AIDS might topple the new Uganda

THE HUMBLE bicycle gains a new lease of life in the hands of the average Ugandan. All through the country, bicycles serve as jeeps, wheelbarrows or taxis to carry loads of incredible variety and weight.

Finely balanced clusters of bananas are loaded left and right, jerrycans of water piled high behind the rider, or a wad of foam plastic is attached to the carrier for fare paying passengers.

On one occasion, I saw a cyclist speeding along with a passenger mounted side saddle on the back. In his hands this man held a second bicycle, itself laden with bunches of matoke (a staple food that looks like unripe bananas, but is boiled and eaten like mashed potatoes). The red dirt track was rutted and crumbling, yet the rider never wavered a inch to one side or the other.

Outside the capital, Kampala, hardly anyone in Uganda owns a car. Motorised traffic is dominated by the four wheel drives of the international aid agencies and the speeding matatus, overcrowded minibuses that serve as

Africa's public transport.

Virtually all Uganda's bicycles are imported from India or China and they come in any colour as long as it's black. A new model costs up to £70, more than an average worker earns in three months.

Bicycle power might seem an unlikely motor for building a successful modern economy, but the reliance by Ugandans on two wheeled traffic is as much a sign of their resourcefulness as of their relative poverty.

Down in the market area of Kampala, for example, old bicycle tyres are torn into strips and woven into rubber doormats. Motor tyres are recycled into rubber plugs, valves and a thousand other uses.

This kind of versatility is helping to make Uganda an unlikely candidate as the next economic tiger to emerge in the world's economy. In recent years, the economy has chalked up growth rates of up to 10 per cent a year, to a growing chorus of approval from the international business community.

The multinationals are now flocking to the country, while local business is showing some resilience of its own, spurred on by the return of many Asian business families who were kicked out by Idi Amin in the 1970s.

Peace 10 years of it is the main impetus for this growth Ugandans have known more than their fair share of dark days under the murderous regimes of Amin and Milton Obote. Under Amin, one tenth of the population was killed by one of the world's most insane and brutal regimes, even by the bloody standards of modern Africa.

Now the economic performance of Yoweri Museveni's government is hailed as a model for East Africa. While its richer neighbour, Kenya, sinks ever deeper into corruption and economic decay, Uganda's GDP has never been higher.

Museveni today stands as a beacon of hope for all Africans anxious to slough off the continent's status as laggard of the global economy. In many ways, he is even more important than Nelson Mandela, because Uganda's recent history of colonialism, civil war and plunder is far more typical of sub Saharan Africa than South Africa's.

Certainly, problems remain. Although Museveni won a landslide victory in elections earlier this year, genuine multi party democracy does not exist. Political parties are "bound but not gagged", according to a recent assessment by the US ambassador in Kampala.

In the north of the country, the army continues to be harassed by Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army, a Christian rebel outfit backed, ironically, by Sudan's Islamist regime. The growing instability in Burundi could also have dire consequences for Uganda which has close links (some would say too close) with the Tutsi dominated regimes in both Rwanda and Burundi.

But of all the problems threatening to interrupt Uganda's economic miracle, the most pervasive is AIDS. Life expectancy has already dropped from 48 years to 42 as the spread of the disease cancels out a generation of progress in health. Kampala, nothing more than a big village by international standards, threatens to become the AIDS capital of the world, with up to 40 per cent of the adult population HIV positive.

The consequences for the workforce and for society in general are enormous. One Irish expatriate told me that in his firm of 30 people, four of the Ugandan employees had died of AIDS related illnesses in the past year.

Yet support services for AIDS sufferers are virtually non existent. The epidemic has orphaned thousands of children, leaving many to fend for themselves on the streets.

The government says its efforts to stem the spread of the disease are meeting with success. But observers doubt whether the sexual habits linked with the epidemic, such as male promiscuity and a widespread aversion to condoms, have changed much.

The government's message calling for greater fidelity, abstinence and the use of condoms is proclaimed on giant billboards along the airport road, more for the edification of international donors, it would seem, than for the local population.

Ironically, ask any Ugandan school students where AIDS came from, and they will invariably claim it is an American plot designed to decimate Africa's population. Commentators in the local media frequently deplore what they see as the decaying morals of their former colonial masters in the West.

Last month, for example, a leading article in the government controlled New Vision newspaper painted a lurid picture of a sex and money obsessed Britain beset by hooliganism, illegitimate births, "open homosexuality", necrophilia and even road rage.

"Britons will do anything to get their hands on big money, including killing members of their own family - parents, children, brothers or sisters," the writer concluded.

The West has caused so many problems in Africa that it seems almost understandable that Ugandans should blame us for this latest catastrophe. The problem is that AIDS, unlike the colonists, will not go away.