A Rutoro warning for leopard’s battered bickering co-wives

When I was much younger and still living with my grandmother, we had a neighbour who had two wives. I have two distinct memories about that time.

The first was that I used to play with their children – we were of the same age group – and often got into the kind of trouble that you might relate to – when you go playing and lose count of the time, until it’s past your curfew, so you return home to kibokos.

The second memory is that the man, quite short and stocky, was a wifebeater. How did I know? Well, every time he dished out his occasional rounds of battering, his wives would run the distance to the safety of our home, screaming “yatwita” [he is killing us]. He didn’t dare crossover to face my grandma.

 Sometimes, she would have travelled – and therefore unavailable to offer respite and reprimand the offender. I still remember that even during those times, the adults at home would open her bedroom and hide the two women there, as that was the only safe zone.

As a child, I wondered why the two women didn’t just gang up against the man and deliver the mother of all revenge-whoopings. There were two of them, against one. I was too young to contemplate the impact that all of these dynamics and dysfunction might have had on the four children I played with.

That is also probably when and where I heard the Batoro advise that when you see a stick that’s used to beat your co-wife, it is best to throw it far away, over the fence.
Interestingly, you can also be certain to find a good number of people for whom the relationship between citizens and their governments can’t be differentiated from an abusive marriage.

It’s not entirely preposterous to imagine that Uganda falls within the realm of that general definition. This explains the near-boiler interest in political affairs from your average Ugandan, social status notwithstanding.

This column posited a few a months ago, that the fight over Uganda’s parliamentary speakership was akin to two baldheads wrangling over a comb. But unlike the vice presidency, the speakership is not where you deploy someone that needs to get forgotten. Which is why the bitter fights and near-mutiny within the ruling NRM make sense.

In this part of the world, where a president is more likely to be accused and found guilty of autocracy, having an operational Parliament, albeit filled with stooges, is good defence. You also need a loyal sherriff to keep a lid on any babbling that might displease you. Ergo, anyone teeming with hubris and prone to singing from a different hymnbook must be dispatched with. Now you see how we ended up at the choices that NRM made, and shall have to live through their consequences.

While it is clear that the ruling party understood the assignment and went about its execution with precision, the same cannot be said of the Opposition – or what is supposed to be.

Many, more qualified, have argued that any substantial threat to NRM’s stranglehold will have to be a result of internal fissures, and not from outside. They cite the bruising and fright that the indefatigable Dr Kizza Besigye has occasioned on the system over the years; and the chaos and panic that ensued when the suave, former Prime Minister, Amama Mbabazi, threw his hat in the ring.
 
From the looks of it, they aren’t wrong. It is hard to find proper words to describe the opposition’s lackluster show during this week’s election of Speaker of Parliament. Abysmal. Woeful. Dire. Perplexing. Deficient.
The lack of clear leadership and strategy if ever there was one, was dispiriting and bewildering for anyone watching.

Make no mistake, they didn’t owe each other any votes or support, but they could have made the most of the moment, even for optics sake. The strongest party, the National Unity Platform, could have fielded its own candidate, or at worst, simply abstained from voting – it didn’t.

The older Forum for Democratic Change, needs to wake from the hangover of being upstaged.
In the end, given an opportunity to put up joint fight against a supposed-wifebeater, each, instead, handed him a stick, and then gorged each other, as he used their sticks to deliver a pummeling. He is going to finish you, if you keep at it.

Mr Rukwengye is the founder, Boundless Minds. [email protected]