Spire: Satirist serves mixed bag of ordeal in 23-day quarantine

Dr Jimmy Spire Ssentongo on Thursday turned himself into the subject of his own bold cartoons, depicting his prolonged quarantine.
Spire, as he is popularly known, drew himself in a foetal position with arms and feet bounded with ropes.
The floor is strewn with Covid-19 test results, with Dr Jane Ruth Aceng, the Health minister, towering over him and demanding he ‘gives up the coronavirus he was hiding’. To his back is a muzzle of an AK47.
It is what the 23 days of quarantine had reduced the academic, who is famous for his bold cartoons and a column in The Observer, to.
“They didn’t show up,” is all he could tell Saturday Monitor on Wednesday evening.
The cartoonist had been expected to be reunited with his family after the latest test results from samples taken on Tuesday returned negative.
He had been looking up to this so much that he shared Ntomb’khona Dlamini’s Freedom Is Coming Tomorrow song from the 1992 antiapartheid movie, Sarafina.
“No more twists. The status of other people at the quarantine centre shouldn’t arise as a determinant of my fate. I have been in my room,” he said.
But as surreal as the reprised song by Sarafina ensemble was, Spire discovered to his dismay that freedom is a tortoise.
“Third day after the second negative test, still at the hotel waiting for release certificates. They say ‘we know for sure that you are supposed to go home today, but we are not sure if you will go. If this is not torture, what is it?” he posted.
Spire’s quarantine experience has been panning out like a short film. One time he would be disconsolate, then he gets philosophical, and before you get to share in his pain, he is pulling his hair or even self-deprecating.
“How can government imprison a man like you when my useless husband is here stretching in the chair,” Spire said of a random woman’s message. From Arch Apartments in Ntinda, Kampala, he told Saturday Monitor he would resume hunger strike if not released by Wednesday.
He had tried the hunger strike gamble earlier, but abandoned it, saying it was not possible to use hunger to negotiate because “it is hardly a weapon.”
“No wonder [Ken] Lukyamuzi abandoned the strategy. Nothing nags like an empty stomach.”
Lukyamuzi was Rubaga South MP when he went on a hunger strike to compel Kampala Capital City Authority to repair roads in his constituency.

‘This is torture’
Dr Ssentongo is a senior lecturer at Uganda Martyrs University and part-time lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Makerere University.
He is renowned for bold cartoons rendered with a trademark dripping water bottle, apparently depicting President Museveni’s favours upon those who tow his line.
He didn’t spare Dr Aceng the drip in the cartoon about his own predicament.
Spire was away at Cambridge University, UK on research fellowship when the Covid-19 pandemic forced airlines to hit the hangers en masse.
“I knew for sure that, coming from one of the Category 1 countries, I was required to self-isolate for 14 days,” Spire said.
At Entebbe, he duly submitted himself to the start of an ordeal he never could have imagined. Him, together with others, were driven to Central Inn Hotel in Entebbe and “herded into the lobby with total disregard about social distancing.” Each was to pay $100 (Shs3,800)per night for 14 days or $1,400 (Shs5m) for two weeks.
“The options given were two: One either books in at this hotel or be checked into a school dormitory for full isolation,” he said.
“Arguments by some returning students that they had no money at all were met with a suggestion to quarantine them in a school dormitory.” Spire and his group were later moved to Arch Apartments in Ntinda after public protests about the condition at the hotel. Government also started picking costs for accommodation and meals, but they had to first clear own bills with Central Inn.
Spire paid $110 (Shs418,000) for two nights, including the first one at the lobby. But as days went by, he learnt that some of the colleagues he had travelled back with had been released.
“Our crime is that someone staying in their own self-contained room tested positive on March 16, so we are collectively guilty,” he complained. “We did PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests on April 1, seven days after the alleged case, and we are negative.”
After completing 14 days, Spire learnt with dismay that he would not be leaving. They had to undergo fresh tests. A German national could not hold it anymore and did a Lukyamuzi, declaring hunger strike. She was released.
“We voluntarily accepted to be quarantined and refused to pay bribes to escape even when we knew we could,” Spire moaned. “It is a pity that it is now being abused at our expense.”
He told this newspaper that he had a chance to bribe his way out but chose not to. “On hindsight, I don’t blame some of those who escaped, because quarantining turned into torture,” he said.
Incarceration is what it was beginning to look like in the minds of many of his followers. But Spire does not believe so, telling this newspaper like a man capitulating. “I don’t really know.”
He believes the situation was mismanaged, citing the case of Entebbe Inn that was basically a “concentration camp that we had to pay for” where not a single health officer visited in three days... everything was a mess.”
On Tuesday, the Centre for Legal Aid, led by lawyer Isaac Ssemakade, protested Spire’s continued quarantine, telling Ministry of Health officials that the satirist was being treated like a guinea pig “yet he is neither a pig nor from Guinea.”
Health ministry spokesperson Emmanuel Ainebyoona said they were still processing the test result slips and end quarantine certificates.
“It’s very unfortunate that he has stayed longer but we are taking no chances given that his quarantine centre had some confirmed cases,” he said. But one thing Spire is glad for is that his gadgets were not taken away. He is constantly online, and communicate with fellow ‘inmates’.
“Taking away our gadgets wouldn’t help matters. It would show that there was something they were hiding,” he said.
Disturbed family
At the tail end of things has been his family – undergoing the ordeal in their own way.
“My family has been extremely disturbed by what I have been going through. Not just because I was away, but because I could easily get infected at Entebbe Inn where I was at first,” he said.
“We were the guinea pigs from whom they learnt the most basic lessons on quarantining. Most of the mistakes were unforgivable.”
On average, a room and meals is Shs150,000 at Arch Apartments. This means the 78 quarantined pay Shs11.7m per day to the hotel.
Of the 78, 74 are Ugandans paid for by the taxpayer.
Over 5,000 kilometres away in India, Spire’s elder brother is trapped in a hotel.
“At least I have an idea of when I will graduate from this quarantine university and go home,” he said.
“He [Spire] has no clue about his own. Sometimes you are complaining that you have no shoes, then you meet a person without feet!”