“In Uganda today, the absence of discipline and dedication to the common good hampers the potential for meaningful change.”

Grandpa Dissecting Uganda today

One of my favourite vacation get-aways is when I go visiting my grandma’s roots in Bulemeezi. I always return wiser after night- on-end chats with my grandpas and grandmas. And so it was this last weekend, only that this time I came back perturbed. The family patriarch, (we call him Jjajja Muwanvu), now in his late nineties, glued my eyes, ears and brain to a philosophical discourse that shook my faith in the destiny of this country.

It all began with a casual reference to the bush war which redefined this family’s fortunes almost irreversibly. An uncle, who was a teenager during the bush war, triggered it all when he wondered what exactly made these guys undertake such a successful revolution. Pensantly, Jjajja Muwanvu took two sips on his gama of steaming coffee and opened his wisdom taps. According to Grandpa’s theory, the fate of Uganda is in the hands of the three classes that make our society today. He uses strange terms for each of these classes, but a second reflection vindicates his terminology.

Antoinette Comfort class
At the pinnacle of Uganda today, Jjajja Muwanvu places what he calls the Antoinette Comfort class. The name says it all, he argues, thus no further explanation, besides the fact that this class desires nothing but perpetuity of its condition and status, …‘per omnia saecula saeculorum’…, he adds, in a crackling opera-style baritone, nostalgic of those days when the Catholic Church liturgy was exclusively in Latin.

Impotent Rage
In second place comes the class that goes by the unflattering tag of Impotent Rage. The peculiar nomenclature stems from the behaviour and actions of this class. This is a class that is educated, well informed, with strong analytical skills, travelled, exposed, and with a bigger numeric strength than the Antoinette Comfort class at the top. It has made razor dissections, debates and analyses of Uganda today. But it all ends there. Grandpa argues that because this class has elements of the Antoinette Comfort class, it cannot but rant, rant and rant… nothing beyond, thus its name.

Its desires and aspirations as a class is to graduate to the class above it while playing cautious not to drop below itself, that is, to forfeit, let alone loose, the elements of the upper class that it already has. And this is its Achilles heel.

The class above, par contre, has so firewalled itself against all forms of assaults, that the efforts of this hankering class from below only turn into impotent rage.

Unconscious Incompetence
At the base of the Uganda Pyramid, Grandpa’s classification has the class of Unconscious Incompetence. He defines this as a situation when one does not know what he does not know. And because of this characteristic, this class remains at the mercy of the two classes above, pulled to either as the situation demands.

The success of revolutions, he argues, happens when the Impotent Rage class garners courage enough to tame its physiological appetite, shed its Antoinette Comfort elements and hankering, rendering its rage potent.

This potence pierces holes into the balloon cloud enveloping the Unconscious Incompetence class. With the cloud evaporated, this class acquires conscious competence that translates its numerical might into the crucial determinant in all forms of revolutions, by whatever means appropriate to the times…!!

Grandpa says that in Communist doctrine, this is called Discipline: fidelity to ideology, cause and the common good. And, in Uganda today, concludes Grandpa, this seems not the case…!
The reason I didn’t enjoy my get-away this time round!!!

Ben Kahunga Matsiko

Email: isherugaba@gmail.com

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