Magogo’s latest tirade reveals the underbelly of a cult of personality

The surprise that greeted Moses Magogo’s unsolicited attack on The New Vision veteran journalist, James Bakama, is less an oversight and more of a convenient fudge.
It reflects, in large part, the insincerity that is firmly lodged in Ugandan football. Being unversed in the smoother hypocrisies of the Fufa president had crystallised a misleading settled notion about Magogo.

Many considered him tolerable if not for his commanding presence then genteel agreeableness in all respects. That veneer of refinement came apart following an extraordinary missive in which the Fufa top honcho calls Bakama a blackmailer and an extortionist. The tone in which the missive is written is so indignant, so furious, as to be almost funny. Except it wasn’t. Funny that is.

Offering no more than anecdotal evidence, Magogo calls Bakama “an old man left with nothing to prove but retirement.” The Fufa president adds: “Find an alternative of paying the education bills of your children.”
It was such an unmitigated disaster! Besides not acting with the utmost decorum, Magogo fell short of the size of proving Bakama wrong. The Fufa president’s quibbling can as such be interpreted as an attempt to try and create a smokescreen.
For some it is also unnerving how Magogo conflates the Fufa brand with the person of the president in the missive.

This gives an indication of how the 43- year-old has gone to great lengths to create a cult of personality. He always strives to routinely conceal the endurance of hierarchies. This is at times done openly, but mostly surreptitiously.
The dirty work is mainly done by social bots on the web 2.0 or placard-wielding acolytes offline. These all work in tandem to collapse several different phenomena under one complimentary label – Fufa is Magogo, and Magogo is Fufa.

The picture painted by the bots – both on- and off-line – is Ugandan football will be orphaned in the event that Magogo is knocked off the perch. Such fawning adoration and sycophancy is in part maintained – not just undone – by the presence of leeches.
Thirty pieces of silver will bring with them hero worship in its most blunt and self-serving form. Historic president! Long live Magogo! When cracks start to show, the leeches are quick to ensure that black and white certainties are painted in shades of grey.

The braggadocio of Magogo makes their work that much more simpler. He is after all on record in professing himself “the best Fufa president, ever.” To which the sycophants nodded in the affirmative.
But there are offsetting factors to sycophancy as indeed we got to witness this past week. If leaders encourage the led to simply parrot back information as Magogo seems to like, then glaring mistakes will continue to be made. There is always beauty to be found in checks and balances both externally and internally. Hero worship and linear movement can only achieve as much. No one will tell the emperor that he is naked.

This is precisely what happened when Magogo typed and widely shared the ill-advised missive against Bakama. No one was bold enough to ask the emperor to reconsider his uncouth response. That’s not what sycophants do. It is their default position to glorify.
They are acutely aware that their acts of glorification will bring the subject of praise into the orbit of prominence. Such efforts don’t go unnoticed. They are not rewardless by any stretch of imagination.

The quid pro quo, however, leaves the beautiful game in a precarious position. The cult of the leader carved out by, among other things, unquestioning flattery essentially sows the wind and reaps the whirlwind.
Instead of making self-serving propaganda a staple, responsible authorities should develop an inexhaustible appetite to champion the building of structures. After all structures outlast whatever cult of personality takes particular delight in.

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Twitter: @robertmadoi