The past, present and future are interconnected. In this interconnection the elderly are a critical, essential and central factor. Without the elderly being well looked after, a nation loses its past and future to extraneous forces. The young become increasingly disconnected from their past.

Older persons play important roles in African societies as the African cultural systems give them high status. They preserve cultural, ethical, moral and spiritual values, transmit indigenous knowledge and skills, resolve conflicts and disagreements and also educate the young, preparing them for an uncertain future.

Unfortunately, the typical older adult in developing countries lives and is increasingly being mired in poverty due to false and deceptive economic development policies. He or she is being increasingly isolated from the rest of society, his or her children and grandchildren and is being deceptively given social services by uncaring governments.

In his article “Perspective Chapter: Geriatric Care in Africa” published in a book titled Geriatric Medicine and Healthy Aging and edited by Élvio Rúbio Gouveia, Bruna Raquel Gouveia, Adilson Marques and Andreas Ihle, Dabota Yvonne Buowari (2022) writes:

“There is an increasing number of people that are aging. This is also common in Africa. Therefore, they need specialist care from various categories of healthcare workers and other professionals on geriatric medicine and gerontology. There are few geriatricians in Africa. This is because there are few training centres on the continents. Also, most of the geriatricians are trained on the other side of the continent overseas. The health needs of the elderly need to be cared for by medical doctors specially trained to care for the elderly persons who require special communication skills. Old age is a period in the lives of the elderly for rest after a long life of activity and service. In some communities and societies, socio-cultural references are used to define old age such as family status if the person has become a grandparent, physical appearances such as the appearance of grey hair and wrinkles”.

Indeed, diminishing healthcare is one of the greatest challenges facing the elderly of Africa in general and Uganda in particular.

When we become old, we experience diseases that we never experienced during our youth. Besides, pollution and poor feeding our children and grandchildren, who think when they buy meat, eggs, bread and butter, and ensure we have fried foods, provide us with, are stressing our lives to death. Health problems such as high blood pressure, heart failure and diabetes have never been so preponderant among us the elderly as is the case today.

Other challenges are the widening gap between the young and the elderly, wrong education which seeks to separate the young from their cultural roots, imposed diseases, ignorance, culturally-empty development policies, projects and programmes and, most important, loneliness. In Uganda we the elderly are watching as false economic schemes such as Myooga and Parish Development Model, based on giving “money bonanzas” to a few individuals in our communities in the hope that if they become rich their richness and prosperity will flow downward to us to benefit the rest of the community.

However, these are acting like pollutants because they are too individualised following years of being instructed in the false values of individual merit approach to everything. Those who went through our education system were prepared to be individuals and to benefit as individuals. Although depending on which schools they went to, some escaped individualism and became people-oriented. It is, therefore, foolhardy to pursue development with individualised people in the falsehood that they will be reconnected to society by such schemes.

We have seen how the individualized beneficiaries of such schemes have not only ignored applying the public money they receive in form “bonanzas” to benefiting their families, but they have also abandoned their elderly parents to the vicissitudes of nature. The rate at which the elderly are dying in the rural areas is much higher than was the case during British colonial rule. Where we used to have many elderly surviving up to 90 years and beyond, it is a miracle for us to reach even 70 years.

We are dying with our knowledge, wisdom, understanding and insights, which our ancestors passed on to us in the hope that we would pass these virtues to our children and grandchildren. Many elderly people have children living abroad who do not care about their welfare. Others are lucky if their children allow their grandchildren to visit them and stay with them for any length of time. Those who ensure their children visit their elderly grandparents make the mistake of allowing their children not to learn their mother tongues.

There is no communication between the elderly and their grandchildren. Yet the elderly can pass their time-tested knowledge, wisdom, understanding and insights to the young through effective communication and interaction. This is confounded by the fact that when their children visit the elderly grandparents, they allow their children to transfer their digital life to their grandparents. When the grandparents want to talk to their grandchildren, they are fixed on their mobile phones smiling at them instead of with their grandparents.

It a world of a total disconnection between the past, present and future generations. This makes the elderly sicker if they cannot communicate with their grandchildren, however briefly. It means the knowledge, wisdom, understanding and insights passed on to them by their ancestors end with them. The future generations are completely ignorant of their past. They cannot gain from the knowledge, wisdom, understanding and insights their grandparents gained beyond their own parents. Some elderly people were men and women of letters – very influential locally, nationally, regionally and globally – and gained a lot of experiential knowledge through crossing cultures and contact with different civilisations. This would have benefitted their grandchildren through comparative discourse, but alas!

