It is the grasshopper season and the noise is loud and clear

Every society tends to have what it considers a delicacy and many times one man’s delicacy turns out to be disgusting or tasteless to another person from a different society. Your columnist is not really a culinary adventurer for fear of sabotaging my long friendship with my stomach. It takes a lot for me to try and eventually fall for a new dish especially now that I am well into my adulthood. Being in fancy restaurants is often torture especially when I have to spend hours reading the menu as though it were PhD thesis with only the prices column making sense (shocking sense that is). I have been to restaurants where I was expected to love things like Sushi yet my stubborn mind kept questioning why I had to eat raw fish yet the restaurant has people paid to, actually cook!Talking of delicacies, the month of November in Uganda often marks the beginning of what many refer to as the Nsenene (long-horned grasshoppers) season. Other than white ants (nswa), grasshoppers are the other flying insects that many people (including yours truly) consider a delicacy. In fact, sometimes I feel sorry for those Baganda who have the grasshopper as their totem, which means they cannot partake in the Nsenene bonanza. Others like my late father, who are allergic to these tasty creatures, also fall in my pity basket when it comes to this issue. During the grasshopper season, men, women and children spend nights chasing after the flying creatures in what has actually become a huge business in Uganda. The process of catching these grasshoppers has now been upgraded from the traditional search in the bushes to very bright lights, iron sheets and drums to draw and catch the them during the night. On the streets vendors struggle to catch the eye of the motorists and pedestrians alike. However, there is something about these insects that seems to point to events happening in Uganda generally. Anyone who knows grasshoppers quite well will admit that they tend to have this ear bursting noise they make. It is so loud that you simply cannot miss it if you are close by. It is therefore interesting that the beginning of November, the month when these grasshoppers start making their ear-bursting noise has come at the same time when a lot of noise is being made in Kampala but not by the grasshoppers alone. The Office of the Prime Minister is embroiled in a huge corruption scandal that saw obscene amounts of money meant to help people in northern Uganda ending up in personal accounts. Unfortunately, the noise is not even about how the people had to painfully deal with problems like nodding disease but whether or not, the Permanent Secretary in the Office of the Prime Minister should step aside. As the noise continued, donors suspended aid to Uganda over the graft in the prime minister’s office. For his part, the PM, Hon. Amama Mbabazi, apologised to the donors but feigned ignorance over the issue. This has led to others to make their own noise calling for Amama Mbabazi to also resign for failing to prevent such gross corruption in his office. The annoying noise from the scandals in the Office of the Prime Minister seemed to drown out the noise from the public service ministry concerning the pensions’ scheme. The noise here is that several ghost pensioners have been receiving money they are not supposed to receive. The police even released pictures of those alleged ghosts and some showed up to claim they had not received any money. The amounts involved in this scam are also as obscene as those in the Prime Minister’s office. Corruption stories in the Ugandan media are generally considered noise as nothing tangible comes out of them. A commission of inquiry maybe set up, some few individuals thrown behind bars then released, others suspended from their jobs and of course aid will be suspended for some time but soon everything will be back to business as usual. Where corruption may have done well to compete with the grasshoppers in creating noise, the revelation that Ugandan troops were to pull out of Somalia took the noise level a notch higher. The contentious issue here is the UN report accusing Uganda of supporting M23 rebels (now Congolese Revolutionary Army). What such a move means for Somalia as well as Kenya and Burundi is hard to tell at this point. For now we wait to see what happens while others enjoy their tasty Nsenene.