Gen Saleh should invent a tree that grows money

When I hear or read about Gen Salim Saleh, I ask myself: Won’t people kill the poor man with work? Yesterday he was in Kapeeka; today it is Gulu; tomorrow, Karamoja. Will he ever get time to relax in his village?

Are Ugandans so cruel, that after sacrificing three-quarters of your life for them, you must spend the last quarter dying for them?

Africans are hopeless. When you pay for a peasant’s coffin, they want you to buy a sumptuous meal for the whole village as well.

So, being Africans, we are turning Salim Saleh’s life into a nightmare. We are like ticks. Even President Museveni; surely! Same mother, same father; how do you give something as weird as Operation Wealth Creation to your own brother in a country of wolves?

In the days when some of Uganda’s most distinguished money artists were having the length of their fingers scrutinised, and Ugandans were just discovering the wealth hidden in secondhand cheques, vaccine donations and dead war planes, Gen Saleh described himself as a ‘financial engineer’.

President Museveni, who has a soft spot for science-related professions, was probably lured by the engineering theme and took the General for a scientist.

A scientist who could invent wealth was a huge asset when Museveni decided to make Ugandans rich.
So, although in his humorous way Saleh might have been half-joking, that was probably how the Bush War General found himself made the lord of Operation Wealth Creation. Museveni kind of said, ‘Me, let me take care of State power; you, take care of the wealth.’

The other Museveni people got much easier tasks.
The First Lady is a minister of Education when schools are in lockdown hibernation. There is virtually no work there, apart from the occasional requirement to release the results of public exams that Uneb somehow squeezes in. 

The boy is a military commander when there is no serious war in the region and Bobi Wine’s people are not on the streets. The girls are okay, although they are not scientists.

One of the in-laws is now a presidential advisor who should have plenty of time to relax.

Even the niece-daughter who used to lean on the shoulder of auntie-mother is now a minister in her own right after the parliamentary wiseacres who initially raised objections were cut to size. Most mercifully, her docket actually does not have to be there.

But Gen Saleh has got this humongous task of creating wealth for every citizen.
Enriching a few thousand people would be manageable. You work with Finance minister Matia Kasaija to solve the problem.

But as I have told you, Africans are funny. When they hear of someone sorted out by a financial engineer, they all click Prime Minister Nabbanja’s Shs100,000 out of their heads and click Saleh’s billions in the gap.

Take our musicians, Uganda’s new aristocracy. Names mislead. If you thought a perfect gentleman like Chameleone would just have to change his skin colours and rest anywhere on a rock or a hard place, sorry. The gentleman has given Gen Saleh an estimation of his lockdown compensation worth as Shs800 million (Bukedde, August 3). His brother, Pallaso, is at Shs821 million.

The list of the musicians is very long, each of them demanding hundreds of millions. And, mark you, the ludo players have not yet made the pilgrimage to Gulu to put in their claims. 

Clearly, the General needs other scientists. He must sit with Museveni’s biologists to breed a tree that grows money. 

Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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