Cowards of the Mayuge swamp

If you don’t know the song, you’re no better than a rundown cemetery. Coward of the County lives in us and with us like a heartbeat. 

It’s a song that will never rest even a thousand post-Kenny Rogers’ interment. During the week, it played loudly in the hearts and minds of hundreds of Bobi Wine’s supporters from Mayuge District.

Confronted by heavily armed and itchy-trigger-finger police and military, hundreds of these political cowards turned around and waded the swamps. The enduring image taken of them in the swamp is one that was celebrated across the country.

“You Ugandans are funny,” said a Kenyan friend in Kakira Town. “I see many sharing that image of men without the cojones wading the swamps like ducks to evade police instead of confronting them head-on.”

Ngairu was chewing miraa. His bloodshot eyes betrayed nothing against his words as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hands and lit a cigarette.
“You’re all cowards. Just cowards.”

That was jolting. What we were celebrating as determination of political followers was being seen as mere cowardice by our noisy neighbours. I thought about the cowards of the swamp and then Kenny Rogers played a game in my mind.
Promise me, son, not to do the things I’ve done
Walk away from trouble if you can
Now it won’t mean you’re weak if you turn the other cheek
I hope you’re old enough to understand
Son, you don’t have to fight to be a man.

Sure, the Tommys of Mayuge had done just that, not to mean they were cowards. They were simply living for another day and if security had taken note, they should have realised that the swamp was just an alternative and that where there is no alternative, a Tommy can lock the door and finally go against his dying papa’s advice.

Now, I was supposed to go on rambling about cowardice and wading swamps but there are chances I will be misconstrued in two ways. Both with deadly consequences.
Firstly, Enanga might say I incited violence by mocking swamp waders from Mayuge in a manner that could make them fail to crawl between the legs of musirikale next time and instead pick up stones.

In these times when chaps with guns and teargas canisters and grenades see everything as a problem to be shot dead, Kenny Rogers is the answer and Coward of the County is the thing.

Forget the tweberemu and such things. The armed men do not want to hear of them.  
The second reason to stop mocking our cowards of Mayuge swamp is that the Wetland Engineers Association (WEA) might misread my intentions and begin to think that I’m one of them. 

WEA is led by a self-exiled fellow called Wagwau, a very affable journalist who balded in a funny way I cannot describe here lest Trump himself took offence. These wetland engineers, their claim to fame is in wading the soggy swamps of the southern hemisphere and that image you saw of Mayuge voters doing their thing, that was nothing. A typical WEA luminary wades with his head and brags about it as having entered kitwe.

I tell you, it is a very bad thing for your wife to discover you subscribe to WEA bandwagon. Lest mine read this column and accused me of knowing too much about nothing.
Yeah, papa said not saying too much should not mean I’m a coward.