WORM’S EYE
With the Analyst
The NRM government has welcomed news that districts are
broke as “unequivocal demonstration that our bad policies
are working.”
In a statement issued in reaction to a Sunday Monitor story
that a good number of the country’s 80 districts are
broke, the government’s spin-doctor, a one Tamiira
Murundi, said that when the NRM government curved a district
out of pretty much every village, the intention was precisely
to make the new districts broke.
“Let’s be serious here, for once. Do you really
think that the NRM government is so daft that it didn’t
know that jigger-infested villages could not raise enough
cash to run districts? We are not particularly clever in
the NRM, but every fool knows that peasants who are too
poor to pay taxes can’t run a district. In fact, I
am so surprised that it took the districts so long to declare
that they are broke,” Mr. Murundi (no relative of
those nice people from Burundi), said in his statement,
which was copied to The Analyst by mistake.
The statement explained that when the NRM government decided
to more than double the number of districts from around
36 to about 80 today (no one is sure of the exact numbers
anymore), the “strategic expectation” was that
local governments would be so broke that they would be reduced
to begging the NRM government for handouts just to survive.
“You know our man up here likes to feel like a Ssekabaka
[king of kings] who can make or break an entire country,
let alone miserable districts. There is nothing that would
please him more than throwing crumbs at a starving district.
It make him feel quite visionary.”
Mr. Murundi said now that the NRM’s bad policies
had succeeded in turning a good number of villages into
beggar districts, the “man up here” could have
his fun.
“The beauty with this situation is that the districts
we have reduced to begging will be so happy for meagre handouts
that they will forever worship our man, meaning that he
can remain our man for as long as the districts we have
made poor remain poor. How clever is that!” Mr. Murundi
said.
He added that those who criticised the creation of new
districts as inviable could also celebrate and thank “the
man up here” for proving them right.
analyst@ugandaobserver.com
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