Writer: Alan Tacca. PHOTO/FILE
Because of a small gap in communication last Sunday, this column may have (belatedly) appeared on the paper’s website, but it did not appear in the printed form.
Briefly, I was contesting Pr. Joseph Serwadda’s assertion at his December 22 radio/TV talk show, that if the 80 percent of Ugandans who do not make important decisions were fumigated and eliminated, the 20 percent who think and make decisions for the country would keep Uganda intact.
Except as a dark fascist joke, the idea cannot stand. Why?
The percentages are not stable quantities. After killing 40 million (80 percent), the remaining 10 million will accelerate their jostling for ascendancy and re-divide in new 20 and 80 percent camps.
After several cycles of genocide, Uganda would shrink to a population no bigger than the tenants (not staff) of State House!
But before reaching that state, I wanted us to enter 2025 saluting the present 80 percent of Ugandans who toil to feed the nation, whose workaday skills clothe and shelter our people.
And precisely because many of them cannot comprehend how our universe can be infinitely complex without being magical, they are the main consumers of all that stuff about demons and miracles, without which our pastors would be redundant and impoverished.
Far from being dispensable, the 80 percent are the pillars on which Uganda sits.
Now, we closed 2024 but did not shut out Uganda’s decay, religion included.
Although Christmas everywhere has over the centuries been reduced to a season of fun, gift-giving, and over-consumption, with the baby-Redeemer only lingering in the background, the neo-pagan celebration of December 31 relentlessly promoted by our Pentecostals to supersede Christmas has degenerated far more rapidly.
On December 31, our pastors stage cult-status spectacles where they fiercely compete for audiences, money, and influence, making hollow prosperity proclamations for their followers.
One Pr. Ntale with the self-aggrandising title of ‘apostle’ epitomised many pastors at the gala that was relocated from Namboole to Ndeeba.
According to Ntale, believers only had to point clearly at ‘images’ of what they wanted and shout that a miraculous acquisition was being made. Those who shouted loudest would get their desires fulfilled!
Pathetic Christian antics are more easily ignored than tragicomic political exhibitions.
On the political front, those who hold raw power are far from retiring. Parliament and the Judiciary are on their knees. Lesser institutions wait indifferently for instructions from above. All are mired in corruption.
The upper 20 percent are, therefore, parasitic embodiments of betrayal, simultaneously worshipped and cursed by the lower 80 percent.
Mathias Mpuuga’s newly-found birdie, Alien Skin, must be the “Man of the Year 2024” for highlighting this paradox.
The singer explained why he was not alien to Mpuuga, but of the same skin – sorry, the same feather.
He said he had been alleged to steal a mobile phone and Mpuuga to dubiously pocket Sh500 million: the singer grabbing from an individual; the MP from the national Treasury.
They were now partners facing the ruling NRM, whose leaders are, of course, allegation-hardened after years of being both worshipped and cursed for associating with thieves.
Mpuuga and Alien Skin are, therefore, heroes entitled to lead and speak for the new Democratic Alliance.
Alternative interpretations are cheap gloss. For Mr. Mpuuga tirelessly reminds us how he laboured unsuccessfully to ‘civilise’ NUP’s political upstarts. Alien Skin must have been paraded as his A-plus product for 2025.
Very likely, after the fireworks, the decay of the republic will march on.
