SUNDAY SATIRE: We need a public holiday for celebrating deaths

It now seems like something for historians to nibble on from rusty dusty shelves, but it was actually not so long ago. The name was Tom Voltaire Okwalinga. Popularly known as TVO, the chap(s) behind this micro-blogging thing were so terrific they even made the government run around petitioning courts to have the identity of the blogger(s) revealed.

Then, one day, TVO claimed what should have been the most exclusive content ever. It was bizarre to the extreme but happened that TVO knew the finer – or rather grainier and noisier as he asserted – details of what goes on inside that huge white van that accompanies the spotted animal everywhere.

TVO prophecy

Well, nobody goes around discussing, in public, what sound another makes in that moment. But TVO had no qualms at all because the faceless chap was sure the spots of that feline would be all gone in four months or so. Dead.

Because the TVO fellow had created a niche of sorts with explosive revelations, some Ugandans who hid under their beds as the liberators sacrificed their blood and body parts in the jungles of Luweero were excited by the prediction. The spotted animal would soon stop prowling the African jungle and forever rest.

Well, we all know that TVO is no more and the feline continues to hunt to this day. Yet we still take so much pleasure in consuming pre-death obits on social media.

While there are still Ugandans who believe they can write the spotted animal into the annals of history and continue to publish literature that annoys the person of the feline and its offspring, the lot of us have become professional undertakers.

The other day someone even claimed to have seen a funeral service van being loaded onto a Uganda Airlines plane at Kololo Airstrip. He swore the airbus had landed at Kololo under heavy military guards and that men were seen towing the van onto the plane.

Of course, I believed the guy. There are too many people running insane at the duuka whenever they go to buy soap and they are told that a bar is now the price of agreeing to sell a kidney and that just one parting line of the soap is no longer shillingi mia tano but a good elfu moja.

Word is that most shopkeepers have resorted to using Swahili to let the matter sink home. I don’t know if that is what is exacerbating things, but there are so many mental cases on the loose preening for death.

The only problem is that when you ask those killing and burying others on social media to send in their monetary condolences, they start talking about Gashumba. They then tell you how the Gashumba was blocked from entering Nigeria while super-gluing on singer, Ruger.

But at least they haven’t killed her on social media.

Grim side of life

At this rate, we need to appease Museveni’s dedicated voters. We all know that the President usually gives his voters what they want and seeing the death-glee on socials, it must be a fad celebrating the unusual. It only goes that the government can make things better by finding us a proper day to indulge on the grim side of life.

In some nations, there is a minister for happiness. It’s time the spotted animal envisaged the idea of the ministry for fake deaths. This way, we can have the opportunity to summon those declared dead to explain why they are still alive.