When a ruler turns demigod, the truth dies

What you need to know:

  • Superhuman being. Thanks to the enthusiasm of the ruling party Chief Whip, Ms Ruth Nankabirwa, I now know that even thinking of the President’s biology could be partly because of a misunderstanding, since His Excellency is a “superhuman being”.

I must be an idiot; it had not occurred to me that President Museveni needed persuading before he could get interested in standing again to keep his job beyond 2021, or 2023, or 2030; or indeed at any time a presidential election came round and he still had the physical strength to sign his nomination papers.
Just because of the strange happenings that precede all his extensions, I assumed that being the top citizen had become part of his very biology.

Well, even idiots will learn a thing or two. For instance, thanks to the enthusiasm of the ruling party Chief Whip, Ms Ruth Nankabirwa, I now know that even thinking of the President’s biology could be partly because of a misunderstanding, since His Excellency is a “superhuman being”. Maybe like a Greek god.
One moment he is mortal; many other moments he is immortal; heroic, doing only good deeds. Which nation would let such a leader retire?
And I have learned another thing: While our nation would never dream of freely letting him go, the immortal himself may have actually lost interest in power.

So, again thanks to her enthusiasm and industry, Ms Ruth Nankabirwa and other ‘women leaders’ are reportedly set to attempt to persuade this “gift from God”, endowed with “superhuman wisdom”, to stand again.
Ms Nankabirwa made this momentous revelation at a belated Women’s Day function in Rukiga District on March 16. (See ‘Museveni is a Super Being – Nankabirwa’; Daily Monitor, March 19.)
That was the Chief Whip. The following day, the same newspaper reported the Higher Education minister, John Chrysostom Muyingo, talking about rising unemployment.
Curiously, Dr Muyingo blamed the country’s brain drain for this condition. His argument: When skilled young people who have no jobs leave the country to find work elsewhere, those left behind find it even more difficult to get a job!

It sounds counterintuitive, until (maybe) you complete Muyingo’s argument, which is that if those young people stayed and created “own jobs”, they would “widen the local employment opportunities”.
I suppose it is a bit like the big American investors Donald Trump wants to return home and make America great again, but on a mosquito leg scale.
I just hope that when our political leaders endlessly parrot this thing about “creating own jobs,” they understand how difficult it is for so many people. Otherwise everybody would be a Bill Gates.
Most people are constituted or conditioned to be led, to obey orders, to be employed, even to be slaves.

Indeed, Uganda/Muyingo’s formal education system generally encourages the aspiration that one will come out and work for an institution, whether of government or corporate colour – at least in the beginning. The young entrepreneurial spirit, salutary as it may be, is in a minority.
Even Uganda/Museveni’s 20 or 30 year-old religion of ‘investors’ was more about big players employing many small people, than all the small people becoming tadooba lamp fabricators or selling grasshoppers.
At the bottom is an economic frame that has been weakened by a huge corrupt state, with its patronage politics and costly tools of repression.

But such is the NRM’s luck, that most of our people do not see how this has sabotaged the country’s investment potential. So President Museveni can sermonise that our people are poor because they sleep too much; Dr Muyingo can lament the unemployment rate and blame the brain drain; and bright Ms Nankabirwa can sing that Mr Museveni is the wisest demigod her God could fabricate for State House.