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Turn in your rifles, you old men and womanisers, or risk society’s wrath

Thursday March 23 2017
buwembo

Turn in your rifles, you old men and womanisers, or risk society’s wrath. ILLUSTRATION| JOHN NYAGA

A couple of weeks ago, a local musician who isn’t exactly the most famous in the land, staged a song-launch concert in Kampala for his new hit that implores men to return their “rifles” to the sub-county headquarters locally known as gombolola.

Chances are that you don’t know Kazibwe Kapo because he is not in the league of heavyweights like Jose Chameleone. But his concert was easily Kampala’s best-attended in a long time.

Kapo whipped up public interest in his concert by first posing with what appeared to be very real gun for the concert posters, prompting police to call him in and grill him about the weapon. That was enough to rouse interest and the tickets sold out. But the suggestive song is not about the firearms; it is about advising men to stop womanising. The ecstatic audience showered the musician with enough cash for him to retire comfortably. Married women like the song while the “other” women hate it with equal passion.

So why is returning of firearms to the authorities so important at this particular time of Uganda’s history? 

Now the gombolola or sub-county is a key local government administrative unit, and the term has of late become the password for Kampala’s cynics, thanks to Kapo’s song. So important is the gombolola that until the late 1960s, a gombolola headquarters had an armoury for licensed civilian firearms and it monitored their use. If doubts were raised about your integrity or competence, you were required to return your rifle to the sub-county armoury.

Seemingly unrelated until examined analytically is the fact that Uganda’s formal employment sector is currently preoccupied with retirement. Since President Yoweri Museveni took power in 1986 and restored general stability, virtually all the people who joined the country’s workforce at the time have attained the official retirement age of 55. (Subtract 31 from 55 and anybody who was 24 or older in 1986 must be retired from the civil service. And of course there is no shortage of impatient persons reminding them at the workplace that it is time they turned in their rifles at the gombolola.) So it is no accident that NSSF and other retirement related bodies are in the public focus. It is time to return the rifle for many.

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But there are special categories who may not be allowed or compelled to return their rifles to the armoury at the clocking of 55. Judges for example have to wait until 70, while some senior military officers also can’t just return the guns – literally – to the armoury.

When the maverick General David Sejjusa recently tried for the nth time to leave the army, via a court case, he was informed that the army has the responsibility to first prepare him for “release” into the public.

Even the president too is supposed to return his rifle latest at age 80, because he cannot sign it out – seeking election – if he has clocked 75 and his licence (presidential term) is only valid for five years. Yoweri Museveni signed out his rifle last year at 72, so he will return it at 77 in 2021, unless a constitutional amendment is done to let him keep it for an extra three years so he reaches the maximum 80 years of age that the framers of the constitution envisaged as the latest someone should be president.

Joachim Buwembo is a social and political commentator based in Kampala. E-mail: [email protected]

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