That ragged looking crowd you see there,and many others like them,actually employs that Man with a Hat,but NRMs on this forum would be Hard Pressed to believe that!!
You are the sun, you are the moon, you are the eclipse, you are NRM - Comment
On the third day of the eleventh month of this year, several Ugandans including a minister of state paid glowing tribute to the president of the republic and the ruling National Resistance Movement over the eclipse that brought thousands of tourists to the country.
The president himself was designated the "Chief Viewer" of the hybrid eclipse, a title that will only be claimed again one hundred and thirty years later when this rare alignment of terrestrial bodies occurs again. So, obviously, the next chief viewer has not yet been born.
People who know Uganda well are not surprised at such praise being heaped on the NRM; for everything good comes to Uganda courtesy of "the good policies of the NRM, which created the enabling environment by following the correct line of thought."
Even God apparently knew when to programme the eclipse so that it occured when the right government was in office for the country to gain maximum benefits from the terrestrial arrangement. For He loves Uganda that much.
In 1986, the NRM captured state power and many things genuinely changed. Due to the new peace, several Gospel crusaders started coming to the country and slogans like "God Loves Uganda" became common. All this was courtesy of the "peace that was ushered in by the NRM" in 1986.
This peace being brought in by the NRM line was repeated so often that it became a given. You would sound strange if you started questioning it because first of all it was largely true. Second, it rolls off tongues so effortlessly that anything to the contrary would sound somehow not right.
In a way, the NRM has been very lucky. While it has worked hard for some of its achievements, it has taken advantage of its longevity in power to take the credit for many things that have happened in the interim.
Originally, NRM was supposed to relinquish power after four years, that is in 1990. Somehow it didn't and instead gave itself an extension and then became a political party that has been winning elections ever since. So everything that came after 1986 and 1990 is often rightly or wrongly claimed by the NRM.
This includes mobile telephones, the Internet, Universal Primary Education, and the big one — oil. Yes, the oil in Bunyoro was "discovered by the NRM." It is NRM's oil.
Never mind that there were already published documents about oil in Uganda 50 years ago. And a century before that, the Banyoro had even given a place where there was evidence oil a Runyoro name meaning black gold.
It is an uphill task for the NRM's rivals to start convincing the people that anything good in Uganda is not the gift of the NRM.
The "people" are after all NRM people, since 70 per cent were born after the NRM took power. And ours is neither a reading nor a writing society. In fact, the younger people are more averse to the written word. So whatever is not within living memory is of little interest to the "people."
A king who ruled 300 years ago and a president who ruled 29 years ago mean the same — ie, precisely nothing — to the majority of the people. They know NRM, which brought the mobile phones, the English football league, oil and the eclipse.
Joachim Buwembo is a Knight International Fellow for development journalism. E-mail: buwembo@gmail.com
You are the sun, you are the moon, you are the eclipse, you are NRM - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke
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H.OGWAPITI
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"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
---Theodore Roosevelt
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