“Honourable.” If
you describe people or actions as honourable,
you mean that they are good and deserve to
be respected and admired as in, “I believe he was an honourable
man, dedicated to the people and his district”. There is, another way you could
use the word: “The people also felt he did not behave honourably in the
aftermath of the recent municipality parliamentary elections”. That aside, the
term is also used as a title prefix before the names of people who
are members of parliament, ministers and some other officials.
In Uganda, there are people out
there who want to join politics and to become members of parliament. Most of
them do it under the guise of ‘For God and My Country’ yet in reality, they do
it for totally different and selfish reasons. They do it to scheme for a 4x4
ride at almost zero cost. They do it to take advantage of going abroad on
useless fact-finding missions like seeing how garbage is collected or how
street lighting works. They do it to award themselves hefty pay rises, sitting
allowances and of course, the most important scheme of all, finding that
loophole that enables them so skim public funds for personal gain so they can
build a lavish crib to show how ‘successful’ they are.
 |
| Patrick Okumu Ringa |
I think I’ve have been to Nebbi
Municipality. Regardless of my having gone there or not, Nebbi Municipality
sounds far – like it requires one to first get immunised and will take three
days to get there. Apart from Patrick ‘OPP’ Oyulu, the other household name to
have slithered out of the Municipality is, Patrick Okumu Ringa who so research
tells me, was Padyere County MP for ten years until 2006 when he got trounced
by David Ringecan (RIP).
 |
| Patrick 'OPP' Oyulu |
In true political gusto, Okuma-Ringa
was not bound to let that setback get to him that, in several other elections,
he tried and in vain I might add, to get back his Honourable title but still
lost and more recently to Suleiman Hashim in the recent NRM primaries. Again,
that didn’t deter him. Like a true northern warrior, he scraped himself off the
ground, licked his wounds and came back charging – this time as an Independent.
And once the results came through, had our Okumu-Ringa gotten his title back?
Err, embarrassing to say, but, nara (*)!
If sanity had prevailed, our Okumu-Ringa,
would have put his hands up and said: “Once again the people have spoken, and
they obviously do NOT want me to have the Honourable title. Such is their
conviction because I got the least votes out the three candidates that stood.”
And that should have been the
end of the tale and the end of this Sunday drabble, but there is more. Battered,
bruised and dejected, Okumu-Ringa didn’t take defeat lying down. He went home and
after throwing all his toys out of the pram, he had a moment of clarity that
was laced with a scathing anger and venom that psycho sadists like Pol Pot,
Adolf Hitler and Osama Bin Laden could not have thought of in their heydays.
 |
| Osama Bin Laden |
No, he didn’t go on a killing
spree but he looked at everything he had done for his constituents in the ten
years that he was an Honourable, and said: “right, this is it!” Perhaps
frothing at the mouth, he lashed an order to his men to dismantle the ten or so
boreholes he had built in different wards for his constituents! In defence of
his actions, he said: “I am hurt…let them go and look for water elsewhere…”
 |
| A Borehole Similar To This That Was Destroyed |
Now what sort of grown up man stoops
that low into the pit latrine and does that? Well Okumu-Ringa does that perhaps
we should start calling him The Most Un-honourable Patrick Okumu-Ringa?
(*) Nara, a word used by teens
to mean ‘no’.
Pictures: okaygh.com, olumuyiwa.com.ng, bbc.co.uk
No comments:
Post a Comment