Week of mockery, limelight for Abim Hospital nurses

Abim Hospital senior nursing officer Santina Adong (in red blouse) guides FDC presidential flag bearer Kizza Besigye (C) during a tour of the hospital Hospital last Saturday. PHOTO STEPHEN KAFEERO  

When this newspaper screamed with a headline that President Museveni had in a meeting told party officials he agrees for the first time with FDC presidential flag bearer, Dr Kizza Besigye that Resident District Commissioners are “useless”, the President in a subsequent press conference reminded journalists to take remedial classes in English.

He asserted he was only agreeing with Besigye sarcastically and accused the media of jumping on the word literally. First of all, that in itself was sarcastic because the heavens know this was not the first time Museveni agreed with his former personal doctor.

Besigye opined that graduated tax was a liability, scrapping university government sponsorship was a bad idea, introducing cost sharing in state medical facilities was a disaster and surely Museveni’s government agreed with him and dropped some of the ideas the doctor diagnosed as irrational.
That is why it was sarcastic that the President could claim his first agreement with Besigye was sarcastic.

Ruto visit
Then came another capsule of sarcasm, this one imported from Kenya through the Sebei border. Kenyan deputy president William Ruto addressed a joint press conference with Mr Museveni in Sebei sub-region on Wednesday.

As though stung by a wasp laden with guilt conscience, Ruto said: “My presence here may be construed that I have come to campaign for Museveni. Museveni has been campaigning in Uganda for a very long time. He has sufficient experience and knowledge, I do not think he would require the support of Kenyans to campaign for him.”

Let’s trace the sarcasm here. Mr Ruto only recently featured on the front page of Sunday Monitor for no other reason than meeting losers from the region in the NRM primaries.

That was weeks after he openly ridiculed the Opposition for meeting Raila Odinga. The body language, smiles, speech and timing all colour Ruto’s self-defensive utterances with sarcasm.

Just across, live the Kalenjin community where his own ancestral roots lie. The Kalenjin and Sabiny who populate Sebei share ethnic background. The mathematics of Ruto meeting Sabiny MPs and joining Museveni during his campaigns in the area is as basic as the elementary algebra.
But sarcastically again, rather than boost his confidence levels, the Ruto visit seemed to have drained one layer of self-belief in Mr Museveni.

Quite strange that the President who has always boasted of his victory at one time telling an interviewer it would be witchcraft if Besigye won, declined to estimate his chances.

But this week, the old man with a hat was in the mood of being sarcastic but may be, just may be, he will admit he was only being sarcastic when he said he did not want to speculate.

At this point we have to revert to the owners of the language to define the word sarcasm. Webster dictionary explains: “To use irony to mock or convey contempt.”

Unlike Museveni who admitted he was being sarcastic, we have to decode the sarcasm Mbabazi employed this week when he frowned, wore a face of disillusionment and said, “Today has been my first time to pass through Kasokoso but, oh my God, people are so poor,” at a rally in Kireka, adding: “The houses, the roads everything is in horrible condition.”

Oh dear, the irony of discovering this 30 years later. We hope he won’t, like his erstwhile political soul mate, shortly say he was only being sarcastic.

This week the Go Forward campaign picked momentum with a resounding welcome in Busoga, Lugazi and Kabale; Mbabazi’s articulation seems to be getting on the roll and he seems to have now gotten his world turned on, the world of throwing in the air too good to be true promises such as the headline grabbing one to create one million jobs annually.

Electric trains
But he did not miss his former boss’ bug of sarcasm. At a rally this week, Mbabazi’s speech was disrupted by a train. He stopped and took a jibe at how the machine takes three days on the rails and how his government will bring electric trains whose journey will last three hours. These promises! We shall return to them another day.