Again, to copy and paste: “These files contain ideas and musings, and, well, everything else. Eih, and also guest posts. You’ve got something you want to react to or say and you feel the comment section won’t do you justice? Ask for some guest space, it’s all waiting for you.”
A few things to celebrate about the ‘new’ cabinet
Ordinarily, new cabinets should, and always, stir excitement. This is true of Uganda as any country. But what excitement is there when all ministers do is enjoy the perks that come with the job, pick their monthly pay cheques and throw around their newly acquired airs. One must try hard to find something exciting anyways and here’s a few I could think of after many days of tasking my mind:
1. Adieu Ms Agent of Irritation: That’s the moniker a journalist working for an international news agency christened former information minister Kabakumba Masiko and his colleagues couldn’t agree more. Hopefully, her replacement, woman of letters (and words) Karooro Okurut, will be better.
2. Adieu, too, man of a past era: there can be no better description of former internal affairs minister Kirunda Kivejinja. In his heyday, this man crystallised his brilliance by authoring one of the few fine books on Uganda’s history, a Crisis of Confidence. Yet the man who lied to the public over Dr Kizza Besigye’s brutal arrest was a different one from the revolutionary.
KK’s exit, however, is tempered by the fact that many more who could have left with him were kept around. Think of perennial sleepers Henry Kajura Muganwa and Gen. Moses Ali who was appointed deputy chief whip. One must wonder how he will whip others when he is enjoying his nap.
3. Adieu Mr Quiet Engineer: Quite frankly, I’m forcing this one because, well, because there can’t only be two things in a 76-person cabinet to celebrate about. John Nasasira, the man who has been works minister for nearly the last 25 years, has finally been moved.
Last year, Nasasira scoffed at a group of people who organised an exhibition of Kampala’s potholes, wondering what they’d exhibit this year after he had filled up all the potholes.
Unluckily for him, he’s no longer works minister but the potholes are still very much around.
Has ‘mahogany’ really fallen?
The story angle that Prof Gilbert Bukenya’s political star has fallen is too tempting to resist. I toyed with it and nibbled it here and there but I can’t say Daily Monitor was as cautious.
It’s true the man’s political astuteness was worse than weak. He turned both on his bed and his word, to rejig a little a phrase popularised by Eriya Kategaya, who is yet to be reconfirmed as first deputy premier and East African Community Affairs minister or handed a new docket.
Kategaya, let’s mention in a slight digression, went against the saying he invoked and returned to work with his childhood bud Yoweri Museveni after accusing him of going against everything they’d believed in and fought for.
That said, one thing you cannot deny the man who nicknamed himself mahogany (after the hardwood) to scoff at the so-called cabal of mafia that, according to him, were working tirelessly to bring him down is that, somehow, he made it difficult for them to chop him down (in keeping to his self given moniker).
You can berate this professor of public health, a distinguished malariologist and pioneer of the wildly successful upland rice initiative all you want about his choice of tactics in keeping a step ahead of the “mafia” until you fully appreciate that politics is about survival, which has no specified prescription.
Had he, for instance, been dropped in, say, 2005 when he scuttled to Daily Monitor to raise his own alarm against whoever he thought was interested in felling him, then perhaps it would be fair to say the “mafia” set the man’s political and social misdemeanours against him and he toppled over.
Regardless of how crucial those were in influencing the appointing authority’s decision, it’s pretty clear than in his good time, and in the absence of the myriad scandals that have come to define Bukenya’s political career, he who made him VP decided to unmake him.
Lest we forget, Bukenya was never going to be VP for life. It is not a position he was born into so he couldn’t die in it. He could fight for it yes, which he did, but that’s all he could do. Ultimately, the last word belonged to the appointing authority.
What is true is Bukenya’s light has lost a bit of its shine, as is to be expected. However, he can easily reignite it. For one, he still has a healthy chance of remaining powerful if he seeks, and wins, the secretary general position in the NRM, which he tried for last year and lost to now newly appointed premier Amama Mbabazi.
