Can holy sex redeem thieves?

Last Sunday was Easter. In the churches where government bigwigs go to masquerade as exemplary Christians, the plunderers (active and retired) were in the front pews, their clothes shimmering, their pockets probably carrying fat offertories.

Believers, therefore, should be grateful twice. Once, because Jesus was the courageous establishment disrupter he was. And grateful again that Barabbas was there to be released instead of Jesus.

The white-collar plunderers under Uganda’s National Resistance Movement (NRM) are different from the marauding bandits in the times of Pontius Pilate, but they are driven by the same greed, the same cynicism, and possibly more hypocrisy. 

Our plunderers quietly listened to the bishops denouncing thieves in government and characterising corruption as the curse that would derail the NRM government.

Ssabalwanyi (lord of warlords), Gen Museveni, had heard all this before. But no serious president takes bishops seriously. So, after inspecting his cows, Gen Museveni posted on his X (twitter), “I was very happy to hear the religious leaders’ message of condemning corruption. Keep it up…”

You must be devoid of any sense of humour not to smile at that, coming from a tough guy who is responsible for recycling most of the distinguished plunderers in his vampire state.

The Easter Monday newspaper pictures shot on Easter Sunday remind you that plunder is not limited to ruling NRM politicians. 

Makers of recent headlines who nominally belong to the Opposition were faithfully image-making with their bishops.

Some pictures were predictable, others rather curious. Take Abed Bwanika and Mathias Mpuuga, the two Masaka legislators who have been quarrelling with their National Unity Platform (NUP) honcho, Bobi Wine, over the poisoned taxpayers’ money that went into Mpuuga’s mouth. They are all smiles with Bishop Serverus Jjumba of (Catholic) Masaka Diocese.

Bwanika reportedly owns (or has) a Pentecostal church, where I thought he would be pastoring, preaching and chasing fake demons on Easter Sunday.

Early morning that Sunday, interviewed by his fan, Pastor Joseph Serwadda, on Impact FM/Dream TV, Bwanika had attacked Bobi Wine with uncommon ferocity, peddling the cheap diversionary pro-Mpuuga thesis that it was Mpuuga’s anti-gay stand that put him on a collision course with his party chief, Bobi Wine, who was allegedly associating with and raising funds from pro-gay organisations in the West.

If Bwanika was the intelligent man he insists he is, he would know that 21st Century global humanity is far more complex than the semi-mythical centres of Sodom and Gomorrah, where God roamed about like a tribal morality policeman, and whose idea of reforming the centres was to unleash a genocidal flood. 

Today, God is silent, resting. And the advocates of democracy and a humane civilisation are also often the advocates of tolerance in matters of sexual morality.

Part of the strategy in the conspiracy against Bobi Wine is to detach him from his international connections, and at home to ethnicise him and distract him with red flashes from the sphere of private sexual morality, challenging him to take a puritanical and controversial stand.

But the bishop (and church) giving Bwanika and Mpuuga their Easter image opportunity also associate with other Catholic institutions around the world. 

In Australia, the Americas and Europe, the credibility of many of those institutions has been stretched by thousands of documented charges, not only over gay eccentricity, but also over criminal paedophilia, concealment and shielding of abusers.

Should Bishop Jjumba, and, by extension, Mpuuga and Bwanika, be forced to make a formal denunciation of all those institutions as compensation for the taxpayers’ money Mpuuga and others dubiously awarded themselves?

Mr Alan Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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