Should public figures live separate private lives?
James Abola
I have been wrestling for a while with a thought and this is it: “to what extent must the public life of leaders and public servants be consistent with their private life?” Is the effectiveness of leaders and other public officials affected by their character or not? Let me state a few scenarios by way of illustration.
Assume there is an official who is very good in his profession but has a known weakness for acting inappropriately towards the opposite sex. Is it in order for such a person to be dropped from saying heading an institution which has minors of the opposite sex?
Should such a “known offender” be barred from working in an environment where they have authority over members of the opposite sex? Or should we discriminate between situations involving minors and those involving adults?
The other issue that has been in the news in the last few years is the reversal of progress that Uganda had made in the fight against HIV/Aids. Several times we have been told that Uganda’s initial progress in containing HIV/Aids was due to the “ABC” strategy where A stood for Abstinence, B stood for Behaviour change and C stood for Correct and Consistent condom use.
In discussions I have had with some health workers it has been pointed out that some of the very people who promoted ABC did not listen to and practice the very message they preached and this in turn made it difficult for their audience to take them seriously.
Recently the government opted to re-launch the “ABC” strategy for containing HIV/Aids, which is probably a good idea. What perplexed me is that the government official who was chosen to be the face of this re-launch has been reported several times in the recent past to be a non practitioner of “ABC”.
Picture yourself in the position of a citizen of a sub-county that is holding an event to re-launch the “ABC” strategy and the chief guest is the sub-county chief who is also well known for...