Photo: YouTube
On Saturday evening last week, loud-mouthed Dr. Chris Baryomunsi, the Ugandan Minister for Information Communication Technology (ICT) and National Guidance was airlifted to Kampala for medical attention after fainting while in his constituency Kinkiizi East in Kanungu district-western Uganda at the border of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
This physician, public health specialist, demographer, and politician before he became the ICT minister, was a minister of health in 2016 and before that, a member of parliament for the same area since nearly 20-years ago. He is one of the people Gen. Yoweri Kaguta Museveni trusts when it comes to clearing the soiled government image.
Someone of sound mind, a right thinking member of the community would think that such a position of power and influence Baryomunsi at whose helm he has been, would influence a hospital construction in his constituency but there is none. The available one in the district is dilapidated and not fit for human admission, Kambuga Hospital, that is why immediately he got admitted in it, feared for his life and arrangements were made for a helicopter to airlift him 500km away to Kampala to the capital where he is currently admitted at the Mulago Heart Institute as he awaits to be flown out of the country to Europe or America for specialized treatment of hypertension.
This man does not only stop at being a member of parliament representing the National Resistance Movement (NRM) criminal government of Yoweri Kaguta Museveni but he also spends enormous amounts of time on different Televisions, Radios and social media defending the undefendable state of human rights in Uganda.
It is a gross dereliction of duty as an influential politician in parliament and cabinet not to ensure that his constituency and district at large do benefit from government programs like infrastructure (Roads and Hospitals) but instead spends time spewing balderdash about how despot Yoweri Kaguta Museveni has for nearly forty years in power, developed Uganda and that he must be continually supported. If what he spews in the media reflects what is in his constituency, anyone would believe him but he seems to be suffering from phantasmagoria.
The ramshackle deathtrap or ‘hospital’ where he was taken after he had fainted, was constructed by Idi Amin in 1970’s whom they branded illiterate and the worst president ever. It is now infested with bats and birds, walls crumbling and no sign of a health facility that fits in this civilization.
There is no tarmac road network in his entire constituency and no government service functions there efficiently. They are only remembered during elections where campaign rallies and ballot boxes and guns reach where services have failed to reach for decades Museveni has been in power.
It is a shame that the minister represents the poor constituents, mostly campesino farmers, who cannot afford basic needs yet the person who represents them is a penchant for opulence, a squealer of the regime who, together with his family, have an apparatus of privileges which none of those he represents, cannot afford. His children are sent abroad to get the best education from the first world countries, get medication from the best hospitals while the people he represents are wretched year in and year out and there is no hope of being extricated from such twin shackles of poverty and poor representation.
This is the same minister lined up together with other chamchas to act as dishonesty mongers in an effort to sanitize the image of the government on international news; for example he will be remembered for deflecting the government’s blame in my torture while speaking on Aljazeera, BBC, France 24 and others when he was asked to comment on the gross human rights violations currently eclipsing news from Uganda.
I hope the people he represents, those who hardly can afford basic needs, have seen how their legislator has no faith in the services he dishonestly sells as the achievement of despot Yoweri Kaguta Museveni.
Lawyer, Award winning Novelist and Scholar of PEN-Zentrum Deutschland.
Whatsap/Signal/Telegram: +447958104814
Books: 1) The Greedy Barbarian.
2) Banana Republic Where Writing Is Treasonous.
3) The Log Cabin.
4) The Savage Avenger
Full profile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakwenza_Rukirabashaija
