"Personally, I employ 3,000 workers in my various companies; this number is more than government workers in all the districts in Teso," Mukula was reported as saying recently.
Impersonally, we are told, Mukula employs 3,000 ghost workers too. He tends to get personal with some employees and impersonal with others, naturally.
Anyway, if Mukula employs more people than government in Teso, why is he even running for office? He should be running to be employed by himself, while every other Itesot does the same.
It makes no sense to run for office in order to be in government when you are already a government; that’s too much government.
Nonetheless, if Mukula runs for office in order to employ himself and ends up losing to himself. He might have to petition the courts, saying the election was rigged by himself against him for himself. He will have to take flight after losing the fight.
Teso has been through enough. It does not need a Mukula versus Mukula dogfight. Sure, such a joust might cancel out Mukula altogether and benefit opponents who are not him.
However, if his opponents are also running for office in a government with fewer jobs than Mukula, they should be running for Mukula and not office, since the two are not mutually exclusive in Teso.
The 3000-Employee-Man is not playing. He even knows better English than his opponents. Remember Wikileaks? He used the word “dauphin” in that massive publishing of classified documents. Some of you thought he said Daphne, but then you recalled that Mzee doesn’t have a son called Daphne.
Mukula has also been said to have the Midas touch, the man is a political magician. But, to be clear, he is not called Magic Mike. The latter, Mike is a 30-year-old striptease performer from a 2012 American independent comedy-drama film called Magic Mike.
Mukula is better than that. He has already told you that he employs 3,000 people, not 3001 or 2,999 workers. They are 3,000, that’s 168, 256 persons less than what was translated into votes for the Uganda Patriotic Movement (UPM).
UPM collected 171,256 votes in the general elections held in Uganda on December 10 and 11, 1980.
So by Mukula being far less popular than a party that didn’t win the 1980 elections, this will surely work against Mukula. What is working for him are the 3,000 persons he employs in Teso. It makes him the John D Rockefeller of Teso.
Rockefeller was America’s very first billionaire, with a fortune worth nearly two percent of the national economy in the early 20th Century.
His personal wealth was estimated in 1913 at $900 million, which was almost three percent of the US gross domestic product (GDP) of $39.1 billion at that time.
According to the recent Multidimensional Poverty Index [MPI] report by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, the poverty rate in Teso sub-region stands at 55.6 percent. This means Mukula could be largely responsible for 44.4 percent of Teso’s prosperity rate. That is below average, dear Teso Rockefeller. You must pull up your socks or have one of your 3,000 employees help you do it.
The man is the GOAT (greatest of all time) when it comes to employing people in Teso. This intervention by the GOAT is the reason why goat production plays an important role in improving the livelihoods of the Teso communities.
Indigenous goats are mainly acquired by buying (85 percent) while exotic goats and their crosses are acquired from government programmes (34 percent).
Mukula is surely part of a government programme to employ Teso sub-region in NRM’s embrace in a race between Mukula and Mukula, so long as Mzee doesn’t drop the Mike.
