Budo commission demanded

Jun 14, 2008

IN a mixed bag week, two issues stuck out as running sores. The first concerned the re-opening of Budo Junior School at Kabinja, and much of the criticism here was directed at the school itself. It was understandable because of the sheer horror of the event some weeks before, when 20 children had be

By John Nagenda

IN a mixed bag week, two issues stuck out as running sores. The first concerned the re-opening of Budo Junior School at Kabinja, and much of the criticism here was directed at the school itself. It was understandable because of the sheer horror of the event some weeks before, when 20 children had been reduced to cinders and ashes in the mysterious inferno of April 14.

To date, the only practical action seems to have been the arrest and remanding of the matron and a number of night guards. Rumours and accusations involving even leaders of the Church of Uganda continue to fly around, and not just from the parents who suffered such devastating losses that dark night. Otherwise from the inquiry instigated immediately there seems to be merely an ominous and deeply frustrating silence, although it is said that a preliminary report had been sent to the district head by the end of May.

A district head, with all due respect, seems rather too low a figure for a catastrophe of this national magnitude! Police inquiries are said to be continuing. Those accused at a much higher level as the true instigators of the tragedy have throughout stayed at large, which is, rightly, as the law would have it. But as day follows day and the “investigations”, such as they are, remain resolutely hushed, is it any wonder that the relatives of the dead are going mad with grief? The whole nation is with them. It is not, alas, the first time in our affairs that inquiries of this serious kind taper off into thin air. But this is not the fault of Kabinja, and the re-opening of the school makes a certain sense, for the alternative poses its own dangers.

All this begs the crucial question whether the inquiry should not have been of much higher importance, and carried out in public. Why not? It would clear the air, go some way towards soothing devastated souls, and perchance nail the perpetrators. It must be done now. What say the Attorney General, the Prime Minister (Leader of Government Business), and, if all else fails, the President of the Republic? The second issue, seemingly not of the same urgency, but equally deeply reaching into our national fabric, concerns a reported statement by a person called Milton Odong, only a Gulu Deputy RDC, that in future only those carrying National Resistance Movement cards would be offered public employment. I felt an overwhelming revulsion at this.

In my near decade on the ground breaking Uganda Human Rights Commission, it always made me go mental when evidence of this abominable policy was reported of the UPC. It is 100% impossible that the NRM would ever go down this despicable route. Over to you Secretary General!

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Some of the better things come in plain wrappers. For the last few weeks such was the case in The Sunday Monitor’s instalments of Jaberi Bidandi Ssali’s autobiography. JBS (for purposes of brevity – paper is so expensive) affects a simple plain style. You find the eye speeding down the line. None of the lazy people who whine about the jaw-breaking toughness of writing they allegedly encounter in this column (they must read while moving their lips, hence jaws!) can attack JBS’ style.

I read the pieces enjoyably, as one sometimes thirsts for a glass (not three!) of good clean cool water in preference to wine. JBS has lived in sometimes very dangerous, times but somehow has not sunk with them. Was he perhaps not considered really dangerous by the brutes of the time? Reading him, although like the majority of autobiographers he is never far from the eye of the blaze (is thus a near hero in his eyes) you feel that he will survive. And, Inshallah, he does. It took a quite consummate, indeed surgical, reply to his recollections by a new name to me, Yoga Adhola, to discover that JBS had come so close to the UPC throne (in one of Obote’s exiles) that his colleague Muwanga felt compelled to arrest him, although not for long.

Many years and events later, when Local Government minister in the Museveni government, JBS donned a lounge suit, in place of his ubiquitous “Safari”, and travelled North as if to prove by dress that he was presidential material. (By then Muwanga was not in his way, being dead.) Read JBS, whom I salute, and the amusing Adhola retort.
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On Thursday a story appeared of the editor of the sleazy Red Pepper “newspaper” being interrogated by police after an earlier story about the sizes of some ministers’ private parts! What a silly, childish and utterly meaningless story, reflecting accurately the paper itself.

I hope the editor gets off on condition he publish accurate measurements of his own and his colleagues’ parts, on inside pages so as not to outrage his few customers. As it happens, while at the Russians’ National Day celebrations, the subject had been directed at me in a roundabout personal way! I recounted to my audience of a Russian, an American and a Swiss (names and offices withheld) a story I heard years ago.

The Russian government wrote to its American counterpart, ordering a huge consignment of condoms: size 9” by 3”. The Americans, smelling a PR plot, obliged, but marking the condoms: Medium! Reader, in the ensuing laughter I escaped on Wednesday: personal data intact!

Best news this week was that Sport (thanks in part to this Column?) was given an additional billion shillings in the Budget. Hallelluiah!

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