netherlands no longer traffics in African youth, so this does fall into the development aid category.
Should we protect the woman from herself, asked the assistant, but Odongo had already pushed her aside and signaled to a TV journalist accompanying him, who immediately ran towards her. “Of course we are willing to talk about this,” Odongo said clearly into the microphone. “I even want to do it.”
