People refuse to help not because they don’t feel for others but because the history of helping in Uganda has taught them to fear the injustice of the law.

Wilfred Muhwezi was a father of four, with his first born in Primary Seven. Wilfred was a High School teacher, a Parish Chief in Mbarara and a Gombolola Internal Security Officer (GISO) in Ibanda.  In the last week of April 2023, he perished in a road accident on a ruined section of the Mbarara-Ibanda highway. Wilfred was carrying his wife, also a teacher, and their three-year-old lastborn child on a motorcycle when they were hit by an overtaking Isuzu Forward truck.

The eyewitness account of a Boda-Boda rider turned Wilfred’s burial in Ibanda into a moral challenge. He narrated that while Wilfred lay terribly fractured and struggling for his life by the roadside, the first local responders to the accident scene begged passing cars to assist and rushed him to hospital in vain. In fact, one of the cars that did not stop was of a relative. The truck that hit him made a run for it and some Boda-Boda cyclists pursued it until the driver abandoned it, taking to his heels. Wilfred’s accident scenario was just a repetition of the norm on Uganda’s roads. How do we make sense of the “heartlessness” that hears cries for help and never comes to the rescue? Where did the morals go?

To make sense of the Ugandan public’s moral degeneration, we need to understand the state’s praxis of the law. It is common practice for the Uganda Police Force to distressingly interrogate Good Samaritans on matters to which they only came to offer a helping hand. Road users who meet accident victims in isolated places now just pass by, refusing to call the Police in fear of being unkindly followed up. For the victims who have made it to the hospitals and clinics alive, the Good Samaritans sometimes have been charged with paying admission fees or purchasing first aid kits as though they were prepared for the accident.
The hospitals and clinics have even transformed themselves into prisons, detaining the Good Samaritans until relatives of the victims have arrived. In some instances, families of the victims turn against the Good Samaritans and the uncritical laws of Uganda allow for such treachery to thrive. For a state that lacks an adequate emergency ambulance infrastructure, instead of at least rewarding those who help accident victims, several Good Samaritans have been remanded to prison.