With all his much touted mobilisation and organisational skills, who can tell what he’s capable of doing in that position? There’s a cautionary tale in the man’s middle name Balibaseka. As his life has demonstrated, the last laugh seems to exclusively belong to him.
Eh actually, its not Yvonne!
You’ve got to wonder sometimes what kind of minds are behind some of the commercials in Uganda.
If you listen to especially radio, it’s likely you’ve heard the commercial promoting lifebuoy soap. It goes somewhat like this:
Voice I: ‘Hey, it’s Yvonne.’
Voice II: ‘Hi Yvonne.’
etc etc
The alluded Yvonne is venerated South African artiste Yvonne Chaka Chaka who is the face of the soap on the African continent.
The voice behind the commercial pretends its her. What’s worse, our Yvonne can even speak Luganda (all thanks to the translator.)
Leaves me wondering: 1) why couldn’t whoever is responsible actually get Yvonne to air a radio commercial in English and send it to Uganda; and 2) if they wanted the commercial translated in Luganda, why not find equally respectable people here as Yvonne (and they’re legion: Joanita Kawalya, Halima Namakula, just to mention two) to voice a Luganda commercial, hm?
Who are they kidding?
A contrast of eras
There are few times when you chance upon a perfectly representative image of ongoing transitions and Friday was one such time. Pity I didn’t have my camera with me. But then again, maybe I wouldn’t have been able to take the picture anyways.
Walking past parliament I saw a young guy somewhere in his 20s with an over-sized misbaha (Muslim prayer beads) going up to his waist; over-sized jeans he had not only folded below but could only prevent from slipping off him by continuously pulling them up and walking with a serious swag this way and that way; and a huge turban over his head that is most common with guys with long dreadlocks.
Right behind him was an elderly man about twice and half the young man’s age; with a graying bald head; a shirt nearing the kind Nelson Mandela likes to wear; some khaki pants and old school business bag.
This man was as amused about the young lad in front of him as I was about the contrast in eras the two people represented.
Power is too sweet
From here on out
What will happen will happen
Power is too sweet to lose
— just like that
Graying laws will be dispensed with
Young ones birthed without a dint’s thought
Power is too sweet to lose
— just like that
Basic reason will be divorced
Brutality will return with vengeance
Blatant lies will be spun to new truths
Power is too sweet to lose
— just like that
***
Don’t show us our past
Only we can state it accurately
Power is too sweet to lose
— just like that
Fundamental change?
What fundamental change?
Respect for basic rights of all?
Are you daydreaming?
Democracy; Good governance; overstaying in power?
We shall deal with you
Power is too sweet to lose
— just like that
These files are back!
Hey nice people,
Here’s to announce that your favourite files are back! And read my words: There’ll be no turning back.
The story of the long absence, is, to use a tired cliche, a long one. There will, however, be time to tell it. And this time, no empty promises! It shall be told.
These files contain ideas and musings, and, well, everything else. Eih, and also guest posts. You’ve got something you want to react to or say and you feel the comment section won’t do you justice? Ask for some guest space, it’s all waiting for you.
A huh, what haven’t I said? It’s exciting to be back. Let’s share ideas and thoughts. We can’t do anything more exciting than that. Or may be we can. You tell me.
Uganda: Top Misreported Stories of ‘09
Of all the stories that got covered this year, what would top the list of the most grossly misreported? Few, if any, would edge out the death of Brian Bukenya, son to Vice President Gilbert Bukenya, and that of former army commander Maj. Gen. James Kazini.
They were part of a spate of deaths, and near deaths, carrying on from the last weeks of October into November. Save for Kazini’s, all the rest were a result of three road accidents that claimed the lives of upwards of 20 people including Brian’s and President Museveni’s advisor Fr. Albert Byaruhanga.
