Nkurunziza and the monitor lizard’s ill-advised love for sunshine, anthill
Might be as difficult for an African president to quit power voluntarily as it is for the monitor lizard, enjoying the deceptive, sweet morning sun to quit the anthill.
For the latter, our forefathers always said that the monitor lizard that doesn’t know when to leave the sweet sunshine will have its skin grace the ‘tom drum’ (engalabi); for the hunter finds it still lazily sprawled. Easy target.
For the former, let’s just say that not even my little girl believes that Burundi’s longest-serving president Pierre Nkurunziza (14 years, 287 days) died of a heart attack; and Rhine’s just three – which should tell you plenty!
It is very difficult to see how a fully fit, middle-aged man who played football like a true footballer, rode sports bikes through the tiny capital at a fast speed – with his hands off and sang at full voice in his Hallelujah Choir, could succumb to a heart attack just like that.
True, Cameroon’s Marc-Vivien Foe did die of a heart attack in the middle of a Confederation Cup semi-final against Colombia in France, June 26, 2003 – and he wasn’t the first footballer to do so. But then you want to consider that most African presidents want to die at the controls, at about two or three hundred years of age, or avoid death altogether; so they need no nudging to, on a weekly basis, see the heart doctor – what’s he called again?
And you fail to see how the coronavirus, which hadn’t succeeded in killing any Burundian, save one, would so conveniently make the president himself, its next target, inducing a massive heart attack, quickly shutting down the entire system of a very fit man. That’s an insult to the intelligence of the enlightened!
The monitor lizard theory certainly provides better, far more credible answers to the sad Nkurunziza ending, in the tiny but very beautiful Black African country.
Burundi, with all its amazing natural scenery, is evidence that “small is beautiful”; but also an excellent example of the saying “deadly things come in small packages”. Move aside Uganda, a country of the wilfully docile, inept and risk-averse, where one man – Mr Yoweri Museveni - can safely embark on a plan to rule forever (34 years so far) and his son can safely roll out the alleged ‘The Muhoozi Project’ to succeed his father (no doubt to rule forever too), and they still calmly and safely gallivant or gad about on high horses like they own or invented the country.
That would be a tough call – extremely ambitious and unsafe - in Burundi, a country several of whose presidents have been assisted out of State House and earthly life in not very nice ways. Deceptively small country; but extremely deadly.
Had Nkurunziza stepped down at the end of his two terms, and not wandered into the minefield of amending the constitution to provide for a third term; and had he, as his third term was ending, not ventured into trying to hold on to power through subtle other means (say, what thinkest thou of “Supreme Eternal Guide”?), he’d most probably be still playing his football, riding his bike through city and countryside with hands off, and singing tenor at the top of his lungs in his Hallelujah Choir.
He’d even have had time to learn box guitar and strum along like a good old-fashioned Texas cowboy, complete with wide hat, suspenders, tight jeans and those irresistible boots.
But like the monitor lizard who, when basking in the sweet, deceptive morning sunshine, didn’t know when to let enough be enough, Nkurunziza has, so sadly, been forced to leave his young family behind.
Had Chinua Achebe been alive today, he’d have been whispering to these other lizards, “a slave who sees a fellow slave being buried in a shallow grave should know he will suffer the same fate when his turn comes”.
The writer is an advocate of the High Court of Uganda
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