Humanist

Channeling my favorite protagonist, Lawino, of the highly acclaimed work of art that is Okot p’Bitek’s “Song of Lawino,” I will continue to reflect on the predictions of our forefathers of how divisive multi-party democracy and exogenous religious sects are for our society.

It will be good for me in strengthening my resolve for civic duty.

For example, I was starting to feel a little bad. Thinking I could have toned down a bit my brutal but accurate fact-check of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Patrick Wakida, which The Observer published and politely titled: “Reflecting on Our Children’s Future.”

In it I wrote:

“Take for example the video clip doing rounds on social media, featuring PhD Wakida delivering his ‘official speech’ on his defection to the ruling party, National Resistance Movement (NRM). PhD Wakida made some jaw-dropping assertions, if contextualized within his attainment of the “highest academic degree awarded by universities.” Among them, his false and irrational assertions that he has attained the “highest education any Ugandan can have.” Education is infinite. It is the “process of acquiring knowledge, skills, and values through learning whether formal or informal. PhD Wakida’s claim to have achieved the highest of an infinite process, education, is both false and irrational. Indeed, within the same speech, PhD Wakida effectively demonstrates the fallacy of his claim of having attained the highest level of knowledge acquisition a Ugandan can have, when he declared that Kibuku district in Bukedi sub-region, from whence he hails, is the “poorest area on earth.” Continue reading here …

Subsequently, as I have listened to politicians, from all sides of the aisle, politicking for the 2026 Uganda elections, I am instead beginning to think I was, in fact, easy on PhD Wakida. The propensity for politicians to fake it in discourse has reached pandemic proportions and dangerously so.

Bear with me please. Case in point, I heard a female politician assert that tools that Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) uses to collect data in conduct of the Uganda National Household Servery are inappropriate and not specific for Uganda. I beg your pardon, what?

In UBOS reports, it clearly explains how UBOS tools are developed, how the data is quantified and its context for interpretation. The tools work specifically for Uganda. That the female politician who was politicking during a radio talk show did not know and was confidently falsely proclaiming otherwise is scary.

Not to be outdone, a male politician at the same discourse chimed in with colonial information about Karamoja sub-region as to why it is consistently categorized the poorest region in the country. I wondered, when was the last time the male politician was in Karamoja, if at all he has ever been there!

But confidently, the male politician contributed to the discussion, speaking from a point of ignorance. He is not from the Karamoja region and the show host and moderator had asked the discussants to speak about the poverty in the constituencies that they each represent.

The non-Karimojong politician’s submission on Karamoja sounded like it was read straight out of a journal of a ‘colonial explorer’ of centuries ago. He boldly ignorantly insinuated Karamoja is poor because its people, Ugandans, are backward. His factoid examples of their backwardness included “they eat blood.”

Fact-check. Eating blood isn’t only a Karamojong thing. Examples of cuisines from around the world in which blood is food:

• Maasai people eat cow’s blood mixed with milk.
• Chinese communities eat fried blood tofu.
• Filipino groups eat dinuguan stew
• European nations eat various blood sausages like Spanish morcilla or French boudin noir
• Indonesian communities eat blood sausages like Balinese urutan

Source AI Overview from Google search results.

It is befuddling how politicians who purposely lament, blaming the other for their incompetence, are celebrated and get away with it.  To the extent they do not realize that it is their responsibility to offer manifestos on how to deal with injustices of constructive dispossession, for example.

Karamoja, case in point, is among the highly resourced regions, in terms of minerals and share of the tourist industry – National Parks, which bring in significant resources to the national coffers. How then are they the poorest with a greater percentage of their people living below the poverty line?

These are the questions people’s representatives need be asking on the floor of Parliament and insisting on getting answers, the basis on which they need submit their legislative contributions.

Like Lawino I will continue to lament “over the strange ways of university-educated, whose new ways are incompatible with traditional African concepts of manhood.” Faking it in discourse and using public fora to purposelessly lament!

Woweee!