When I learned that Uganda has a minister in charge of ethics and integrity, I wondered what the portfolio of such a ministry would be. The person currently filling the post is an excommunicated Roman Catholic priest, Fr. Simon Lokodo. So far he seems to be more interested in questions of homosexuality and pornography, perhaps seen as the most heinous crimes in Uganda. It is an amazing sleight of hand for someone like Yoweri Museveni who has been in power for decades to turn around and set up a ministry for ethics and integrity that does not seem interested in the machinations of his government but on sexual mores of the people. It reminds me of Paul Biya in Cameroon, himself a former seminary student, who proclaimed that his reign would be marked by rigor and moralization, whatever that means. He seems to have since abandoned the idea. It is a strange thing that dictators often worry about questions of ethics. Do they ever worry about whether dictatorship is itself ethical? Perhaps the whole focus on ethics can often be diversionary. I wonder what Fr. Lokodo thinks about all this.
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