Satire: Tourists are here but we took away attractions

I think I’m one of the 33 million Ugandans with mental illness. I keep getting a lot of hallucinations.

On Tuesday, I arrived in Kampala to find a rare cleanliness and soldiers dotting the city. There were so many that I saw a platoon guarding a public toilet at City Square.

My brain took me straight to Kigali. For a moment, I looked around just in case an over-spitting irrigated me like it happened at Remera some years ago.But nothing.

Then slowly, it hit home that I wasn’t hallucinating at all. The boda guy I picked at Lugogo said it was en-eh-ehm. I asked what that was, he asked back if I didn’t know “non-alignment of NRM”.

Later, I met with this vixen and I asked if she would perform at NAM.

“I hear there are many tourists, they need some entertainment,” I said.

“It is nimiiro, not Nam,” she said. “Nze farmer, gwe nimiiro.”

“No, I mean the thing this boda guy was talking about, the one that has soldiers all over the city and…”

“I sing nimiiro, not Nam really, your hearing is getting worser [sic]. If you don’t believe me go and ask the producer.”

It was much later that I learnt that he was talking about NAM, which apparently is Non-Aligned Movement. So the Movement part had got the boda guy NRM-ing it.

“Because of that Movement thing, the city is clean. Potholes are gone,” the boda guy said.

This part got to me though. So after all these years of the government saying potholes promote tourism, they had to fill them all at the very moment tourists descended on the city?

I swear I’m not making this up. One day in January 2020, Minister HO Oryem was asked if bad roads was the reason Uganda has fewer tourists compared to Kenya and Tanzania.

The towering amiable Oryem looked at the MPs on foreign affairs committee with the sternness of a jaguar sizing up the most opportune moment to leap into the water and grab a giant alligator.

Then he said and I quote: “For us, a bad road is cause of complaining.

“But for people in affluent societies who have never experienced getting stuck on a bad road, pushing a car from a ditch can be part of the tourism experience.”

Those who know Oryem know he is a man of rare virtue. He doesn’t move around with more bodyguards than flies around a dying dog.

I’m told he braves the traffic gridlock like the heavily mustachioed Koreta and everyone else who does not have a claim of going to the bush.

To confirm that Oryem was on the money, Irish ambassador to Uganda Kevin Colgan, last November, advised tourists intending to visit some of Uganda’s breathtaking sceneries to visit crater potholes in Kampala’s industrial area, and also to see wild herds of reckless boda riders.

“You don’t need to go outside of Kampala to see the great crater lakes. All you need to do is drive around the industrial area and you will see all the lakes you need, from herds of games at Murchison Falls to herds of bodas on the streets of Kampala, there is a wilderness to it all that we love dearly,” Colgan said.

Yet after all such things, we covered the potholes, blocked bodas from strategic areas of kavuyo where their madness would be most visible and what did we give the non-alignment fellas?

Cook-athon! Yes, cook-athon. How are we going to get the much-needed forex when we are covering tourism attractions and sending away wild anima… sorry, wild bodas?

There seems to be so many people Oryem should charge with treason other than those who want to go on social media to fight non-alignment of Movement. Yes, we must arrest the chaps who covered potholes..

The saboteurs of our economy’s most outstanding landmarks should not be left to belch their impunity for even one day.