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I will not repeat what Nyanzi said, I will not repeat what Nyanz....

Friday April 28 2017

And so after three decades in power, President Yoweri Museveni has acquired a new nickname, courtesy of a young academic and political activist. I shall not repeat it here.

Those who follow the goings-on in Uganda already know what it is. Even if it were a secret, though, I would not repeat it.

Not that I fear the police may pick me up; many have repeated it and got away with it. The reason I couldn’t possibly repeat it is because where social values are concerned, I gravitate towards the conservative end of the spectrum.

It is not as if I am averse to employing the odd, well-aimed insult. However, there are things that were drummed into my head while I was still young, of which even in middle age, I am not about to let go.

One was self-restraint where people old enough to be my parents were concerned. Even when they irritate or annoy me or even make me really mad, there are things I will not say to or about them. Also, there are things that I couldn’t say to or call anyone.

And should I hear anyone say them to someone, I’ll find it shocking. That’s the way I felt when I heard about and eventually read what my former colleague Dr Stella Nyanzi wrote about President Yoweri Museveni and his wife Janet.

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In particular, her vivid imagination of parts of one’s anatomy and her choice of the part of the human body she thinks the other is like, were, well, gross. It was equally striking listening to the applause she received, including from some very unlikely sections of society.

But then again many things in Uganda tend to be dragged into the highly polarising political contestation between the government and its opponents.

Currently, people’s views regarding anything tend to reflect which side of the political divide they inhabit. Somehow, we are no longer willing to acknowledge the good things those on “the other side” do, let alone object to the conduct of our allies, however unconscionable it may be.

Uganda’s highly antagonistic politics has pushed many to extremes they are unwilling to recognise or acknowledge. Which is why some people have found it fitting to applaud Nyanzi’s over-the-top attacks against President Museveni and his wife, for which she has predictably been arrested and charged.

I spent over a year working at the same research institute as Nyanzi. During that time we got on well and often found ourselves on the same side in a number of internal contests.

I liked her take-no-prisoners approach and found her outspokenness refreshing. I left early after the place became unpleasant to work in. She chose to stay and fight on. She was not going to “run away,” like others and I were doing, she said. And then she took on the institute’s leadership in a head-on collision. Until then, I had not heard her use heavily sexual language or utter obscenities.

I was therefore taken aback when she did. I regretted that it distracted from the issues she was putting across.

In my opinion, she lost that particular battle only because the people asked to investigate the matter chose not to dig deep. This time round, the drama has not eclipsed the issues.

That said, two questions have not been asked at all or loudly enough. One is whether the issue of the government not including money for sanitary pads for poor school girls in its budget could have been raised and debated without the noise generated by her use of obscene language and her attacks against the First Lady and Minister of Education.

The other is whether for saying publicly that her ministry could not buy the pads because there was no money, Janet deserved the insults she got.
Certainly Nyanzi could have chosen a different approach, possibly alongside others who feel as strongly as she does about the matter. Uganda’s advocacy industry is hardly small. Its members are not averse to nailing their colours to the mast over causes that promise much-prized visibility. As an activist for the rights of homosexuals she knows that well enough.

Also, the Ministry of Education is not the only ministry to have been allocated far less money than it asked for from the national Treasury. The reasons why ministries get less money than they need to execute their mandates effectively are diverse and complex. They include factors driving prioritisation in any given financial year, and weaknesses or failures in internal revenue mobilisation.

It is difficult to know from why in a certain ministry, a certain item won’t be funded.

It is equally difficult to know what conversations the concerned minister and his or her officials engage in with the Treasury as a result. It means that whether Janet deserved personal abuse for revealing that there was no money for sanitary pads is debatable.

The last time I looked, because of budgetary constraints, the police were sometimes unable to investigate conclusively cases of sexual abuse, including where the victims are children. Would insulting the Minister of Internal Affairs change anything?

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]

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