Dead in Tears

Cry out loud. Cry for this earth-old soil on which we stand. Drenched with the blood of innocent Ugandans and deeply deprived of rain through the degenerative intent of our leaders who have chosen to cut down trees and replace them with Sugar cane plantations for the Indians to export to Kenya. Our old earth cries and yelps with the pain of barrenness-the proverbial barrenness that the deserts of Africa have borne since the beginning of time. While the sons and daughters of the soil pine away in dire conditions perched on the line between extreme poverty and disease-death looms so ever close. We have been pushed way up the wall that we now get easily wrought up over nothing. We sale our suffrage for a few shillings and a promise of a few more shillings thereafter. Though the colonel has performed at his best and has rekindled hope in the hearts of the dying electorate, our nemesis still casts his malevolent shadow over the light at the end of our tunnel- a gloomy prognoses about our fate at the polls.

Today we buy a Kilo of sugar at Ugx. 4.000, A kilo of beef at 10,000 and our shilling precariously hangs at about 3.440 against the dollar. Steady progress indeed. The price of oil on the world market hit a record low and the pump prices around the plummeted while here in the land of vultures and buzzards, the pump prices still stand at Ugx. 3.550. I’ve heard that the Go Forward flag bearer owns a string of petrol stations. He binges on the extreme profits therefrom. Don’t we all know that the colonel also owns a chain of Petrol stations in Uganda? Is he living a good example by being part of the local OPEC gangs that milk the already malnourished and dehydrated proverbial cow that represents the Ugandan people? Does he have a moral high ground to satanize H.E YKM? But of course that’s what we call peace-the peace for which they fought. That’s the vision we romance and wear yellow t-shirts for as we steadily move forward. We have a tax tag on the filthy water that runs through our taps and the unreliable and erratically crazed power in our meters costs an arm and a leg. They have built us roads with pathetic integrity and only last week, Ssemyalo Ronald lost his life on one of these roads they are so proud to tell the body of voters that say they built. He lost his life in a road accident along Masaka. In his cheap casket at his burial, his face wore a look of one thousand unanswered questions. In his face I saw the plight of his entire family lineage. He gave up his life unwillingly. Thank you for the roads you built. These Chinese you so well trust to do shoddy work have indeed lived up to your expectation. Poor engineering and substandard, ill-marked roads are the death trap of us. We will all end up like Ronald and you will remain in this land with your big, expensive and pompous 4X4 rides.

We turned up in big numbers and voted for you in the last election. We had faith in you and we believed that you still had a vision and the will to move this land forth. We holistically ran down the streets and celebrated your victory. We romanticized your gallantry and sang songs of praise to you as our dry , cracked lips and sweat-drenched faces baked in the hot sun while you were smug in your pavilion and signature round hat. We were never bothered that although we all had an equal claim to this God-given land much as you did, we still stood in the sun while you stayed under the shelter. We walked to come and witness you cross that historical lane while you rode your state-of-the-art car in a convoy of 30 man-made monstrous rides. We loved you more than we loved ourselves because we believed you were the change we needed. We are now way too old and far too spent to clamor for anything nice out of this life. We are past that age and we have lived a life of need and exploitation and poverty and oppression. We can no longer reclaim our youthful dreams but we had hope that our kids would live on to achieve what we failed to achieve. We believed through you, they would have a better future. That you would pass on the torch to them. You lied. You lied to us. You broke our hearts. We bled and you watched our lives drain out of us and soak into the earth old soil on which you fought to deliver us from the claws and clutches of the dictators of our past.

All those promises evaporated right before our eyes when your minions got around to oppress us after your landmark, historical jubilation. The Central bank lending rate went up two, three, four fold. We struggled in our finances and we peacefully demonstrated. Instead we were doused in tear gas and we were beaten. Our bodies were torn and we were weary and hopeless. The prices of house hold goods went through the roof and many more of us sunk six feet below the ground. Then the budgets were read and the taxes went hay wire. You taxed Paraffin, you taxed water-drinking water. Water that the lord gave us freely in abundance-you taxed it. You put a tax on agricultural machinery and my grandparents moaned and turned in their graves-six feet underneath. Both my grandparents died in the hands of the LRA during the twenty years plus civil war that rocked my motherland. Most of my family died horrendous death in northern Uganda and I lost my sight in the process-to live a life of ridicule and impairment in a land that I was raised to embrace as my own homeland. The world watched on while we were plagued for 20 years. They made films of our plight and took pictures that won awards in America and Europe while we starved and died. Ghost soldiers got paid sums of money while we were mutilated and taken into captivity in our own land. May your souls and Kony’s soul roast in hell’s unforgiving flames for the eternity that only the Lord can predict. The vultures and Buzzards flew low and snatched whatever they could. Land, our savings, Our cows, conscripted our young and energetic youth, our property-everything they could take. We took solace in the churches but the buzzards and vultures still found their way in there. We were battered from all dimensions and all we had left were our empty stomachs, diseased children and the troubles and the shirts on our backs. We became refugees in our own land. We were now aliens in our own land. We lived off give-outs and the mercies of our Indian and Chinese masters who paid us peanuts and worked us to the point of death and yet we still breath to date.

We breath and still crawl out of our rat holes everyday because we are resilient. We have lived through the darkest moments our land has seen. We lost everything but We still believe in our leaders. We do not believe for ourselves but for our little ones. For those innocent, pristine little ones who still go to school and study the history of this country in which the same players traverse from the past, into the present and headlong into the future. We will vote and we will vote wisely. Come 18th February 2016, we will vote and our President will emerge as the winner and he will be crowned and sworn in and we will weep. We will weep because we know that nothing will change for the better. We will live on as slaves for the next five years and after then, the same vicious cycle will be repeated. Change isn’t a luxury we can afford. We haven’t sacrificed enough to deserve change so we consume democracy in rationed propositions and we exercise our rights in the darkest hours of our days as though they were contraband. We have sold our souls to aliens. We have nothing left to hold on to. We have nothing to claim, nothing to give. We are dead. We have no future. No, we don’t! That’s our fate. We have accepted it and have made peace with it. Long live the soil from which we were molded, the same to which we shall return. Long live our Land!