Dear
Editor,
Eagleonline.
Just
when Angelo was penning his response to my article on fakes and kidnaps where
he tried to discount the menace of counterfeits, the Government of Uganda was
declaring 3 days of mourning due to a nasty road carnage caused by fake brakes
that left 22 dead in Kiryandongo District. I say fake brakes because I watched
with dismay on TV when one of the lucky survivors lying in pain on a hospital
bed narrated that the driver of the bus had tried to stop the bus but the
brakes failed. A 2016 report by the Ministry of Transport indicated that 95% of
road accidents are caused by human error and mechanical condition of the
vehicles. This is where counterfeits in the form of fake driving permits and
fake vehicle parts lurk. This is the savage image of counterfeits that most
people choose not to see.
Angelo’s
views may appeal to many people who pay scarce attention to the immense devastation
that counterfeits are causing to whole communities and economies in Africa and to
those who may not understand it as a causative factor of heinous crime. As a
person who has endured a 10 year knowledge sojourn traversing the counterfeit
wilderness here and in other countries with a hand luggage of more than 20
years in criminal law practice, I know better than to join Angelo in finding a
false equivalence between counterfeits and the tragedy of kidnaps. The
relatives of the victims of the bus carnage are in as much grief and pain as
the relatives of the victims of the kidnaps so much so that they are all
inconsolable, not because the deaths are different, but because they amount to
the same thing. It may not be easy to explain the equivalence of two complex
subjects in a few lines and I don’t claim to do so now, but let me give some hints.
In
a 23rd May, 2018 NTV interview, the Minister of Security Gen. Elly
Tumwine made a statement linking the recent increase of kidnap cases in Uganda
to terrorist activity. It is possible many people dismissed the Minister’s talk
because he did not elaborate. Those who know will tell you that worldwide,
counterfeiting business is a major source of terrorist funding. Kidnaps are an
active ingredient of terrorism, and therefore it is not false to juxtapose
counterfeiting with kidnapping. It would have been nice for the Uganda Police
to fully investigate this nexus between counterfeit and kidnaps but alas, only
2% of the 4000 murder cases (many a result of kidnap) have been investigated
and successfully prosecuted in the last 4 years. This neglect of duty by the
Police is also counterfeit behavior which we have come to accept as normal.
In
my article titled “Counterfeits, a
Security Threat” which was published 6 years ago in the New vision of 23rd
May, 2012 at page 10, I quoted a report by the international Anti – counterfeiting
Coalition which stated that drug traffickers, money launderers and terrorists
find it safer now days to raise and clean their money through counterfeit
businesses because this business is easy to set up without the risk of
suffering harsh punishment under drug trafficking or money laundering laws. I
still identify with this view and maintain that fighting fakes will help in the
fight against the kidnaps.
Like
they say, what you do not know, does not hurt you. Most Ugandans do not know
much about counterfeits in terms of its dangerous effects that is why they may
not think of it to be as dangerous as the kidnaps we all dread. We are losing
the war against counterfeits and paying the price with our lives because we
tend to trivialize the issue. When I was growing up, there was no Children’s
section at the Cancer Institute in Mulago. Today the Children’s section is as
big as the section for adults and behold, the sight of little Children fighting
for their lives can move even the most hardened soul to tears. But amidst all
this, we are not alarmed by recent media reports that some criminals are
importing and selling fake cancer drugs on the market neither are we outraged
by the fake Hepatitis B vaccine which is now incubating in the bodies of
millions of Ugandans. Business continues as usual and we continue to choke on
the fake medicines and yet we remain unaware of our conspiracy in the grave
consequences like death, which may greet us as a result. I admit that it may
not be fair to compare the mortalities caused by fake drugs to those of kidnaps
since they all represent a tragic loss of human life. No death can be sanitized
because its cause is more popular than the other and for me I think that it is
worse when we try to reduce this issue to an academic exercise.
Angelo
appeared to be slighted by my use of statistics of kidnaps and those of fake
products when he accused me of “atomizing the victims of crime as statistics
for reference.” I don’t know how anyone can get a correct equivalence between any
two fields of study without comparing their statistics. What I know is that it
is statistics which breathe life into what we call facts on any subject. Angelo
made an impassioned reference to his coverage of the LRA insurgency as a
Journalist but I think he needed statistics to put this disaster in its true
context. It is the statistics of the 60,000 to 100,000 Children who were abducted
by the LRA in 4 African Countries between 1987 – 2012 that raised World outrage
leading to the indictment of Dominic Ongwen in the ICC for the massacres and
kidnappings.
We
need to face the reality sooner rather than later. Counterfeits may not sound
as fashionable as kidnaps but that is just semantics. They are both killing us,
we need to stand up and stop them.
By
Fred Muwema
Director
Legal & Corporate Affairs
Anti-Counterfeit
Network Africa
28th
May, 2018
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