When Knowledge Matters

All is not well at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Media reports have it that High Commissioner and Ambassador are worried about their futures because contracts have expired with no sign of them being renewed. Others live in dilapidated missions, while some wait for Appointing Authority’s signature.

Foreign Affairs say Ministry of Finance has not released money and Appointing Authority has not had the time to sign appointment letters. The appointing authority is President Museveni. But I obviously know better. It has nothing to do with money or a signature, but global social norms.

Chew on this.

In the UK, the Foreign Office in a review of its diplomats came to the conclusion that they have to undergo a stint at The Diplomatic Academy before taking up a posting. The academy will train them throughout their careers from foundation to expert level because “the world is too complex for individuals to grasp without help and where it was once a matter of elites talking to elites, now it’s about having to operate in many different registers in public, private, on TV and on social media.”

Here and during the Idi Amin era, before our athletes went abroad to compete, they went to camp to learn the ways of the host country – ‘the-what-to-dos’ and ‘the-what-not-to-dos.’ Today those camps don’t exist.

When we go abroad – athletes, diplomats and all, we simply hop onto Emirates but, we have little knowledge of the social cultures and norms of the countries we are going to because we figure as long we can read, write and speak a language that sounds like English, we have the knowledge.

I have never been to Finland and neither had our ambassador – until he got the posting. Until he got there, I bet he had no idea that Finns don’t like being hugged or kissed; that two or three minute conversations are common and should not be interrupted? Did Johnson Agara, our ambassador in Istanbul, know the Turks get deeply offended if the sole of your shoe faces them before he went there? I doubt. And neither did our ambassador in Malaysia know that insisting on eye contact and saying: “Hello, I’m Galabuzi” (or Nampeera), is not the done thing.

While M7 has not told me why he’s is not signing any foreign appointments, am sure he won’t do so until he has the right calibre person to send. He simply can’t pluck people out of the depths of a Mawokota, Kamuli, Kamwenge or whatever village and post them to Azerbaijan, Montenegro or the UAE, for who knows what diplomatic storm they might whip up when they do the wrong thing.

Fifty years ago we lived in a monoculture and all that concerned us was that corner of Uganda that we lived in. Today we are surrounded by other cultures and increasingly, we travel and do business abroad. But wouldn’t we be more successful if we were able to understand how the different cultures and societies operate?

If Foreign Affairs also open up a diplomatic school, they might as well open it for all of us. Knowledge you see, would have helped that man who sat next to me on a 12-hour KQ flight to Thailand. While I ate and quaffed enough Carlsberg’s, he looked on with envy - his throat all dry and a stomach that rumbled in hunger. When the trolley passed, he’d bark at Stewardess: “I don’t want!”

Ten minutes to landing he whispers: “Eh, are you not worried about your bill - you have been drinking since we left Entebbe?” Seeing I had the knowledge, with a smirk I told him: “Bill? All drinks and food are part of the cost of your ticket.” With that, his stomach rumbled even louder as I cracked open another Carlsberg.


   

When Life Is All About Being Idle

TB: “Yo Dude, you good, you paying, what you up to?”

Dude: “Ah bleak TB, just passing time.”

The conversation with Dude was to the point and lasted a mere three minutes. What I found interesting was the notion of him “just passing time.” Passing time is a saying – if it can indeed be termed a saying that I have heard of, but really don’t know what it means.

Is it a Ugandan invention and something that we own the exclusive worldwide rights to? If we do own the rights, where are they kept? My guess would be in the vaults at Uganda National Bureau of Standards. So I placed a call to them.

“You want to know if we keep the rights to just passing time” so Lady on the other end of the phone shot back. 

“Yep, I want to know if Uganda invented them and if we did, do we own the copyright.” The line went dead shortly after. I called back but as soon as Lady heard my voice, she hung up.

I tried Google and he too was not forthcoming but one person who ought to know would be 18-year-old Nephew and this is what he had to say. “But uncle, you must know. It’s passing time, like I can wake up and decide to spend the morning passing time.” I was not with him and sought further clarification.

“Okay, sometimes I don’t have anything to do so I go into town and pass time. You know how it is these days, don’t you?” We obviously weren’t playing the same chess game but after more probing I came to understand that it had something to do with being idle.

