MPs should be given mobile toilets

You are free to float in the biblical delusion that you – or all of us – are made in the image of God. But the greater certainty is that we are made in the image of the monkey.
Last Sunday evening, a social media junkie showed me some of the things she had recently saved on her phone. Some wisecracks, some poetry, and bits of lavatory humour. There was this one with cartoons showing the different positions adopted when a Mutooro, a Muganda, an Acholi or a Musoga sat on – or even in – the usual flush toilet-bowl.
Funny, I thought, the directions human imagination took.

But then she scrolled out footage from real life that spoilt what was left of our grilled chicken sundowner.

In some big city, with the traffic jammed, a lanky black man in faded blue jeans paces into full view in a space between stalled vehicles. Probably a street dweller. He unfastens and partially drops his trousers, bends forward and pushes back a lump of solid yellow waste. He whips out a small piece of toilet-paper, wipes quickly, does his trousers and smartly walks away. Part of his pupu was on the tarmac, and a portion had settled on the right-hand door-sill of a gleaming SUV.
The cartoons of Ugandan tribesmen squatting every-which-way on their toilet bowls and the figure of this man reminded me of an image in one of Saul Bellow’s novels: “spider monkeys, defecating, and pelting the explorers below.”
We may have made some small gains in the brain area, but we lost the heights from where many of our tailed cousins freely answer the calls of nature.

Not long before or after my silly evening, a camera captured the MP for Arua Municipality, Col Ibrahim Abiriga, urinating outside the Ministry of Finance. His car was parked a few metres away. And, naturally, various media platforms got working.
When interviewed, the legislator explained that he had been “badly off”, and of course castigated the media for spreading the story.

Almost permanently clad in brilliant yellow, including shoes, Col Abiriga is probably the most ridiculed supporter of the plot to keep Mr Museveni in power beyond 2021.
The Baganda have a proverb: W’okubira omulalu mu kyama, nga ayogera obulungi gw’olabye?

On translation, the rhetorical question mark disappears: When you run out of lucid confidants, you turn to lunatics.
It is difficult to think without pity that President Museveni has found himself going so down-market for supporters in his quest for more time in power.
But love, hate or despise him, the pathetic yellow figure of Hon Abiriga is one of the most conspicuous faces of the ‘stick to Museveni’ wing of the NRM.
So, it occurred to me, to preserve some dignity as a nation of hominids who left the forest, Ministry of Finance budget wizards should do something for our legislators. Not just for the NRM honourables, because that would be discriminatory, but for all our 400-plus MPs. Mobile toilets.
The city where MPs do a lot of their work is shrinking. Villagers and petty traders are roaming everywhere.

The nearest (often dirty) bathroom – whether in a shopping complex, an office block or Parliament itself – always seems to be a full hour away. And you have to negotiate the labyrinthine architecture to find the hidden corners where passable bathrooms are hidden, if they are not locked. In short, your day includes a comprehensive bathroom plan! And we have the legislators we have.
On the road, motor vehicles are locked in interminable jams. If an MP who is ‘badly off’, and is stuck in stalled traffic, got out of his car and tried using the spaces between all those machines, a boda-boda could dart from nowhere and knock him down.
Uganda’s taxpayers do a lot of things for their MPs. Small minibuses customised into mobile toilets would not be to ask for too much. It means just about Sh500 million for every legislator. Plus 400 drivers and 400 cleaners. Talk about job creation. A tidy bit of money, all right; but as they often remind us, democracy does not come cheap.

Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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