When the Minister of State for Minerals in the Ministry of Energy and Minerals Development, Ms Phiona Nyamutoro, stood before Parliament recently to confess her culinary "sins" and preach an eco-gospel of sudden charcoal repentance, she inadvertently illustrated the oldest luxury in human history: the ability to buy salvation. There is no debating the ecological bill currently being presented to Uganda; our vanishing forests and choked skies are a tragedy written in ash. Yet, to declare a survival mechanism a transgression—only after ascending to a kitchen where gas and electricity flow as smoothly as political privilege—is to resurrect the ghost of Marie Antoinette in the heart of Uganda.
To command a population trapped in economic gridlock to cook with expensive electrons they cannot access, or gas cylinders they cannot afford, is to tell a hungry nation that if they cannot find firewood, they should simply bake their matooke in an electric oven. This is not policy; it is a philosophy of the well-fed. It is an environmentalism that measures its progress by the purity of the minister’s stove while remaining blind to the structural poverty that keeps the rest of the nation’s fires burning.