In Uganda, it’s seemingly no big deal if one is idle. In western Uganda for example, Munyankole Man passes time by squatting at the roadside to watch speeding Gagga buses en route to Kigali. In Kampala, Muganda Man passes time by tugging at his crotch as he watches cars being clamped. In Gulu, Acholi Man is still fascinated at the way his Casio ‘disco watch’ flickers, with the Langi’s absorbed in trying to work out how many different ways they can rotate a tooth pick inside their mouths while we Basoga, stare intently at our toes waiting for the next jigger to hatch.

Passing time so I later found out is not exclusive to Uganda. The British also pass time and they do it by writing letters to a granny called Deidre. Deidre then passes her time by answering and plastering their letters in The Sun newspaper so other people can read her response as they pass time waiting in reception to see Doctor. Check out Robert.

"Dear Deidre, I have always wanted to be a woman. I feel I was born in the wrong body and had hoped the feeling would go away, but it just gets stronger. I am 26 as is my girlfriend. We cohabit but she is talking about having kids and I feel it would be unfair to bring them into a relationship knowing I want a sex change. I don’t know what to tell her.”  

Robert.     

Robert really has the time to pass to be writing silly letters to Deidre and I can understand why she would respond to him and the rest who write in. She’s a granny and if grannies are left to pass time, they end up senile and perhaps that is why The Sun gives her two full pages a week.

That said, I really hope that kesho when I wake up I have something to do, for if I were to spend the day passing time, what would I do? Would I write to Deidre and tell her how I’m off to Mbarara to meet Munyankole Man so we squat by the roadside while tugging at our crotches as we count the Gagga buses speeding by?

Will Getting Rid of Pork In Books Appease IS, Al Shabab and Boko Haram?

The world is in disarray and part of the problem has to do with religion. Here, Muslim Cleric is being assassinated. In Nigeria, Boko Haram is on the rampage – abducting school children and killing innocent civilians. Syria and Iraq have IS who want to behead anybody they come across for a dime while Al Shabab contend themselves with sending Suicide Bomber into neighbouring Kenya.

With all this insecurity, we look to the powers that be - Ban Ki Moon at the UN, Barack Obama and his Secretary of State, John Kerry, the UK’s David Cameron and more importantly, our own Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa, who holds the chair at the UN Security Council to sort out the mess.

While Kerry and Moon rake up frequent flyer air miles shuttling in and out of the worlds trouble spots in the luxury of their private jets, they do little except utter two words they both have in common. “We denounce....” They denounce what’s been happening in Syria, Iraq, Paris and Kenya and leave it at that – words that do not solve the problem.

Enter Oxford University Press (OUP). OUP is a printing press and they print books. In fact, OUPs only contribution to the greater good of mankind had been to publish its bestselling reference book – The Oxford English Dictionary, plus the Oxford Annotated Bible and a number of kiddies books which, have made their way into classrooms all over the world including Uganda. And I guess we have to thank them for that.

With their successes in the literally world, the folk at OUP now figure they can make a contribution to solving some of the world’s problems – especially those that offend the Muslim world.

Their solution is so simple, it will have Moon, Obama, Kerry, Cameron and Kutesa kicking themselves and saying: “Eh WTF! How come we didn’t think of that? The solution has all along been right under our noses!”   

Three weeks ago, OUP banned “pigs, sausages or anything else which could be perceived as pork...” from its books because it would “avoid offending Muslims.” Now you see why Moon, Obama and the rest will be kicking themselves?

However, and this is where I roll out the upper cased BUT. I am no expert on foreign policy and neither is Pork Roaster at CHOGM in Bunga or those in Ntinda, Wandegeya and Luzira but jeez, I really don’t see Boko Haram, IS, Al Queada and Al Shabab saying: “OUP nailed it! Getting rid of pigs from their publications has over night solved the 200-year-old feud we have been having with the Christians.”

Also Muslim Friend has never indicated to me that he won’t buy a book because it has a picture of a pig nor has he demonstrated or thrown stones at pork joints that are close to mosques as they are in Ntinda and Wandegeya and I have not seen him or his kids hiding under tables or throwing up when a pig has idly wandered past. Khalid Mahmood, a British MP and who is Muslim criticised OUP saying: “That’s ludicrous. That’s absolute, utter nonsense and when people go too far that actually brings the whole discussion into disrepute.” Hear, hear. 

Seeing OUP has made a non-issue a big deal, what will IS, Al Queada and Al Shabab do when they see Book Hawker selling innocent children’s books that contain the words “pig and sausage.” Will he become a marked man?

