“When the friends that saw small-pox go through our homestead … people will be finished because the insides of the people are bad! This will be the gift that the political parties have brought.”

Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino.

Yes, sadly, in Uganda, Okot’s prediction has escalated to the worst point ever. “The breakdown in the traditional African political systems that emphasized unity” is complete or at best vulgarized. How now can we not accept that in Uganda “the adoption of Western political systems” is the cause of “Africa’s problems of poverty, ignorance and disease?”

Simply see how, in Uganda, we are okay with exogenous rules we don’t even understand. Yes, even me, until I read Nicholas Opiyo’s tweet I was bothered by the election of a new Speaker before the late Jacob Oulanyah is burried. But, I was resigned that it was constitutional. Nope, it actually isn’t. The Constitution defines a Speaker as meaning “the Speaker of Parliament, and includes the Deputy Speaker,” as Opiyo has reminded us.

This means that the Deputy Speaker, Right Honourable Anita Annet Among, should have continued to function as Speaker and to preside over the necessary state funeral activities for the late Oulanyah, and in tandem with our African-Uganda cultural norms and practices. But now, in an environment of grief and anger, and seemingly like evil witches, we are dancing over the late Oulanyah’s dead body. And moreover when it is totally unnecessary.

Worse still, this may lay the foundation for another unnecessary constitutional amendment; and moreover that will further dilute the supreme law of our nation-sate. Now that I now better, I am ANGRY! I am angry at the unnecessary huge cost we spend on elections of members of parliament and to sustain such a huge number of MPs, who absolutely don’t understand their role nor the laws of our nation-state.