By JOACHIM BUWEMBO

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After reading about the Stockholm syndrome, where hostages develop affection and trust towards their captors, I can now predict with certainty that Ugandan road users will eventually accept the maddening cacophony being inflicted upon them by the numerous VIP convoys that keep chasing them off the road like criminals and pose mortal danger many times a day to innocent road users.

There is no telling how many VIPs have a right of way on the roads, but what is for certain is that they have become too many.

It can happen anytime, anywhere. The city roads are congested beyond comprehension. You don’t know when the jam you are in will ease and cars start slowly flowing again. The only thing you are sure of is that a VIP will emerge from nowhere, pierce your eardrums with shrill sirens of their lead car and your driver or yourself achieves the impossible feat of swerving off the road to give them space while you are in the middle of other cars that are also scampering for safety.

Humbly, the Ugandan motorists are taking it all in calmly. Maybe secretly, everybody knows that given the chance they would do the same, and so they are not angry at the rude noise polluters who scatter them off the road like village chickens being shooed away from the grain that is being dried in the compound.

Even when a young lady was knocked dead by a (fellow) woman VIP whose position is not mentioned anywhere in the constitution last month, the public was not even slightly enraged. In fact the number of siren-blaring VIPs seems to have increased since. 

Chances are that in nine out of 10 cases that you are scattered off the road you cannot even recognise the VIP who is claiming right of way — they are that many.

The traffic Act was amended a couple of years back and said only the President and his Deputy, Speaker and Deputy, Chief Justice and Deputy and the Prime Minister have right of way. The others, of course, being ambulances and police when responding to an emergency.

The publishing of the Act seems to have invited more abuse instead. So rampant are the traffic-scattering sirens that even the dead have joined the party — funeral corteges are also furiously demanding right of way as if their departed passenger is in a hurry to catch an appointment.

And when you see the number of ambulances slicing through traffic these days you would imagine Uganda has the most responsive health emergence services. The reality however is that some of the siren-blaring ambulances are on missions different from taking patients to hospital.

Sometimes you cannot see the VIP in whose honour you are being thrown off the road even if their windows are not tinted. This is because the VIP is too small to be seen easily — being a big person’s kid being taken to school, international school. It is even suspected that sometimes the ‘VIP’ is just any person in a hurry to catch a flight and has hired a rogue lead car to clear the road for them.

For now Uganda has only one very decent VIP convoy and that is the President’s. His route is obviously carefully planned by security in order to cause minimal excitement.

The presidential motorcade moves peacefully, quietly and sticks to one side of the road. But the smaller VIPs cause so much mayhem as they zigzag from left to right even where the road is clearly divided, but I am willing to bet the Ugandan public will continue accepting this even as it gets worse. It is called the Stockholm syndrome.

Joachim Buwembo is a social and political commentator based in Kampala.