Can’t someone bewitch our MPs into austerity?

In the last ten years or so, the entertainment industry in East Africa has evolved as far as tastes and preferences are concerned. It appears a foreseer introduced East Africans to one of the world’s biggest film industry; Nollywood. Save for the quality, these Nigerian and to some extent Ghanaian productions, have become a main feature on East African TV stations, Uganda’s WBS, Kenya’s Citizen TV and Tanzania’s Channel 10. It is now normal for a TV station to air one Nigerian movie after the other for a whole day. If you sit in a bus from Kampala and it has a DVD system then chances are high that you will watch a Nigerian movie as the bus snakes its way through the hills of Kabale and Ntungamo. What is undisputable though is that most of these productions focus a lot of themes like witchcraft. And because of this, many East Africans have embraced the movies as they relate to their lives as well. Yes, many people believe in witchcraft and although they go to church in the morning, they still visit shrines and other such places as Prof. Mazrui clearly pointed out in his award winning BBC series, The Africans, A Triple heritage. The belief in witchcraft is so deeply rooted in our society that cases of child sacrifice in Uganda, for instance, now often eat up more newspaper space than corruption or political news stories. And I am not saying it is better for a politician to pocket all the money meant for relief in Karamoja instead of sacrificing a small innocent child in search of quick wealth. The cases of witchcraft have a hold over our lives are not limited to child sacrifices but also extends to areas you would not have thought of. Just imagine this; about a decade ago, Uganda lost a crucial football game to Rwanda after the players were convinced that the piece of cloth in the Rwandan goal was the reason they were not scoring. Towards the end of the year there was a lot of whispering going on about the towel that Kenyan Premier League side, Gor Mahia’s goalkeeper (Mapunda) had in his goal as the match against Sofapaka went on. The Sofapaka players and supporters were convinced this piece of cloth made it impossible to score against Gor Mahia. Matters were not helped further when on 6th January 2013, Kenya was bundled out of the African Cup of Nations’ qualifiers by Burundi and again a finger was pointing at the cloth in the Burundian goal as the reason why the ball just could not find its way into the net. I am not here to decide whether this is a myth or a fact, but I tend to think that if it was a fact that a piece of cloth placed in a goal can keep out all goals, then one of these teams would be playing the world cup every four years and turning in clean sheets. And if indeed we have witchcraft that is this powerful, then why have we not used it to tame the greed of our politicians. Don’t you wish you knew a powerful witch doctor each time you pick up a newspaper to read that MPs have awarded themselves huge sums of money simply because, the constitution allows them to do just that. In the end they do nothing much else. It is a big relief that actually Kenya’s President Kibaki refused to sign the obscene retirement package that Kenyan MPs had awarded themselves complete with an armed body guard and a state funeral! I hope Kibaki used his wisdom and witchcraft to keep the MPs from not scoring this hefty send off package. And on something unrelated, yesterday 12 January marked 49 years since the Zanzibar revolution by local African revolutionaries who overthrew the Sultan of Zanzibar and his largely Arab government. This revolution’s hero was a one John Gideon Okello. Born in Uganda and once jailed in Kenya, the “Field Marshal of Zanzibar and Pemba” is one of the East African heroes that we hear little about as we spend our days following the lives of Kim Kardashian or Wayne Rooney. We often refer to Idi Amin as a field marshal but Okello beat him to this title in remarkable fashion. And he later lived in Kenya, D.R. Congo and finally in Uganda. Blog: www.ssenyonga.wordpress.comTwitter: @ssojo81