Sorry, former MPs; who wants more parasites?
Slimy things, oozing septic wounds, accumulated filth in open sewers, greasy foods with uninviting flavours, the sheer utterance of excessively indecent words or disgusting ideas; these things have a nauseating effect. They can make you ‘sick’.
Forgive me, but I believe there is something ‘cultural’, something to do with cultivated values, about the experience of disgust.
When we say that X is incapable of being disgusted, we probably mean that X is a person of low culture. It is not tribal; it is not racial. Therefore, with some effort, regardless of their roots, X can learn when to be disgusted, especially concerning ideas expressed in words, sounds and visual images.
Neither is it strictly a matter of formal school education. An otherwise smart X may lack the cultivation to discriminate between what is (and what is not) disgusting.
Now, there is something about Uganda’s ruling NRM that seems to prevent the party members from recognising what will cause disgust; whether it is highly educated party bosses carrying around bundles of money to dish out, or semi-literate party propagandists in Wakiso yapping daily that they are not properly fed by the party.
You certainly remember those yellow-painted piglets that used to appear in various places. Okay, a spate of dirty jokes, but the NRM members have apparently forgotten why their (yellow) party was associated with sty-bound animal greed. Or, rather, they remember, but they do not have the culture to be troubled at all.
I dare say it is this deficiency that lies behind the conversation reported in last weekend’s newspapers, when several people, mainly former (9th Parliament) MPs, including former prime minister Amama Mbabazi and current Parliament Speaker Rebecca Kadaga, as well as former principal judge James Ogoola, gathered at the Imperial Royale Hotel for a dinner.
Because of the shape of the 9th Parliament, the diners were probably mostly faded (and fading) NRM people.
And their concerns included their current (or impending) irrelevance, the misery (or prospect of) not being important, and the shortage of free money to play with and buy bootlickers in their communities.
As usual, Mr James Kakooza, the MP for Kabula County, wanted to sound like an intellectual, speaking of ‘cold debate’ in the 10th Parliament because of a shortage of experienced legislators with ‘institutional memory’.
Very impressive, but Ugandans must not buy this crap.
The NRM chairman and President of the republic once clarified to voters his position, that he would be happy with MPs who slept during debate (why not idiots?), as long as they woke up and voted for the NRM (read his) viewpoint.
Some too lazy to be good farmers, used to reasoning badly and, therefore, generally useless as lawyers or scholars, too incompetent to become successful traders or Musevenist ‘investors’ and makers of industrial goods, they dined at Imperial Royale Hotel and cooked this idea of a second chamber of Parliament for themselves. Lords. Eh! You get me?
The 9th Parliament was as treacherous as the (current) 10th, both rubber stamps manipulated by State House.
Except for small pockets of reason, mainly of Opposition politicians and ‘rebel’ NRM members, the legislators of the 9th and 10th Parliaments have (and will have) no institutional memory to speak of, apart from the mercenary ethic that a legislator’s base self-interest can meet the needs of authoritarianism in a farce masquerading as democracy, if the price is good.
It is sickening merely to suggest that Uganda’s overburdened taxpayers should pay for another layer of parasites baptised as an upper chamber of Parliament.
Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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