A few days back, Uganda celebrated 53 years of independence from British rule. For some reason, there are people who mistake this to mean Uganda is 53 years old. To clear your mind on this, you need to think of how old you really are, based on what appears on your birth certificate and when you started taking care of your own bills or left you parent’s house.

On big days like Independence, the levels of national pride go up a notch higher. When growing up I always used to see flags on electricity poles along Kampala road and on the day itself they always played that grainy black and white video showing the Union Jack (national flag of the United Kingdom) going down and the Ugandan flag going up. You almost wish you were alive at the time to witness the historic moment and so you can narrate to your children every now and then. 

But of course we now know this independence for Uganda and many other African countries was not all that given that we are still very dependent on the same people whose flags we brought down. I think it is safer to look at independence as more of a process than just a one day event. We should have a scale to show us how far we have come and how much more time and effort is needed before we can fully claim to be independent. 

We need to keep track of how much of our budget is dependent on foreign aid and whether the figures are reducing and thus increasing our independence or not. Of late, many countries have simply switched from borrowing from the west to borrowing from China. That is just like you opening an account in a new bank because you feel you have done enough borrowing from the old one and you are tired of bumping into your loan officer everywhere you go. 

We should be hearing that we now send less people for treatment to India or UK because our medical capacities have improved over time. It is always disturbing to hear that our best doctors leave and go to the same places we fly to for better treatment. 

What about in our schools? Do we do enough regarding evaluation of our curriculum so we can learn more about Kalangala Islands than the Canadian Prairies? Are our teachers spending more time teaching children about where the Nile passes and what activities are done or can be done around it as opposed to the time I spent learning about the Tennessee Valley Authority? 

The process of independence should include the eradication of the system that raises our children with that inferiority complex that sees white people served with a smile at a local restaurant while a fellow citizen is given that look as if to imply that they needed to have been invited to the same restaurant by the manager. 

We are living in an era of photographs especially the ubiquitous ‘selfie’ and yet our people feel most comfortable taking such photos when they get to Dubai, Europe or East Asia. By now we should be proudly posing for photos in any of our towns and sharing them for the world to know that Africa is not a country and that even the countries in it have other places besides the capital cities. 

Our national pride among all other things ought to growingly stand out. I like the trend that many have adopted of wearing their national team football jerseys even when our football team is not delivering when we expect it to.

The Kenyans do it quite well with their bracelets and other Kenyan themed paraphernalia. 

As a region we should now all be striving to achieve more of the indicators of independence and showing off our pride unreservedly to the rest of the world. I dream of the day media houses will stop referring to any of our countries as a small country in the middle of Africa but as country in East Africa famous for ABC (positive aspects). 

Those who give us aid or scholarships are not going to teach us how to love ourselves. It is not in their interests anyway. We may not have total independence after over 50 years but our sense of pride should show that we heeded Bob Marley when he said we should emancipate ourselves from mental slavery.