In part 1, I ended at our third day at Central Inn, which is when we first saw a health officer, only to check our temperatures and ask questions related to other symptoms. Yet, even this was only for those who wished to do so.

This means that, even if someone had the symptoms but never wished to see the medical officer, they would stay among the rest. Up to this point, no basic precautionary tips had been given to the quarantined. We were on our own, only doing what we wished to do or not. The only measure that was strictly implemented was policing the gate.

Nevertheless, while the gate was strictly guarded, our population at the center kept reducing. The disappearances seemed to have happened by night, allegedly at a fee of about $50. It was clear how this posed danger to society had any of us been positive. On the other hand, you sympathised with those who escaped.

A bottle of drinking water went for Shs 4000 at Entebbe Central Inn. A meal was in the range of Shs 20,000 to 30,000. Under voluntary circumstances that one has prepared for, this may not have been exorbitant. But, for a people that have just bumped into a policy requiring them to spend that much for 14 days, this was obviously problematic.Had there been proper planning ahead of time, many of these possible scenarios would have been anticipated and pre-empted. Some of us were worried for our own lives given the high risk of infection at the Inn. Others did not have money to pay the $60 for the hotel, let alone the meals.

Whereas government would say that it would have been very expensive for it to pay for all quarantined people, it was important to consider the implications of everyone paying for themselves.

Government did not have any knowledge on the financial status of the quarantined people. Some were returning students on scholarships whose stay had been cut short by their host institutions. Some just didn’t have money or only had their little savings and therefore not willing to drain them on quarantine.

Being forced to pay when one barely has money invites temptations of escaping. Where escaping raises grave health implications to wider society, it is safer to pay for everyone and not take any chances. If people have escaped from Ebola camps in the past out of sheer discomfort with being constrained, how about when they as well have to pay for it!

Some slept hungry at Entebbe Inn, in sofas at the lobby. Some survived on drinking water and snacks that we received from good Samaritans!

With all this load of trauma, counsellors were only sent in on the third day, and only after making much noise. Some young ladies among us would occasionally break down and cry. It was clear that we had been locked up as a dangerous group whose wellbeing hardly mattered. All that was important was to make sure that we kept inside not to infect the outside, and maybe providing someone income.

Truly we had never been faced with a pandemic to this scale of threat, therefore we were bound to make some mistakes. But some of our errors of omission and commission were simply a matter of carelessness, heartlessness, incompetence, greed, poor planning, and our usual lack of integrity.

The pandemic found us with sick systems, we couldn’t heal overnight. Our healthcare system was sick. Our leaders always knew that they could be treated abroad. Now we are trapped together. This is one of the reasons we are panicking a lot. We clearly know that given how much we had abandoned our hospitals, if the virus reached here at the scale we see elsewhere, it would decimate us.

You would expect that, in this fear and panic, we would then have been keen to ensure that the disease does not come in. Yet even at this, we were as well sick with corruption and influence-peddling that we had normalised. This made our airport porous. The strong and connected could go through – even if at the risk of everyone else. Quarantine centers too had to leak.

What more lessons do we need, to learn that tolerating corruption in our society is ultimately not for our good! The beauty of this horrific disease is that it has exposed many of the weaknesses and contradictions that we have all along glossed over. To the extent that whatever intervention we want to come up with, our first fear is that the money is going to be stolen.

Countries that have invested in building strong institutions and integrity among their people are more worried about how to get vital supplies and hospital infrastructure to cater for their overwhelmed systems. Here we are grappling with all that, plus the fear of thieves in distributing food, giving travel clearance, conducting sensitisation campaigns, etc. Budgets are insanely bloated! It is time for a kill, as usual!

On the front of implementing regulations on movement and gatherings, we still face another evil we had all along normalised – state violence. The language of public order management that the police and LDUs were used to, was that of violence. It has always been meted out on the opposition, now it is an official habit.

Even when sent during a pandemic to ensure that people do not behave in prohibited ways, they understood that they had been sent to cane and shoot as usual.

It would then have to take the president, in whose watch this violent political culture has been entrenched, to scold the LDU as ‘pigs’. The child you have encouraged to hurl insults at people you don’t like is now insulting even when you don’t expect him to. If we don’t learn now, shall we?