Some elderly people were leaders at all levels of society before they settled in the lands of their ancestors. Their experiences in leadership and governance cannot be passed on to their grandchildren some of whom are now in leadership and governance. This is dangerous as it does not help contribute to building the identity of the nation. The nation will be vulnerable to people from elsewhere or with outward looking personalities and identities.

Therefore, not only is the nation in crisis and in danger of mutating to something else we never expected when the British colonialists passed the instruments of power to a black man. The elderly are a frustrated lot. They do not see their nation the way they had grown up expecting: a progressive nation of sovereign nationals and citizens, in full control in their destiny.

If the elderly have become sicker and more vulnerable to death, it is partly due the psychological suffering precipitated by the continuous thought of their children and grandchildren being in a future with their destiny in the hands of foreigners. They are also frustrated with a long-term future in which their children and grandchildren are no more no less than slaves, either to the State or enterprises or external slave owners, where they are educated or not, and to whatever level.

Already the elderly have seen how, domestically, their children and grandchildren are being underpaid for the skills and services they are rendering to their country, and how this is pushing towards manifesting as “the corrupt” of this generation. They have seen how the obstinate refusal of the government of Uganda to reinstate minimal wage has literally converted every worker in the private and public sectors into a slaving worker. Some of their children and grandchildren, compelled by lack of humanising employment, have offered themselves into modern slavery in the Middle East, with the government or those connected to it playing the role chiefs and slavers played in orthodox slavery.

Many elderly people succumb to heart failure when they hear of the suffering of their grandchildren in the Middle, Burma and other countries. Therefore, slavery is killing us the elderly.

As if this is not enough many of those elderly who sacrificed time and energy to contribute to the development of their country are dying either because their pensions were stolen by those who were supposed to safeguard them their future (now present) retirement; or when the pensions are released, the releases are irregular and in meaningless sums. They cannot treat the expensive diseases to which they are prone. For those who worked in farming, it is worse because the government irregularly gives them only Ugx25,000 ($6.5) and only when they reach 80 years of age. Even then a lot of it is stolen by government officials.

To all these fatal stresses, we cannot fail to mention the current displacement and dispossession of the elderly by people from elsewhere with no historical, cultural, biological, ecological, spiritual, ethical and moral attachment to the land. The mere thought of losing sacred lands and burial grounds to the land grabbers is killing us the elderly much earlier than we would have died. It is disguised genocide. The inaction of government is sending a wrong signal of no care.

Many elderly people are wondering how government boasts of security and peace when they are suffering insecurity sawn by people mainly from semi-desert areas.

There is something called successful aging. This is increasingly a myth, not a reality, in Uganda. In the past it was a reality because we had the extended family system in which those who could would provide social and economic security to so many members of the community whose families could not afford to accrue such security to all members of their families. If there is anything that the present rulers of Uganda have managed to destroy is the extended family system. They have used the culture of money to destroy it by paying peanuts to those who would otherwise provide social and economic security. As if this is not enough, they have, as indicated above, allowed green land grabbing to become a new culture in Uganda. This is violating cultures, belonging and identities of the indigenous Ugandans.

The greatest victims of land grabbing are the elderly who are the custodians of our history, cultures, burial grounds and sacred places. Land grabbing is turning once secure interconnected, cohesive communities, with the elderly as the source of all knowledge, wisdom, understanding and insight necessary for survival into biological deserts, whereby land grabbers are destroying biodiversity just as the government emphasises conservation. Or else the new land-grabbing culture is converting members of traditionally settled communities into modern-day nomads or internal refugees. The elderly and their young grandchildren are the immediate victims.

Even then, by hyping individualism over and above communalism, the present rulers of Uganda have ensured that people have far less empathy towards others than ever before. This way, they have rendered families vulnerable to nature and to their policy choices and strategies to implement them. The elderly are suffering the most because they are being left out in most schemes of government to develop, transform and position the country on the road to progress.

All indications show that a future without the elderly is the one, which is emerging. Indeed the Uganda population is already one of the youngest in the world, if not the youngest. With the young disconnected from the past, narrowly knowledgeable and lacking in wisdom, understanding and insight, an adroit ruler can do anything to and with them.

Yes, we the elderly are an endangered group of the species, Homo sapiens. Apparently, it is the elderly in power and positions of policymaking that are endangering both the elderly and the young. Survival of both the old and young is in jeopardy. With poor care for the elderly there cannot be meaningful care for anybody else in Uganda.

Justifications will be advanced from time to time to explain why the government cannot pay its workers well or why it cannot provide social services, even when everyone is aware that financial resources are being wasted on things that do not contribute to the development, transformation and progress of the country

For God and My Country.

• A Tell report / By Prof Oweyegha-Afunaduula, a former professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences of the Makerere University, Uganda