Let’s hear it for whistleblowers!

BY JOHN NAGENDA

The column could end up shooting itself in the foot, coming out so strongly for those who blow the whistle on others! There is something rather smelly about reporting on people, but doesn’t manure smell, and is it not outstandingly good for growing things?

Every time you open an ear, or indeed your daily paper, there seems to be yet another whiff of a huge deal being hatched, or one that has already been done, and even when the operation is botched, somehow the loot is already taken, or will be. It can’t be altogether fanciful to imagine a colossal machine at work, with huge tentacles everywhere, and vast ears to pick up the rustle of riches however remote.

Then the cavernous whisper: “Bring me some of that” and the deed is on the way. Let this be fought by The Good Citizen, many of whom must be waiting to counter-attack these Unquenchable Guzzlers (UG), so long as that work be not in vain. We can but try; the first step of a thousand leagues… And better, before the oil begins gashing! As usual the NSSF is a good starting point. Billions of other people’s savings pour like Niagara into pools (even Football Pools!) which can be harvested at will. Reading about the All-Con saga, you can but gasp! And it seems now this is an animal of three heads, and real not mythical. And it devours its prey before our very eyes!

Are you telling me the huge swipe can continue to happen, and the loot removed, with our mouths forever zipped? Pray, which head will eat today? Government, wake up. Judiciary, come to your senses! Are those billions to be siphoned away without a thought of to whom they belong? Can it be true, as The Observer bitingly observes in a detailed expose this week, that a Ugandan head was hatched onto the two Asian Kenyan ones, simply to open its grisly mouth and swallow NSSF cash which has sat around for a decade and a half, as if only waiting to be now lasciviously gobbled? What about its real owners, the Workers of the Earth? Who is to look out for those, whose hard-earned contributions are by Statute removed from them against a rainy day which may never come in the Sahara of their expectation? Let’s hear it for whistle-blowers, and may God forfend those already blowing!
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Poor old Buganda: she keeps being wooed by the most unsavoury suitors! And it didn’t start yesterday. Fifty years back in our day at Makerere University College, then a kind of far suburb of London University (but, mark you: London University!) one or two of us Baganda students were thrust into a tiny limelight at being consulted by the Buganda government at Mengo.

What was our opinion of a new relationship to be struck with Obote’s UPC as a buffer against the upstart Roman Catholic Democratic Party, under that bumptious young lawyer, Benedicto Kiwanuka, newly returned from England? Just imagine: he had openly said of our beloved Kabaka, Sabasajja Muteesa II, that “the Kabaka was known to him”; what a cheek! And the late Ibingira, a young Turk of the UPC, whom we knew well, hard taken Obote (who after all was married to a Muganda woman, the very pretty Miria Kalule) had actually knelt before the Kabaka and said words like, “Your Majesty, why can’t we be friends?”

Why not indeed, except that it was the beginning of the unravelling of the Buganda government, as it turned out? In the years that followed I would say to Grace Ibingira, “It is you who started it!” And he would invariably reply: “Did I know!” So started, in earnest, the cunning betrothal (and betrayal) of Buganda, with results that reverberate to this day, even when we have a clearly sincere friend in the form of the Movement Government! That is what I know, but for saying it I expect no kiss-kiss from Mengo. Instead I will be told that Buganda is sick and tired of being used as a ladder, up which those who come to power climb, kicking the ladder backwards afterwards.

And what does Mengo do then? It coyly invites assorted others with no hope of powers into its boudoir, and there dallies. They are all at it. The latest, following on a Col. Besigye, who himself followed on a let-us-have-another-go Obote, is the willowy no-hoper Olara Otunnu, who is promising what he hasn’t got, and will never get: power! Right behind is Obote’s widow, the same Miria, now warming up the decrepit UPC throne for her son. DP also desultorily offers its hand sometimes, through years of good old Ssemwogerere (where languishes he today?) and now down to my pointless old friend John Sebaana Kizito.

Shoo them out, Mengo, their combined puffs would not blow out a tiny candle. Old Faithful, the Movement, against whom you rail, is still the path to Bliss, as president Binaisa used to say. And you know it.

Next week I must tell about an Indian tractor which nearly went missing in faraway Pallisa. Perhaps you’ll laugh!