How many men does it take to push-start a fire tender?

I was 14 going on 15 when I started nicking the family truck and teaching myself how to drive. It was an old truck and prone to suffer breakdowns at the most inopportune moments, like in the middle of rush hour, on a busy street, thus necessitating the driver – a pint-sized pubescent package – to jump out, open the bonnet, fix the latest ailment and dash back into the truck and away before the traffic police turned up to ask about permits, parents and permissions.
One day, entirely without warning, but perhaps due to the constant opening and closing, the bonnet became unlatched and slammed up to the windscreen while I careened down a steep slope in Mabira forest, blinding me to on-coming traffic. I was able to slow down and sidle off the road without any harm to self, other road users but, alas, not to the environment.
No two journeys were the same. You never knew when the carburettor would suck in dirt, bringing the car to a shuddering stop and requiring you to suck it out, or when the exhaust mountings would give away and leave you driving an incredibly loud four-wheel motorbike. When the brakes overheated you let them sit for half an hour or poured water on them. Pee, if the injector nozzle was aimed correctly, and applied with sufficient pressure, also worked.
The upside to all of this was that no one borrowed the car. No, not because I was a bad person who did not want to share my toy with my friends, but because going through the user manual – why there was a big stone in the passenger seat and its role in the vehicle’s continued mobility; what the hissing sound from the steering wheel meant and how to differentiate it from the one from the “karanksi” or crankshaft – would take half a day.
These hair-raising memories flooded back when I saw the finest and bravest from the Uganda Police Force’s Fire Brigade doing their best to push-start one of their fire tenders deployed to fight the blaze at Makerere University.
There are, of course, many ways to find meaning in the fire. One could look at the contradiction of the police buying the most advanced anti-riot vehicles and equipment while investing significantly less in the welfare of its men or other ‘peaceful capabilities’ like forensic labs or fire-fighting equipment.
One could look at the university itself and wonder why there appears to have been no working fire hydrant on the hill, even with professors in civil engineering, architecture, et cetera.
One could even look farther, at the wider incompetence in the relevant ministry, or deeper, and explore whether there is a pattern of fires breaking out at traditional shrines, like Kasubi and now Makerere, and how long before we see one at Nsamizi. 
But my mind went to the driver of the fire tender, a Mercedes Benz model produced sometime in the mid-1970s. It was almost definitely bought new, out of a show room and not a ‘bond’ and the operators might have undergone some training on how to use it. Then one year had melted into another, one fire into the next smouldering ruin, and the bloody thing had just kept going.
How many fires has it fought? Where do they find the spares to keep it on the road? How many drivers have handled the beast? What kind of hand-over takes place when one driver retires and another takes over? Does the retiring fire fighter go round, large stone in hand, showing the incoming upstart yet to get any soot behind their ears which parts to hit to get it running or turn off the engine?
Do the drivers compete to be assigned to it or is it a punishment for those unliked by the superiors? And does this beast also participate in the well-known practice of fire tenders moonlighting as for-hire water bowsers around Kampala?
The story here isn’t chronic under-investment, misplaced priorities, congenital incompetence or spiritual warfare of the fourth, fiery dimension: That is the way we work, not the way we fail. 
As a long-suffering operator of an old piece of junk, I empathise with, rather than condemn, the driver. Anyone who brings a museum artefact to a firefight and walks away alive is a hero – even if they have to be pushed to start!

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and  poor man’s freedom fighter. 
[email protected] 
@Kalinaki