Lost explosives, ballot papers!

Oct 30, 2004

IF we start with the US presidential election again, it is because by next week’s column it will all be over, with President Bush, and his far more likeable lady wife, beginning to pack for their exit from the White House. Halelluiah!

John Nagenda - UGANDA’S No1 COLUMNIST..INFORMED, CONTROVERSIAL AND PROVOCATIVE
IF we start with the US presidential election again, it is because by next week’s column it will all be over, with President Bush, and his far more likeable lady wife, beginning to pack for their exit from the White House. Halelluiah!

Although Bush got on famously with our own Leader, elsewhere all was gloom and despondency for America and the world. He may well go down as one of the most unsuitable leaders that mighty country has ever had, and certainly one of the most careless.

In the last week or so, he has lost or misplaced two crucial commodities: the explosives in Iraq, which have disappeared in thin air; a most explosive issue - weak pun but true. He has now lost around 58,000 absentee ballot papers in (where else?) Florida, the very scene of funny goings-on (some would call it straight thievery) last time round. Perhaps it is his “solidarity” brother Jeb who has done it, but the difference is the same.

Nothing seems remotely to be beyond these people! Can you imagine if it were Africans who had done it. Where is that ridiculous Transparency International?

I had one simple pleasure on Thursday, when Susan Muhwezi asked me to thank US ambassador Jimmy Kolker for hosting the Africa Travel Association to what we used to call a sundowner. After the thanks, taking the ambassador by the shoulders, I shouted, “Let’s hear it for John Kerry!” Susan shouted back, “George Bush!” There is no accounting for tastes.

Meanwhile in Uganda the papers continued to quote The Hajji in miraculously better English than we have ever heard him utter. Are the papers cheating on his behalf? Better to sing the praises of the Uganda Wildlife Authority.

Borrowing funds from its own projects, even before a shilling had been released by Government, UWA went right ahead and buried all the available carcasses in the anthrax attack. BSI, a road contractor, lent the machinery. Much heartfelt thanks.
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Two stories about Busoga College Mwiri, to which I went for two years back in the ‘40s, 1948 to 1950, to be precise. The first concerns, F.G.Coates, the Headmaster of the time, who I read has died at last, aged 94. He was Headmaster for 29 years, one more year than Mwalimu Nyerere was President of Tanzania, if I have got my figures correctly!

Coates was a very fine violin player, but he had a hard task with us boys. He would play what I later found out to be standard classics to resounding silence.

But he had a card up his sleeve; he would play mumbo jumbo at a very high rate of speed. This we loved. The whole school would explode with laughter. What an unintentional slap in the face for a serious musician! On one end of term report, the Headmaster had written of yours truly: “This boy is rude.” Aged 10! How can a child of ten be summarised in such a fashion?

It could have ruined my career before it had taken off. The other death, needless to say, is that of our dear friend Paul Waibale, or, as he was known to all and sundry: Paul Waibale Senior. I first met him in that year of ‘48, 56 years ago; meaning, almost certainly, that few knew him longer. We did not meet even on a yearly basis, but it was a real pleasure when we did.

I much respected and enjoyed his weekly column in The Vision and told him so. In fact I told Pike that as a mark of what a valuable contribution it made he should up Waibale’s salary appreciably. I phoned Pike after news of Waibale’s death to ask him whether he had done so, and he hummed and hawed before saying it had been passed but had not yet been communicated to the beneficiary.

Trying to make Pike feel like a heel, I put the boot in: “Now he’ll never know in this world!” I think I succeeded. The boy I had met all those years ago had been transformed into a rather shaggy old man. But never in spirit. The twinkle in the eye remained, as did good sound sense, delivered with a chuckle, in his column. We are worse off for his going. I can’t go without mentioning something nice which happened to me yesterday.

My old friend Oyen, ex Norwegian ambassador to Uganda, now ambassador to Angola and D R Congo, phoned and told me that the new US ambassador to Angola, a lady called Cynthia Efird, had called on him.

Upon hearing that he had served in Uganda, she said that she had met a Ugandan who had much impressed her. When she was introduced he intoned, “Oh dear! They have sent me another small American woman to lecture me!”

Oyen said, “I have built a new home in Norway. One of the rooms is called the Nagenda Room. She agreed that that was the name.

I remember that evening at the Italians well. The somewhat short lady was in charge of the East African desk at the State Department in Washington. She went on to tell me how her government was concerned about Uganda closing The Monitor newspaper. I told her this was not true, but we were entitled to carry out an operation there, after which the paper would re-open.

The argument went back and forth until I said, “But perhaps we should have done what you Americans did in Belgrade. Bombed the paper instead!” There was no answer to that.
Ends

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