Don’t crush Bobi Wine; sing something as Museveni

Many, many years ago, when His Excellency President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni and all of us, old people, were much younger, His Excellency could be said to have aspired to some of the attributes of Greek gods – in a manner of speaking.
In Greek mythology, the gods resembled and interacted with humans more intimately than in biblical mythology.
If, for instance, the story of Jesus had been set in ancient Greece, there could have been something like a god (Gabriel?) swooping down from the atmospheric region of Mount Olympus where the gods lived, and an abduction of a great beauty, after which Joseph would have probably never seen his Mary again.

Some Greek gods could be very athletic. Usain Bolt and Messi are nothing.
In those days when Mr Museveni was much younger and there were other bush war heroes who could still tackle and kick a ball in a football game, His Excellency would put on a pair of boots and go with 10 other fellows into a match against another team. Something like the President’s Cabinet versus Parliament.

Of course, just as in real life the MPs were generally his poodles, in the match they tended to leave large gaps through which he raced to the net to score his team’s (or his) goals.
Call these matches dubious macho exhibitions, or the athlete, a fake athlete, but His Excellency had at least put in effort on whose basis he could claim some of the credentials of a minor Greek god.
Unfortunately, biology always knocks and puts darker and darker stamps of its authority on our mortality.

Today, 90 minutes on a football field – and scoring – goals – would probably leave all the joints of His Excellency creaking very badly.
So what does poor Museveni do when there are strange youngsters playing and dancing around and shaking his throne?
Clobber them. Or – to conceal the Stone Age instinct and avoid the risk of staining his clothes with blood – Mr Museveni acts or speaks in ways that make the goons serving his regime assume that he wants anyone who is audacious enough to desecrate his throne to be thoroughly whipped.
The deal: they do the grim work, and he assures them of their impunity, albeit in abstract gestures, like turning a blind eye when everybody is looking. So, in interesting times, should the goons ever find themselves dangling on Uganda’s revolving crosses, the President has kept enough distance to disown them.

But even at that distance, the primitive meanness deployed against Bobi Wine leaves the President looking pitifully undignified. Couldn’t the curse of overstaying in power cook up a less obscene spectacle?
On one side you have the President and Commander-in-Chief. At his beck and call are 20 or 30 generals. And he can move several battalions and tonnes of guns to challenge whole nations.
On the other side you have Bobi Wine. He sings. He wears a red cap. Period.

Bobi does not sing Verdi or Rossini. His music is very simple. President Museveni could sing or croak something to counter some of the effects of his fearless young adversary.
I mean singing something authentically Museveni’s; something original. For I can see from the newspapers that the first and last music recording by Mr Museveni, Another Rap, has attracted a legal challenge.
One Kawesa is making a copyright claim. If Kawesa wins the Shs5 billion claim, the President would have to sell 5,000 of his cows or raid the Treasury of the vampire state.