By Zacharia Kanyonyozi
Photos: YouTube Screenshots
There is a saying from a line in the poem “To a Mouse,” by Robert Burns, and goes like this: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.”
Which means: No matter how carefully a project is planned, something may still go wrong with it.
Accordingly, #March2Parliament anti-graft protests have been sabotaged. So Kampala is uncharacteristically quiet, with a lull-before-the-storm quality to it.
To bring you up to speed, various groups of Generation Zoomers (Gen Zs) are demonstrating against the corruption that has all but collapsed Parliament and the country, demanding an end to it.
The protesters have presented a smorgasbord of demands, including the resignation of Speaker of Parliament Anita Among and the four backbench commissioners, a reduction in the number of Ugandan MPs, and the resignation of MPs involved in any corruption scandal.
Predictably, parliament was sealed off with security officials permitting access only to lawmakers and other parliamentary staff.
Still, there were several arrests. However, these arrests related more to a storm in a teacup than any reason to storm the Bastille, as it were.
A joint team of the military and police also arrested former Rubaga South MP contestant and activist Habib Buwembo and comedian Samuel Okanya, alias Sammy.
Dictator Museveni and his council of military officers may as well pat each other on the back.
However, gloating would be premature. That’s because change will not be planned, it will be spontaneous.
You see, change in Uganda is like the human anatomy when under siege from disease. White blood cells move through blood and tissue throughout your body, looking for foreign invaders (microbes) such as bacteria, viruses, parasites and fungi. When they find them, they launch an immune attack.
Lymphocytes, a form of white blood cell, target bodily invasions by making antibodies. When lymphocytes identify antigens as not belonging in the body, they produce antibodies against them. This can take a few days, during which time you may feel ill.
This process is instinctual, never contrived.
At the moment Uganda is feeling ill because the Museveni Junta is peopled by miscreants that most Ugandans accurately describe as foreigners (antigens). Yes, they are considered foreigners because no Ugandan in their right senses would sell the country the way Dictator Museveni has sold Uganda.
Carpetbaggers such as Dictator Museveni and his Rwandan court (they are not Banyankore) are wont to behave as he does: a bandit on the run who must take as much as he can before he goes the way of Charles Taylor.
Sadly for him, though, the country’s native and inbuilt defence mechanisms will someday kick in. They might take some time, as in the case with Lymphocytes, but soon people will be left with no option but to rise up and come to the defence of this besieged land.
Remember that the so-called Arab Spring was sparked by the first protests that occurred in Tunisia on 18 December 2010 in Sidi Bouzid, following Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in protest of police corruption and ill treatment.
It was not planned. It just took shape and the world by surprise.
It was instinctual. That’s because there comes a point when misrule rules out all compromise or civility. Consequences just occur.
Parliament today appears like an armed camp, which is strange for such an institution. But this damning state of affairs will not last forever.
God will allow nature to take its course by ‘taking out’ Dictator Museveni; in the same manner He allows our white blood cells to defend us.
Still, we must only look to God in the same fashion the 35th US president John Fitzgerald Kennedy asked his fellow Americans to do: Let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.
