November 2014 should become an important month in the history of baby-care in urban Kampala. Early on in the month, a baby was killed by a Kampala City Council Authority (KCCA) car, after he had strayed from the care-takers who had brought him to breastfeed, since his mother was in the authority’s custody. The mother was in custody for selling bananas on the city’s streets. There was some anger in Ugandan social media circles, but from the usual suspects. People who oppose the current violence against the poor and other under-privileged residents of the city in the name of ‘modernising’ the city. There was a loud silence from the mob that later drenched everyone in noise when a video surfaced on YouTube showing an adult female, now made infamous as the Ugandan nanny, and an eighteen month-old baby.
If they must live where we live, it must be as our servants
The noisemakers calling for the hanging of the nanny because what she did is horrible might have missed the tale of the dead baby. The KCCA officials, from the Minister in charge of the Presidency, immediately embarked on a Public Relations campaign, including offering a FUSO truck to take the dead baby’s body for burial and some items to take care of the funeral. When the video of the ‘tortured’ baby surfaced on YouTube, the news about the dead baby (which mind you appeared very hidden in the clutter of news briefs in The Monitor newspaper, for example) almost disappeared completely. The tortured baby and her tormentor were the news.
However tragic the torture of the baby in the video looks, it is not worse than the smashing of the baby by the KCCA vehicle. You have a dead body, not a baby anymore in one of these two horrible cases. As the news has revealed, the assaulted baby was discharged from hospital two days after the incident. The relatives of the other baby are mourning. The smashed body was buried. One should inappropriately add ‘forgotten’ by the crowd that jumped onto the video to abuse and even incite violence against the “monster” nanny. The person whose actions were responsible for the death of the other baby remains un-named, un-shamed and un-tried. We all know where Jolly, the infamous nanny, is now: in prison. And it is said a charge-sheet carrying the hefty charge of attempted murder was prepared in record time. What charges await the driver who actually killed the baby when he drove over her body?
Ryan Ssemaganda's body (being carried) was buried in his home just outside Kampala
Ryan Ssemaganda’s body (being carried) was buried in his home just outside Kampala
So, is the outrage on social media and beyond in the case of the child in the video really about children rights? About inhumanity and savagery? The two wrongs are categorically different (one an accident, the other a deliberate assault), so it’s not my intention to compare them, but rather the responses to the wrongs. What determines the amount of anger stirred among us when a child’s rights are violated?
Daniel Kalinaki, former Managing Editor of The Monitor newspaper (which did not give prominent coverage of the dead baby story as it did the tortured baby story) writes:
“There is also a class issue here. We did not join Baby Ryan’s demo because his family is from a class removed from us, a class that neither reads newspapers nor owns smartphones. One class “laughs in the fist” at the misery of the downtrodden. The other lives hand-to-mouth. I suspect that Baby A’s video, were it to be shown to Baby Ryan’s family, would shock and even outrage them, but it would mostly be removed from their reality.
A generation of economic growth matched by growing inequality has created a very small but super-rich elite class, a tiny middle class, and a large, poor majority at the bottom. A lot of our public discussions take place around middle-class issues. For instance, violence by maids is a middle-class issue because the super-rich can afford to stay home and take care of their children, while the poor can’t afford maids and carry their kids with them when they go hawking or begging.
In this narrow prism of mainstream debate, we tend to ignore the major issues such as the long-term transformation of society that concern the top, or the privatisation of the State and public spaces and services that affects the bottom.”
Street vendors held public protests over the boy's death, but middle class people didn't join this demonstration
Street vendors held public protests over the boy’s death, but middle class people didn’t join this demonstration
We have lost the human connection to those who do not belong to our class. We are more human than them
It makes us feel good about ourselves to label the nanny in question a monster. We know that we are not about to be nannies. We have lost the human connection to those who do not belong to our class. We only sympathise with those who are of our class. We also are passive when those unlike us are being persecuted and tortured off the streets of our cities. Sometimes we openly support policies under which those unlike us are denied basic human rights that would get us raving mad were they to apply to us. We do not connect to those who are poor and under-privileged. We are not poor. We are privileged. What privilege would we have if we were to empathise with those who do not have it? We are more human than them. 
We think that they are committing a crime for living in the same spaces as us, the city. If they must live where we live, it must be as our servants. And they are damned if they think they can do horrible things. The driver who killed the baby with the KCCA vehicle is not a focus of our anger. We are not calling for his imprisonment or death. His crime is not a class offence. The nanny’s offense is not really the torture of the baby, as it is her class. If we must be mistreated, it must be by those of our class. Not lowly beings.
The stories of abused children, tortured children are always in our faces when we turn our television sets to Agataaliko nfuufu, the tabloid news on Bukedde TV that focus on the poor people. But we consider that entertainment for us. Because we do not see those children as potentially our own. We do not get angry when poor people suffer under circumstances that are very avoidable because they are less human than we are. When they do something terrible against one of us, or our children, or our pets, we call them monsters. But we are not monsters when we evict the poor from their homes at night because we want to develop amusement parks for our types on the land where their houses stand. The real monster is the class division between us that has disabled us from empathising with other human beings irrespective of their class.
source:thisisafrica.me