Do you know who takes the credit when gay Bill is binned?

There is a place in Jinja City called ‘Dirty Carina’. Or something like that. The other day, someone asked me to drive his jalopy to Dirty Carina. 

Getting to Dirty Carina is no joke. Even when you are on your Footsbishi Evo2, you need the skills of Venezuela’s triple jumper Yulimar Rojas. You have to hop, step and leap over the galleys and valleys disguised as potholes.

The thing is, regardless of the street you take, the tragedy is the same. I was about to get there when the jalopy suddenly lost power. Then it could not move again because a wheel was deep inside what was clearly a galley, a valley, or both.

While fidgeting in the mammoth crater, a woman with a yellow apron approached and stuck a parking ticket under the wiper. She said I had parked. And that if I didn’t think I had parked, I should blame the mayor.

And that is where the second tragedy is. Jinja City has no mayor. There is just a semblance of one. I hear he is or was a comedian. Everyone calls him just that – a comedian. He probably sees cars meandering to avoid the isolated bits of streets in these galleys and valleys and thinks the motorists are being creative and funny. Bodas helped me out of the valley and soon I was parking outside a dirt red brick flat. 

Yes, there are worse dwellings but Dirty Carina is a case study for them all. The thing is huge.
I had decided to ignore everything when my bladder protested. I ambled around to ask for a toilet and some chaps sat on a bench outside pointed me to one. Yes, it is called Dirty Carina, so if you thought there is a price for guessing what the toilets are like, then you have won yourself an armed UPDF bodyguard.

I found the chaps on the bench talking about the re-tabling of the anti-gay law in Parliament. Their diction, in Swahili, was so crude the guy who calls himself Justice Hunter would probably ask Twitter to raze down Dirty Carina if he overheard them.

Presently, the chap with silky skin complexion and slippery kinky hair was telling the others that even if Parliament sat in heaven, the law would never see the light of the day.

One agreed, the other sounded lost. Then Mr Slippery Kinky Hair said he believed there was something the Spotted One wanted and that by using the gay issue, he was baiting those who give him whatever he wanted.

“What could he want other than to stop the White man’s culture from crippling our social fabric?” said the girl who until now had been silently filing her fingernails.

“Succession. He’s offering them his son as his successor and there…” Mr Slippery Kinky Hair could not finish what he was saying as the girl cut him short.

“You see, dad keeps saying you stop speaking like politicians but you never listen. Now you are running mad with premature politics,” she said.

The other two boys laughed. Mr Slippery Kinky Hair looked hurt. His Adam’s apple moved up and down as he swallowed hard.

But he was not deflated. He had merely loaded the magazine in his voice box with that saliva swallowed. He now rapped.

In the elaborate speech, he said at some point in the plot, MK would be served as the one who appealed to his father to stand for the rights of all, thus winning over the West and activists like Justice Hunter.

“You guys don’t know, there are many voters in Rwanda and MK has already appealed to them,” he said. “Now if the West begins to think he can do what Bobi Wine was riding on, then it is game over.”
Someone brought scraps and the guys abandoned their pep talk to go and weigh them. They were scrap dealers – probably speaking scrap politics.