Satire: Mzee writes Valentine’s Day letter to Opposition

This is normal English. Milton Obote was Uganda’s president twice, in football they call that a brace and indeed Ugandans had to brace themselves for his ideological bankruptcy. After his first rule, Obote spent the Amin years in exile in Tanzania. I was with him there or maybe he was with me. As you know, Uganda Peoples Congress was everywhere those days. I one time even found them in Nyabushozi and I asked them how they reached. They told me that I was not the only nomad in the world. This was 1964.

I also reminded them how my people came to be called nomads. One time, the British came in 1899 and asked us to show them our settlements. We told them we did not have any since we liked to move from place to place. ‘You’re mad,’ they said. And we replied, ‘We no mad.’ After that, they started calling us nomads.

Anyway, Obote returned to Uganda on May 27, 1980, and won disputed general elections a few months later. That’s the time we had to go to the bush. Nobody cared about Ugandans. While we spoke of the right to bear arms, they promoted our right to bear alms instead.

The New York Times in 1983 even flaws, Mr Obote, who is 59 years old, is viewed by many as the only experienced and viable leader now on the scene.” “There just isn't anybody else,” a prominent Ugandan businessman said. “I'm sorry but the alternative to Obote is even greater anarchy or some kind of military regime again.”

This is how I am now. People think I am the only ‘one’, while Bobi thinks he’s ‘won’. The man cannot even spell nor do basic arithmetic. Won does not equal one. It equals the one that is not won. In fact, won is short for Won-degeya.

That is next to Nakulabuye. The place where people were murdered in 1964, remember? Most of you were unborn, still residing in your father’s spherical duplex below his waistline.

Our problem then, as now, was not extrajudicial killings. That is a symptom. Our problem is that we practice the politics of identity. This has led to many of you identifying as president and, by extension, identifying as me. Yet US President Donald Trump issued an executive order shortly after he was sworn in to change the US government's policies on gender and diversity. "These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality," the order says. So you can no longer identify as president of Uganda.

Be yourself and remain in the Opposition until my great-grandchildren die. You remind me of that girl in a school in Rye in East Sussex, England, UK, who said she was a cat, that she “identified” as such, and that others who disagreed with her could receive her middle finger fur-ever. Now you think that because you identify as me, I become you and you become me?

There is a reason why the Bachwezi are believed to have originated from Ethiopia. Not a single historian said that Chwezi came from Butabika Hospital. As I said earlier, we are ‘no mad’. We are sober, always. That is why when I say I love you the way you are, I mean it.

You should never try to rise above your noisemaking. If you do, KB can tell you more. He was once my doctor. Then he went from being able to treat me as if I were in hospital to being inhospitable. So we stopped being in a bromance. Instead, he chose Reform Agenda.

Yet Trump told us in his inauguration speech that it would be US policy "that there are only two genders." There cannot be male, female and ‘reform a gender’. A gender must never be reformed.

Yours,
Mzee Wa Kazi.

Disclaimer: This is a weekly parody column.