By JOACHIM BUWEMBO

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These Kenyans! The other day they deported a jesus (note the small ‘j’ so you can’t accuse me of blasphemy). Anytime now Ugandans will deport a satan. Me (speaking like them), I will not intercede for the Kenyans when the dad of jesus punishes them for humiliating His son.

The reason I won’t pray for the Kenyans is because I suspect they want to upstage us. They knew we were about to scoop top prize for weirdness. So as we were scoring our big one, they chose to deport their jesus and they stole our limelight.

'SATANIC PROPOSALS'

So the world hardly got to discuss our battle with satan on that last day of July 2019. Barely a week earlier, Uganda’s Attorney General had tabled before parliament a Bill with a set of amendments to the electoral process. Hardly had he left the floor than the country almost caught fire, with both mainstream and social media saying he had made some satanic proposals.

These allegedly included barring political camps from making associations in campaign strategy for elections and basically crippling independent politicians. There was also a claim that members of the armed forces in the country would vote a week before the election date.

For a week, politicians, human-rights activists and commentators talked about nothing else but the satanic clauses. The Democratic Party said the Attorney General had suffered a brain transplant. A top social researcher said he was acting like a primary school dropout. And then the government also expressed shock at the satanic clauses, because they were not there in the first place.

The Attorney General swore almost on a stack of bibles that he knew nothing of the alleged clauses. The government challenged anybody to show them the clauses. And indeed nobody could see the clauses. So who else could have sent the whole country screaming about something that did not exist? Only a satan. And unless our security forces let us down, they should identify and apprehend the source of the non-existent clauses and deport him back to Hell to stay with his king Lucifer.

BIZARRE ELECTORAL PRACTICES

Now why do I accuse Kenyans of trying to upstage us? You see, Kenya so far holds the trophy for electoral bizarrerie. Remember an electoral commission boss who expressed shock that anybody could suggest that he resign after messing up the elections? Or the elections boss who said he did not know who had won, letting Kenyans descend on one another’s throats until their sitting president was taken to the International Criminal Court.

We were about to beat Kenya’s records with the said clauses when the Kenyans came up with their jesus thing and the world did not get to talk about our satanic clauses. Now the clauses are nowhere to be seen so the whole weeklong argument was about nothing!

At least if the world had discussed them before the Attorney General disowned them we would have broken Kenya’s record of bizarre electoral practices. Imagine making the home-based soldiers vote a week in advance; wouldn’t that call for those outside, including the thousands in Somalia, vote a year in advance, for candidates who could even be dead by election time?

Joachim Buwembo is a Kampala-based journalist. Email:[email protected]