Roasting In Hell With Mulokole, Pastor and Squeaky Clean

2016 is not getting off to a good start. Over the past four weeks, I have been consumed by morbid thoughts, as well as feelings about death.

I know that I am going to have to die and sometimes, I take the notion in my stride. Other days, I wake up petrified in a cold sweat, that I spend the rest of the day wondering how I am going to exit this world.

I used to be a frequent flyer so dying in a plane crash was my way out. However, I don’t fly much these days. The next obvious exit was in a car crash because of my love for speed. Tirinyi road to Mbale – if not, the road to Fort Portal were the two likely roads that would have taken my life.

But since I gave up speeding, I don’t know what Grim Reaper has in store as a ‘Plan C’, and that gets me all worked up.

One thing about death that I am so certain about is that, I don’t want to go to Heaven. Heaven has been painted as the ‘land of paradise’ where people who have been good on this earth - the Mulokole, Pastor and Squeaky Clean, will sit in the Garden of Eden listening to Angles in their white robes playing the harp, take leisurely strolls and of course, a meet-and-greet and selfie time with Jesus and God – if they do exist.

I am not sure I would be able to take in the boredom of spending my days chatting away with the goodie-two-shoes who made it to Heaven like Mother Theresa, Sister Nirmala, Florence Nightingale, an endless line of Popes, Nelson Mandela et al.

What would we talk about? Mother Theresa is hardly going to tell me koona awoo when I tell her about my wild nights in Club Silk or my pork fests – is she? Nor would I find the work she did with the poor remotely interesting. And the stream of Popes? Apart from asking them if they ever felt like cutting a Sunday mass to watch TV, I would have bleak to say.

Hell on the other hand, holds an obvious attraction. I would be with the bad boys and the list is endless - Genghis Khan, Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Gadaffi...all who died leaving unanswered questions. Can you imagine them sitting round a table debating who unleashed the worst atrocities or telling us what their Plan B escape plan was if they had known Plan A was going to be a gruesome end? I can.

There is, a BUT which, is still at the research stage. Some Muslims claim that if you become a martyr, God rewards you with 72 virgins which, makes it a worthy plot if the rules can be bent for me because – 1. I really don’t want to take the suicide vest and blowing up people route because, recently when a would-be Afghan’s Suicide Bombers vest didn’t go off, when searched, they found his genitals encased in a box built like a safe. When asked why, he said: “I didn’t want to get to Heaven, get my virgins and only to find my ‘thingy’ had been blown up beyond repair”. That calls for an ‘ouch’!  – don’t you think? 2. What if I get there and they are not supermodel virgins but rotund mamas with beards and rotting teeth?

If I do end up in Hell, before I am marinated and thrown onto the bonfire to roast for my sins, I would ask the management of Hell if I could be excused for a week so I can return to Sunday Vision and write my last column. The headline would read: “Uganda’s Top 200 Balokole’s,Pastors and mbu Squeaky Clean Pretenders Who Thought They Would Go To Heaven But Ended Up in Hell!”