That said, I am not taking any chances and I have taken the precaution of tossing my OUP printed bible onto the sigiri because there is mention of pork – Isaiah 66:17, along with the kids ‘piggy bank’ and will scatter the ashes in Lake Vic to get rid of the evidence just in case Suicide Bomber decides to drop in. Better safe than sorry.

When Women Throw Parties For Their Ovaries

Some men argue that women in their quest for liberation are taking matters a trifle too far. I am not one of them so I think. However in Saudi Arabia, Imam is up in arms because some women want to drive cars, a practice which for women is illegal in the kingdom while in Iran, Imam insists that if women are to play football, they must still wear the hajib.

In Pakistan, Cleric will behead his daughter for having a boyfriend while in Afghanistan, Taleban is disgustingly appalled that some families allow their daughters to go to school - an act they deem heinous and punishable by death.

In Uganda 2015, I think women do as they please, though it’s still a crime for them to talk about their vaginas in a monologue and in some cultures, eat the chicken gizzard.

Despite that, women still march forward. They started off with household parties - swapping kitchenware, then on to lingerie parties where they bought the skimpiest of underwear from women who had travelled abroad and brought back the latest offerings from Ann Summers.

They didn’t stop there. In came the sex toy parties where women who we (men) thought were prudish and shy like the ones who work for Sunday Vision, NSSF, Centenary Rural Bank and Sanyu Babies Home snapped up the toys to...hmmm, let’s leave it there shall we, followed by Senga and her explicit ‘how-to-pull’ parties.

With women blazing up the corporate ladder and holding down top jobs, they find themselves in a dilemma of having to juggle family aspirations against career ambitions.

Yesteryear they would have given up on a career due to the dictations of a ticking biological clock but, not anymore because an exit clause now gets them round that hiccup – ovum or egg freezing, and what’s more, is that they are doing it in style.

Abroad, women are not just going to see the doctor for a private consultation and leaving it at that, but throwing egg freezing parties. These parties have many of the same components as an Ann Summers lingerie party or Senga party – music, shrieks of laughter, wine, beer, nibbles and all set up in somebody’s home.

What women are forking out for after agreeing to attend one of these parties is not a new airtight container from the supermarket, but oocyte cryopreservation – otherwise known as a possible extension to the fertility sell-by-date: a batch of frozen eggs. One doctor throwing such parties in London is fertility expert, Dr. Aimee Eyvazzadeh whose patients call, “the egg whisperer” and whose attendees to her parties get a 10 per cent discount off the 

cost of egg freezing.

So why throw a party? Dr. Eyvazzadeh says: “The parties are meant to empower women to learn about their fertility, so they know what options they need to consider in the future.”

Egg freezing works with women having to inject themselves with hormones for 10 days before the eggs are harvested and it’s not cheap with London clinics charging £5,000 (sh21,500,000), plus an annual storage charge of £250 (sh1,075,000) and £6,000 (sh25,800,000) for the eggs to be re-implanted.

While egg freezing parties give women an opportunity to fulfil their careers and still have children, Taleban, Cleric, ISIS and Imam – basically men in general, don’t have sperm harvesting parties – probably because we are embarrassed about having to reveal how our sperms are harvested.

Plus from the depths of Mattuga, Muganda Man would flip and descend on Bulange while throwing stones and making noise for Katikkiro because his all important sexual machismo is being stripped away by an unjust wife who has refused to settle for menial jobs like being a receptionist or a secretary but, jeez, she wants to be a CEO and sit at the helm of the boardroom table!    

Be A Slob, Get Cancer and Die With A Bottle of Black Label and A Marajuana Joint

Slob. The Oxford English dictionary, defines slob as: “An offensive term that deliberately insults somebody regarded as having an unhealthy lifestyle or poor standards of hygiene or manners.”

Hmm, but the Oxford English dictionary got it wrong. They lied. If you ask men what the correct definition is, they would say: “A man who spends all day Saturday and Sunday lazing about on the couch in a torn T-shirt and tattered boxers while nursing a hangover, scratching away at his scrotum, passing wind and drinking beer in an attempt to cure the hangover while watching Premiership football on DStv with a group of equally hung-over slob friends as Wifey or Girlfie slaves away in the kitchen making pork ribs and gizzards for them while she juggles changing Toy-ee’s diaper and running down to the shops to get more beer for the slobs.”

