Stella Nyanzi: unifier or splitter?

Second, by picking up the same forms from People Power in order to paint Kampala red.

Third, by having the courtesy to straighten out our confusion by saying the difference between the two Opposition outfits is a case of ‘tomayto’ and ‘tomahto’/ ‘potayto’ and ‘potahto’.
Clearly, she is hedging her bets to widen the possibility of winning the seat.

It’s either that, or she got lost on her way to both offices. And then decided ‘what the heck’ at each office before picking up her nomination forms. Either way, her focus on the pair is worrying. The last time she focused on a pair of something else, she wound up being clinked behind bars!

By picking forms from both parties, Dr Nyanzi is effectively playing both sides off the middle in order to enhance her own individual merit.

This way, she rises above the two parties in ways that consigns their institutional relevance to the back burner. To thereby make way for a Mugisha Muntu-like third force. One that’s personified by her.

As one of Uganda’s foremost creative voices, Dr Nyanzi is that poet who gazes over the ocean while lost in a sea of thoughts about how to change the world without it changing her. Her salty language doesn’t exactly season good taste, but it betrays a lucid if fevered mind.

A champion of women rights and gender equality, Dr Nyanzi got her groove on rolling up sleeves that belonged to men in order to do what men do, but better.
Most of the time, she inflicts shock and awe (as well as wonder) on her reader in ways that few Ugandan writers have done in modern times.

We expect women such as her to be womanly: paragons of civility and genteel manners. While forgetting that the late great poet Maya Angelou, as a young woman, was a fry cook, a prostitute, a brothel madam and San Francisco’s first Black female streetcar conductor!

A poet should, by law, be lawless and beholden only to that singular, stirring turn of phrase born of passion.
Our society, however, has nurtured followers who’ve lost their will to lead according to the individuality of their own unique perspectives on life.

This was decried by President Museveni many years ago.
In William Pike’s book Combatants: A Memoir of the Bush War and the Press in Uganda, rebel leader Museveni is quoted as having said: “It was not just a question of UPC [Uganda Peoples Congress], people were calling us followers of [Milton] Obote. I said I was not a follower of anybody, I am just a freedom fighter. How can people have followers in the 20th Century?”

Dr Nyanzi’s candidature brings to the fore a leader who is her own person. Maybe that’s why she can’t seem to make up her mind about FDC and People Power.
By taking her own stance on issues and not being beholden to any party might help inadvertently thaw the cold rage between our political actors.

We have seen the rise of the independent in our party system. Which has created a tension between the rigidity of party platforms and the radicalism of individual impulse. This can be resolved in view of “every blessing, just like a coin, having two sides.”

Dr Nyanzi’s choosing of both sides reveals that unity maybe plural, but it’s achieved by the singularity of each of us following our patriotic hearts beyond our party colours.

Mr Matogo is the managing editor Fasihi Magazine.
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