On Friday, October 9, my wife and I stood for the first time on the granite of Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia, with our dear friends Samm Bbuye Musoke and his wife Sylvia. The rock runs down to the sea in great grey slabs, scoured smooth by glaciers that retreated from this coast some 12,000 years ago, leaving huge boulders scattered where the ice melted. The Atlantic does not lap at this shore. It hurls itself at the rock, explodes into white spray, and draws back to try again, as it has done for longer than humanity has existed.
Above the surf stands Peggy’s Point Lighthouse, white with a red lantern, lit since 1915 and still marking the entrance to St Margaret’s Bay. Below it, a fishing village of a few dozen people goes about its business among the tourists. Nearby, at Whalesback, a memorial honours the 229 people who died when Swissair Flight 111 fell into the bay in 1998. This is a coast that knows the sea’s power to kill.
What struck me most was what is not there. There are no hotels carved into the cliffs, no private villas blocking the view, no quarry chewing at the granite. That is no accident. In 1962 the Nova Scotia legislature passed the Peggy’s Cove Commission Act, which prohibits development in a preservation area of some 2,000 acres and restricts it in the village itself. A government decided, more than sixty years ago, that this coastline belonged to everyone, including Nova Scotians not yet born, and that no investor or politician would be allowed to sell it off. The busloads of visitors who arrive every summer, and the money they spend, are the dividend of that decision.
Uganda has no shortage of places as precious as Peggy’s Cove. What it lacks is the will to protect them. In 2007 the government tried to give away a large part of Mabira Forest for sugarcane, and was stopped only by public protests in which lives were lost. Our wetlands, which store water and break floods, are filled with murram for warehouses and industrial parks. Lakeshores and riverbanks that the law reserves for the public are fenced off for private use, and sand miners strip the land and move on. Too often this is done in the name of investment, through allocations signed in private and defended in public. The National Environment Management Authority and the Ministry of Lands need the legal teeth, and the courage, to declare certain places off-limits to everyone, the powerful included. A wetland sold for a factory is a windfall. A wetland preserved is an inheritance.
Peggy’s Cove has a darker neighbour. A short drive towards Halifax, past the fishing villages of Terence Bay and Lower Prospect, lies Mars Head. There, in the early hours of April 1, 1873, the White Star liner SS Atlantic, bound from Liverpool to New York, ran onto a submerged rock at about twenty-two kilometres an hour. At least 535 of the 952 people aboard died. Of all the women and children on board, only one survived, a twelve-year-old boy named John Hanley, whom the records misnamed John Hindley. Fishermen from Terence Bay and Lower Prospect rowed out in the dark to pull survivors off the rocks, and afterwards they buried the dead. Some 277 lie in a mass grave at St Paul’s Anglican Church in Terence Bay, where a small heritage park keeps their memory. The Catholics, 150 of them, are buried in a nearby Catholic Cemetery.
Why was a ship bound for New York off Halifax at all? On the eleventh day, in heavy seas, Captain James Williams asked his chief engineer, John Foxley, how much coal remained. Foxley told him 129 tons. The ship needed at least 140 to reach New York, so Williams turned for Halifax. According to the account that emerged later, Foxley privately believed there were 150 to 160 tons in the bunkers but gave the lower figure rather than admit that his earlier estimates had been wrong. The inquiries never agreed on how much coal the Atlantic really carried. Britain’s Board of Trade eventually concluded that she had enough to reach New York. Either way, the captain made a life-and-death decision on a number that his own engineer did not believe.
The second failure was on the bridge. Williams went to bed, leaving orders to be woken at 3 a.m. Nobody woke him. The officers took no soundings, posted no lookout at the masthead, and did not slow down as they approached a dark and unfamiliar coast. When Quartermaster Robert Thomas warned that the ship should stop and wait out the storm, his superiors dismissed him. The Canadian inquiry found the captain’s conduct “so gravely at variance with what ought to have been the conduct of a man placed in his responsible position.” A false report went unchecked. A true warning was ignored. More than 500 lives were the price.
Every Ugandan who has worked in a ministry or a public agency will recognise both failures. Figures are adjusted before they reach the minister, the Cabinet or Parliament. Feasibility studies are written to fit decisions already made. Structural and environmental risks are played down to secure a budget. Costs swell after contracts are signed, and the explanations never quite add up. Some officials shade the truth to protect their jobs; others do it to protect their share of the money. And the honest engineer, accountant or auditor who raises an alarm is too often treated as Quartermaster Thomas was, or worse. The cracks in new roads and buildings, and the delays and defects on our great projects, from hydropower dams to the long-promised railway, begin as lies on paper.
Leaders who want the truth must make it safe to tell. That means verifying reports independently instead of accepting them because they are convenient. It means shielding the Auditor General, the Inspectorate of Government and NEMA from political pressure. It means rewarding the official who brings bad news early, not the one who brings good news late. A lighthouse is useful only because it stands on rock that does not move. Our institutions are useful only if they stand on facts that are not adjusted for the comfort of the powerful.
As the four of us watched the waves break on the granite, Nova Scotia offered two lessons. Guard what belongs to everyone, so that our grandchildren can stand where we stood. And tell the truth, above all to those in command. Nations, like ships, are lost less often for want of coal than for want of truth.
©Muniini K. Mulera