I understand that suicide is illegal, though that won’t stop me from advising as I should to a jealous lot like you: ‘go and hang on a mustard tree’. Forgive my cold and harsh tone today; I’m so incensed and worked up.
Why won’t you leave our beloved first lady alone? In what clearly appears to be outright jealousy, now it is as though you must take issue with whatever she says or advises! Her good intentions for this lovely country never get to matter in the argument, it is just: ‘how could she say blah blah blah?’ How evil can you get!
You know that, in the first place, it takes a lot of sacrifice for a first lady to accept to be a minister. It is purely for the sake of putting her practical expertise and thorough educational training to serving you that maama accepted that position.
She had the option of staying in State House and ‘eat cake’, but she volunteered to help us – just like she helplessly offered to transform Karamoja into a middle income model district. Didn’t you realise that no sooner had she left that ministry than starvation set in?
Instead of being grateful that our unexplainably magnanimous revolutionary president so loved the country that he offered his dear wife and only son to serve us, you simply start picking on trivia that you spice up with junk reasoning! Same way you keep poking at the First son for his well-deserved supersonic rise and other well-meaning in-laws, cousins, nieces, nephews, uncles, and cousins of nieces in government.
What more do you want to realise how dedicated the extended first family is to the well-being of the nation? Do you notice how biased and nepotistic your minds are? Instead of looking at who is ready to serve where under extreme selflessness, you only think in terms of who is related to who! Your nepotistic mind-sets won’t take this country anywhere.
The other day the first lady explained, just like a caring mother of the nation would, that Government would not be able to fulfil the campaign pledge of giving sanitary pads to rural school children.
There were clearly other priorities to address that everyone should understand. For example, did you expect government to postpone the ‘presidential handshake’ so as to buy pads? Huh? These things only require common sense, but it always dramatically eludes you!
So, you all came up with foamed mouths, like a snake out of a smoked hole, cursing and spitting all sorts of distasteful and disrespectful things. How could you say the first lady did not care, and this rotten Makerere woman, Stella Nyanzi, blaspheming that ‘Janat ain’t my mama’! Good God, what ingratitude has the world come to?
Though we forgive, I actually agree that rotten ungrateful people like that possessed Mskerere don should not be allowed to leave the country. It is in sobering times like these that I come to appreciate the travel bans during the Apartheid era in South Africa.
Why should such people have the right to move? They will pollute other spaces with their venomous banter. Let us see if their Facebook accounts will fly them out. Dr Stella, sit on your Facebook posts and fly to Amsterdam. Or else, simply turn the pads you have collected into a mattress. There you can lie and dream of a country where you can question a first lady anyhow.
I am most especially mad about the latest event when our dear mum, out of immense care and motherly love, advised that if we can’t drive our children to school then we should walk them instead of using unsafe boda bodas.
Just the same way she generously recommended that parents should get food flasks for their children not to starve at school. Only food flasks, which one can buy at about 50,000/! This is money every parent can get! But Jesus, the reaction! Total insensitivity to the person of the mother of the nation!
Do not think that you are the first to read about Marie Antoinette, neither should you delude yourself that you will blackmail government by invoking her name. Mr Ofwono Opondo, please come add emphasis to this point. The first lady can’t be saying that ‘if you can’t afford bread, then eat cake’. Not at all. Rather; ‘if you can’t afford cake, don’t eat bread either’. It is not good for your digestion.
How dare they say that hers was a good message from a wrong person! Must leaders first live miserably like you for you to know that they care about you? Has the world become this discriminative that our selfless leaders who can afford pompous living are no longer allowed to also feel for the poor? Why are poor people becoming so insensitive?
When someone takes their daughter to deliver from Germany, you still sulk. As if that disqualifies that leader from commenting about Mulago hospital. If government did not care, it would be already sold off. But, out of love, they have allowed it to continue operating. Yes, with one of the busiest mortuaries around East Africa. Yet all you can see is how our leaders live their own lives!
Please, and please, let us not adopt this indiscipline from the Western world. That is where all this problem starts from! Learn to respect your leaders. Stop this un-African business of always questioning what they say, as if they are your equals. In Africa, we respect elders, and do not look into their mouths. If you do not heed this simple advice, you leave them with no option but to gag you in good faith.
jsssentongo@gmail.com
The author works with the Center for African Studies at Uganda Martyrs University, Nkozi.