The way those deaths were covered revealed a far more frightening threat within sections of our news media than our current repressive state might ever pose to us. This threat combines self-censorship, pandering to and reproducing the official government statement(s), and cultural attitudes of singing the praises of the dead whether they exist or not. About self-censorship though, some people might argue the state already planted, watered and weeded that seed and like a contented farmer has no need of constantly returning to the garden when it comes into its full bloom.
Granted, death in Uganda can’t boast such a huge shock effect on us. We seem to have become numb to it either because of our long history of losses, most particularly through unnecessary conflicts and wars, or because we go about our daily lives with death so close to us, from preventable diseases to reckless driving, that we seem to have learnt to live with it.
You tell this from our unofficial standard way of condolence; that’s life [get over with it]. But then, every once in a while death easily shatters through that supposed numbness with such fury and abandon claiming in its trail powerful figures that seemed immortal to us forcing us into self-reflection about it. Kazini’s was one such death, the “immortal” figure that many eulogised practically as a military ‘virtuoso’.
For journalists and news media, there is reason to feel frightened at how we revealed, in the ensuing reportage of the two deaths, our deep acquiescence with the official version and the effects of tagging at the coattails of people we’ve ringed off as newsmakers.
From the day journalism chose as one of its mantras that if it bleeds it leads, we locked ourselves up in such difficult moral dilemmas as for instance reporting stories about loss, especially loss of human life. How do you extricate yourself from that shared sense of loss to ask the penetrating questions that are expected of you as a reporter? How do you balance your desire to write a guaranteed lead story, which is every reporter’s desire, against the nudging feeling you are turning into benefit another person’s loss?
Like people in the business of selling caskets, or services of funeral homes that are the craze now, what prayers should or does a reporter make every morning when he or she sets off to work? But then, can we really say these dilemmas were at play in the reportage of the deaths in question? We will begin with Brian’s, VP Bukenya’s son. Continue reading
Daily Monitor’s Idea Of Creativity, Go Figure!
ABOVE: How It Used To Be. While BELOW: How It Looks Like Now…
BELOW: Where This Design They Will Flaunt as New Was Copied…
While I check the Daily Monitor (DM) Online edition several times a day, I wouldn’t have known the new “changes” if it weren’t for an old story about Justice Kanyeihamba I was looking for. So I type my search query into Google (what could we possibly do without you!?) and up come the links to DM. I click the topmost only for the next page to gladly display for me error 404: The requested resource is not available. And where was this error generated from? Nation Media Group, the mother company of DM.
So I think to myself ok, I’ll go to the DM site directly and search. I do the usual, typing in the URL that is, and bam, my eyes encounter a somewhat different webpage from what I knew to be the usual. But before I can applaud DM for a brand new site my mind reminds me that I’d seen that design somewhere else. Where? Kenya’s Daily Nation. To be sure my mind isn’t playing a prank on me, I open the Daily Nation website and confirm what I shouldn’t have doubted even for a second, my mind’s sharp memory.
So I go scuttling, as if there was a prize for it, to my facebook page where we must tell on ourselves and updated my status thus: Uganda’s Daily Monitor changes website to look like its sister (or brother or cousin or name it) Kenya’s Daily Nation. While night and day The New Vision Group as it is now called and which is up to 80 percent owned by the government either buys out or sets up new radio stations across the country. Catch it up here. It’s time to question whether media concentration and media conglomerations are a good thing or a bad thing for East Africa.
When Times Change
When the beautifully falling flakes
Subdue the still multicoloured grounds
And their whiteness radiates the night sky
Times have changed.
Then suddenly we gain extra pounds
The magic of extra layers of cloth,
As body struggles to sustain life
Times have changed.
With hands tucked deep inside
Pulling and holding us together
Our heads hang low, our pace quickens
Times have changed.
The immigrants long for lands long left behind
The ‘natives’ curse for once
The only troubling accident of their birth
Times have changed.
The days that test man’s endurance call out
The days that test the human spirit have come
The days when men hibernate like animals are here
Times have changed.
GK Files 