I agree with that definition and there is no harm in being a slob because it is expected of men and it is something that men subscribe to. Tell Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson or our very own Sanyu FM presenter, James ‘Fat Boy’ Onen that they are slobs, and they won’t be offended. They would wholeheartedly agree with you.

Women don’t like us men being slobs for health reasons like getting cancer. But they need not worry anymore because Professor Bert Vogelstein from John Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, USA tells us in a paper he presented early this year that, “getting cancer is down to sheer bad luck of acquiring a mutation in a cancer driven gene regardless of lifestyle and hereditary factors.”  

So there it is and from a professor – his key words being ‘regardless of lifestyle’. What Vogelstein is telling us is that yes, we are allowed to be slobs. We are allowed to smoke. We are allowed to eat our fill of red meat and fatty foods. We can drink more beer than our bodies can handle and that with all those excesses, if we get cancer, it’s purely bad luck – much I guess like crossing the road at a zebra crossing and a man pushing the wheel barrow knocks you over dead rather than a car.

What’s more, it’s also cool to die from cancer. Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, which is as respected in the medical field as Vogue Magazine is in the fashion industry lamented when he added to the debate by saying, “if you are going to die, it’s best to die from cancer because the long slow death from dementia may be the most awful as you are slowly erased. Death from organ failure – respiratory, cardiac, or kidney – will have you far too much in hospital and in the hands of doctors. Death from cancer is the best...you can say goodbye, reflect on life, leave last messages and it’s a nice romantic way of dying – all achievable with love, morphine and whiskey.”

Might I be justified in repeating Smith’s last sentence for the benefit of Slob who missed it first the time round and for Wifeys, Mums and Girlfies who now want to shoot me for encouraging their men to become slobs and for glorifying cancer?

I am? Cool. Smith said when man departs the world arena, he needs some morphine and I guess if that’s not available, a joint from a pub in Kabalagala would suffice plus some whiskey. Smith does not however, tell us which brand of whiskey is the best to depart the world with but, I am sure somebody at Kampala Wines and Spirits will be kind enough to advise us.

Would they recommend a Johnnie Walker black perhaps? It’s a tight call, but I am going to opt to die out with a Jack Daniels and a couple of Tusker Malt beers and I guess some pork ribs from Wandegeya.  

Craving For Ridicule and Perversion on Reality TV

Television has evolved with producers and concept managers thinking up new shows by the minute that, by the time you finish reading this column, producers in TV land would have come up with 50 or more ideas for new shows.

In the Amin era and through to the Okello reign, we had no TV. Tell a lie, we did, one station – UTV who only aired freebie documentaries that President Kim Jong-un’s father and grandfather sent them from North Korea. If not, we got to see Cultural Revolution documentaries from China or Stalinist propaganda films from Russia. With one TV station, there was no need for the remote control – not that televisions sold in Uganda then, came with remote controls.

Today, we need the remote control because we have choice. There are multitudes of television stations that competition for viewership and advertising is stiff. We need the remote so we can flick from channel to channel at our whim and watch something else when adverts are being broadcast.

Currently the fad on television is for reality shows, if not, chat and competition shows. But it’s the reality shows where TV Producer is pushing the envelope to the limit and I’m not talking about shows we have seen in Uganda like Big Brother, Tusker Project Fame or American Idol.

In England, Channel 4 Television has a reality show about people who are bigger than me. No, that’s not quite right. It’s about overweight people. No wait a minute, it’s about fat people. Hmm, that too is not accurate. It’s about people who are beyond obese, so obese that they can’t get out of their beds and so obese they can’t even bend down and see their toes. Yikes!

But if I was as obese as 32-year-old David who has not left his bed in six years, why would I want to be on reality TV? If anything, the show was not entertaining especially when they showed him rolling up layers of fatty flesh on his belly to pick at maggots that were eating into him. But that is what is expected of reality TV.

There is also a show about couples who are unhappy with their sex lives. Aired after midnight, it shows Couple having sex while Sex Therapist watches the performance. Once the sex is done, Sex Therapist (one male, one female) evaluate them on their performance as well as giving them advice on where their grunts, groans, style and technique went wrong. But why agree to be filmed having sex on television? Err, because the reality television audience demands it so.

