UGANDA’S No1 COLUMNIST..INFORMED, CONTROVERSIAL AND PROVOCATIVE
HOW life moves, river-like, along its way; there sometimes for all to see, sometimes an almost unacknowledged presence, purposeful indeed — if your senses are switched on! But the river continues regardless.
It is the same as to say, “God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.” Wednesday evening your columnist was minding his own business in leafy Mengo when the BBC domestic flagship programme “Today” called. It wondered whether I would take part in a programme introducing a brand new prize to be given annually for a retired African leader who had done the most good for his country while still in charge. It was being introduced by Dr Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese now living in Britain. He had sold his Celtel mobile telephone business for a colossal $3.4b and wanted above all to use a chunk of it to encourage good governance in his continent of Africa.
I thought, how odd, how bizarre; does it have any chance of success? I asked whether Dr Ibrahim was sole judge of his own prize. No, the judges were Professor Rotberg of the prestigious Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and President, World Peace Foundation, (and more beside) and ex-president of Ireland Mary Robinson, latterly UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Oddly enough I had spent a most enjoyable couple of hours with Prof Rotberg when he gave me lunch on his visit to Kampala around a year ago.
I had found him deeply convincing as thinker and activist. Mary Robinson was a wonderful president of Ireland, and so effective at the UN that many saw her as a potential future Secretary General. My original cynicism was falling off me like a dirty cloak.
But what hit me then was to think that a potential first winner, or one of the first winners (for how do you keep out the redoubtable Madiba Mandela?) was none other than regional hero, ex-Tanzanian president Benjamin Mkapa.
I shot out of my chair and danced a jig! “Yes, I am eager to be on the programme,” I shouted to the disembodied voice on the phone from London. God works in mysterious ways… Mkapa, while not poor, would find good use for $5m spread over 10 years, and $200,000 a year thereafter for life, as well as another $200,000 a year for his favourite charities or good works. And not just the money: the recognition. (If the prize included those still in power you wouldn’t go far to guess who my other candidate would be! But we can wait.)
The world’s great and good are falling over themselves to sing high praises for Mo Ibrahim, the man who is making this possible; some, including this column, are already calling it the biggest prize of its kind in the world.
Of course there are those who will instead seek to find any way to pour cold water on it. So did their antecedents, whose bones must now cringe in their graves, when the Nobel Prizes were first founded! Can somebody now be in the Nobel league, and an African at that? Well done, Dr Ibrahim!
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But from that high pinnacle, life being life, I thud to stony earth. The daily headlines from Juba which assail our senses, are not surprising but indicative. Did we really, in our heart of hearts, believe that that mingy LRA leopard (sorry leopard) could change its spots even at this eleventh hour? If you feel strong enough on your katogo, cassava and beans, breakfast, let me remind you of a couple.
This Wednesday: Rebels demand six weeks’ truce. They had just enjoyed a little frolic of killing around 40 innocent Southern Sudan citizens, and now, sated, they wanted, nay demanded, six weeks of rest from talking. Hold on to those beans! Were they subconsciously echoing the six Biblical days in which God made the world, or is the “six” merely coincidental? LRA SHUN MUSEVENI HANDSHAKE.
Frankly, what a blow to his esteem, to his self-worth, to his manhood even! Somehow I think he will survive it, put aside the strong soap, jeyes and dettol that had been so carefully packed for him to use as cleansing; and report to China next week for talks with more fitting companions from across Africa and China.
But the Konyites are not without a certain amount of murderous wit; a kind of bottom-lot philosophising. After they had killed Captain Sam Mugarura in cold blood, they announced that they wanted to change one of the meeting points. The one they now really, really, wanted was on the other side of the river (or as Hemingway so poetically put it: Across the River into the Trees), the better to cross into neighbouring Garamba in D R Congo and link up with their mates.
Kony’s current number two, “Brig” Otti, came out with a classic of sorts. “Don’t they regret the death of their captain? Here we would be too far to kill him.” How far did he rate that to the killing field of the 40? Reader, hold that katogo down. At one stage looking at the mouths without the lips which Mr Kony and Mr Otti had slashed off, a brilliant idea came to me. What about lining an arch of a thousand such ladies, through which, as Mr K and Mr O strutted through, one by one the mutilated ladies would step forward and kiss them.
Pity, I doubt this idea will ever see the light of day. And in any case the two brutes would probably enjoy it!
