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