Another show aptly titled: Size Does Matter is a classic and there is no need to guess what it’s all about – or is there? There are men out there – who were all white I might add, and who are not happy with their size ‘down there’ and feel the need to appear on reality television to tell the world about it as well as allowing the cameras to film them as doctors perform penis enlargement surgery. We see Tom, a banker, lying on the operating table while doctors slice his penis open and insert something almost similar to silicone breast implants. Hmm! 

For the time being, here in Uganda, reality television is limited to music – TPF, Coke Reality and Big Brother. However, with the pressures of an ever increasing demanding audience of the likes of Doc, Nodin, Kayos, Willo Paulo and me that is baying for more cut throat reality television, producers at Urban, Bukedde and other television stations will no doubt come up with Ugandan versions of the shows I have talked about to satisfy our lust, maintain audience figures and bring in advertising revenue.

When television stations start showing us Virgin Bride of Mamba clan from the depths of Matugga having sex on her wedding night while Senga makes notes and talks us though her performance - telling us where she’s going wrong or what she should be doing, and what she is not pulling, don’t say I didn’t warn you because that’s what reality television is going to give you – just like it did when it made us rush home to see if Gaetano and the other housemates would show us everything in Big Brother’s shower hour and once it was over, we hit the remote looking for something more lurid to watch and satisfy our perverted craving.  

The Teenage Social Disorder Meltdown

Like most teen kids in the 80s, there were many times when I took leave of my senses like as a 14-year old, I borrowed (my wording) or stole (Dads wording) Range Rover for a drive round the neighbourhood and crashed it through a wall. The Range was promptly written off.

While 80s Dad was consumed with wondering if Teen Son was stealing his ride, rifling through his pockets looking for 10k to go buy Kasese or trying to score with Nanny, 80s Mum on the other hand, was worrying about Teen Daughter – if she is still a virgin and hoping she doesn’t get pregnant.

80s Teen Kid was not allowed out of the house after dark, or to go clubbing or to a house party or to Alliance Françoise at National Theatre for the day. Meanwhile today’s teen kids skate on the edge. They go out at night, smoke, drink and fondle Teen Girl behind Nakumatt Oasis. They go home in the morning and through the front door like they own the house! 80s Teen Kid on the other hand, had to wait till the dead of the night to breakout of home through the bathroom window, slither over the boundary wall like a thief and the following morning get back in the same way and before the house woke up.

For UK Teen Boy, parenting is a trick. Years ago and when I moved into a flat in South London, I heard my neighbours barely teen boy shout at his mum and telling her: “Your fu***ng full of s**t! In our day not even the hardest kid could ever use those words on our parents because it was asking for a Tsunami of beatings.

If not, UK Teen Boy was breaking into Neighbours house and stealing the DVD player to fund a drug habit or going to the next estate to steal a ride to take the police on high speed chase down the motorway. If he is not doing all that, then he was sitting outside a shop in the middle of town with his shirt off, getting blazed, peeing in the open and fighting and hurling abuse at passersby. In the meantime, UK Teen Girl has ‘put out’, gotten herself pregnant, dropped out of school and has no future ahead of her.

Here, however angry our parents were with us, they never used the ‘F’ or ‘C’ word. Their swears were limited to ‘mbuzi.’ And perhaps a ‘tumbavu’ followed by the Tsunami beating with a bamboo rod that most dads kept under their beds.  We also didn’t go breaking into Neighbours house for his VCR. We didn’t leave our homes in Bukoto and go to Mbuya to steal cars for a high speed chase with police down Jinja Road. And never would you find Ugandan Teen Son sitting outside Uganda Bookshop with bottles of beer at lunchtime and getting blazed, throwing up and peeing against the wall of Christ The King Church while insulting passersby and fighting the cops trying to arrest him. And a pregnant Teen Daughter?! 

Hell, Ugandan Parent won’t hear of that for the whispers of shame would ripple through the neighbourhoods of Bugos, Muyenga, Mutungo and beyond faster than it would take Usain Bolt to react to the starters gun.

Like the UK, Uganda does have moral social behaviour problems. While in 2014 the British Metropolitan Police spent a staggering 12 billion British pounds combating the problem, in Uganda, the police do not have that kind of money and even if they did, they are unlikely to go spending it on some hapless teenagers who have lost the plot especially when then have ‘adult teens’ like Lukwago and Besigye and now a possible Tinye to contend with.