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Satire: Arrest the Crested Crane for BoU robbery
What you need to know:
- The Crested Crane, as we know, prefers to nest close to moist regions like riverbanks. And there is no riverbank like BoU.
- The place is basically rivery with the country’s cash streams and it’s a bank.
Daily Monitor reported during the week that there was a “hunt for vultures inside BoU vault”. So the Criminal Investigations Directorate detained at least nine Ministry of Finance officials to assist with investigations into the theft of billions of shillings at Bank of Uganda (BoU) last year.
The problem with looking for vultures as a group is that they tend to go by different identities. A group of vultures can be called a committee, venue or volt. In flight, a group of vultures is a kettle and when feeding on a carcass, the group is referred to as a wake. So, like clever criminals, the vultures cannot be easily spotted by their true identity.
They remind some of us of the notorious Mexican drug lord Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, a criminal who was known for undergoing extreme plastic surgery to hide his identity. By using implants and injections as well as disguises for photos on fake identification cards with various aliases, El Chapo could have been El Chapatti if he wanted to be.
These vultures are the same. If we take them as a committee, they would look innocent. Since committees hold conversations, they don’t hold up banks. If called a venue, the police might choose to visit the vultures instead of having justice visited upon them.
If called a volt, they may be taken as the alternate spelling of the word ‘vault’ and thus taken as the scene of the crime instead of perpetrators of the crime. To call this group of ‘vultures inside the BoU vault’ a kettle might also increase demands for “chai” among the arresting authorities. And to call them ‘a wake’ would remind us that somebody was sleeping on the job when that money went missing and it was clearly not the vultures.
We all know that heists of this magnitude are more likely to be perpetrated by inside people than outlaws who come together to pull off a big score. Instead of looking for vultures, which are scavengers, meaning that they eat dead animals, it would be better to look for an insider. That is a bird which actually hunts and kills animals. That’s because BoU was not dead when the so-called vultures struck. It is not even dead now.
We must thus start looking for Uganda’s national bird, the Crested Crane. It has motive. The bird was part of a colonial project to rob Uganda completely, and also.
It was first selected as the British flag’s emblem in 1893 by Sir Frederick Jackson, the country’s then-Governor of Uganda. It was then duly inserted on flags flown by the Governor of Uganda by His Majesty George V of England. So it is basically a colonial mascot, encouraging the pillaging we have witnessed in Uganda for more than 100 years.
The Crested Crane, as we know, prefers to nest close to moist regions like riverbanks. And there is no riverbank like BoU. The place is basically rivery with the country’s cash streams and it’s a bank.
In terms of diet, the Crested Crane is omnivorous. That means it eats everything from hundreds of coins to billions of shillings. There must have been some Crested Cranes in the BoU vault, but it is hard to prove this since they have the perfect alibi: they can say they were posing on the national flag when the crime went down.
People would believe they were innocent on this basis alone. Our country is full of people who believe that seeing is believing. So, if they don’t catch you doing something red-handed, it’s harder for them to believe you did it.
This is why politicians have polling agents during elections, that way they don’t have to steal the votes themselves. And since they have not been seen physically stealing the votes, how can you say they did so?
The too-clever-by-half investigators must consider this reality, or they might arrest the wrong bird and this criminal case might go the way of the dodo. The dodo, by the way, were birds found by Dutch soldiers around 1600 on an island in the Indian Ocean. The Dodo became extinct 80 years later. Let us not kill this case also.
Disclaimer: This is a parody column.
