Satire: In 2024, Jesus chose Mulago over the rest

There is a big lie the suited penguins at URA like to tell. That breweries are top taxpayers. Every time I want to disagree with them, I see a man drive from Kawempe to Mulago after being sprayed with bullets, and just like that, I sober up.

If breweries pay a lot of taxes, then it’s all thanks to the real taxpayers behind these breweries. These are the fellows who operate gymnastics at watering holes in the evenings.

The gymnastics involve strengthening the biceps by picking a glass filled with frosty frothing urine-like substance or its methylated cousin from the table to their mouth and back so many times that even VAR gets groggy and loses count.

Then they return home when they are too good to remember that when you need a cannula planted on your right biceps, you shouldn’t drive from Kawempe to Mulago with a dying bodyguard but pull up at any of the clinics around.

The other day I was visiting with Mama in Wairaka when she started howling for me to leave. It was only 6pm but she was saying it was dangerously late.

“It’s not safe out there anymore, didn’t you hear about the man-a-gad?” she said.

“Mama, it’s Man of God,” Mama’s grandkid corrected.

“Whatever!” she retorted.

Now I told her that an evening taxpayer is like a lizard who must account for its own tail if it has to put on a trouser. Mama understood the lizard bit, but not the evening taxpayer one.

I had picked up my broke and haggard self to leave when everyone burst out laughing.

“Does he write bad things about the government?” Mama asked.

“How?” I asked.

“This one was saying that you journalists only write bad things about Mulago until something happens then you run there when too afraid to die because you haven’t saved enough for your own coffin,” one said.

“That was a big advert for Mulago, a rich man like that choosing the much-maligned hospital over all those international ones in Kampala,” said another of Mama’s muzukulu.

“Are you suggesting that they were shooting an advert even when someone died?” Mama said.

She might have been dishing out a restraining order there but I felt a deep sense of eureka in it. We have surely never had a better ad for Mulago apart from when we are being reminded of how Milton Obote was admitted to the national facility when he was shot during a failed coup.

Meanwhile, I should have told you about my predictions for 2024 last Sunday but I couldn’t find a cannula for a show. However, it’s never too late to foretell the year in January, right?

Sometime in September 2002, we were reading for our A-Level exams when this chic teasingly flirted with me. I ignored her, to which her buddy jeered: “Oyo watomerwa endiga”.

The girls giggled. I reassured myself that since I didn’t understand her insult, it didn’t hit home. Later, curiosity made me ask a friend, who translated it ‘alive’: “you have been ram torpedoed”.

I would use the phrase many times later, and every time people laughed. Even in the WhatsApp era, it elicits emojis. Yet the only thing I have picked since is that endiga is sheep.

Now, I can foretell that this year I will not only learn the meaning of watomerwa endiga but also that endiga will buy bulletproof limo so their evening taxpaying man-a-gad stops scampering to Mulago when hangover milk is sold at roadside kiosks.

Also to happen this year, Vipers will sack their coach over squandering the team’s points in evening taxpaying escapades at watering points and a UPDF chopper will crash.

Another one: A regional leader will die but don’t ask me which region. It could be Busoga and it could be the Great Lakes. Being too specific could make an Indian investor pick up ideas and get richer at my expense.

Wait, the editor is saying I cut the crap. Word count. We need to force editors to pay evening taxes so that they forget these word count and deadline things and begin to think that a full stop runs between Kawempe and Mulago.