By Andrew Karamagi
They are yellow and airborne!
It is not true that they crossed into Uganda yesterday, as reported in the media.
They’ve been here thirty years plus but cleverly hid their wings and assumed a human form.
Years of evolution and adaptation have made them immune to shame. Elections and the Rule of Law are anathema.
They are allergic to honesty and only tell the truth by accident.
Anyone with casual knowledge of the industrial scale looting, godless pilferage and unprecedented plunder of our country over the decades does not need a briefing to appreciate the danger that these flying incarnations of our rulers pose to our food security and general flora.
At least the six-legged pests only devour vegetation.
Their human cousins do not only forage on plants. They ate Uganda Commercial Bank, the Dairy Corporation, Lint Marketing Board, Uganda Posts and Telecommunications and dozens more of public property.
Go to Nkrumah Road and face the direction of Kibuli if you want to see the wasteland that is Uganda Railways main station.
Not even the country’s only international airport and its ground handling services could survive their appetite!
True to form, and like their aerial next-of-kin, they have been unable to resist the allure of anything green. Wetlands, rivers like Rwizi and government ranches in Teso, Nkore and Buganda. All gone!
At over five hundred billion shillings which disappears into their bottomless stomachs yearly, they are still ravaging and remain unsatisfied.
As the two related species mount offensives against each other, let us hope that NRA Sapiens will not indulge in yet more corruption and thereby bangle the effort at quelling the invasion by their less evolved kin.
Even Mabira Forest which would have comfortably hosted their visiting relatives was dubiously sold off to another breed of locust called “foreign investors”!
The forest’s erstwhile defender, magnificently named ‘Maama Mabira’ caught the bug and has since joined the ranks of Locusta Humanae.
By the way, does anyone know whether those little demons can withstand teargas, particularly the flavoured one?
And where on earth is Gen. Kale Kayihura when you need him to douse the country with his favourite toys: armoured personnel carriers, canisters, batons and firearms since these locusts haven’t fulfilled the requirements of the Public Order Management Act?
Of course, Kayihura would order the arrest of thousands of innocent grasshoppers which would be detained without charge in Nalufenya, Naggalama and other state-run dungeons.
They would not be released until they confessed that they are not grasshoppers but locusts.
The hapless creatures would be tortured by Nixon Agasirwe and Abdallah Kitatta until they sign confession statements, implicating Kizza Besigye and Bobi Kyagulanyi as having sponsored them to invade Uganda with a view to removing a “democratically elected junta, sorry, government.”
In his absence, the NRM’s rapacious cousins are at large.
They are flying all over the place with the same impunity that their avaricious human counterparts of the ruling cult enjoy.
Given these similarities, it is not yet clear whether under microscopic examination, it would be possible to tell their DNA molecular structure apart from that of the human Locust-in-Chief, his ministers, and other such regime functionaries should they fly and make landfall in Kampala.
“Banange”, as a woman whose land had been grabbed by an infamous UPDF general cried out to me and Eron Kiiza, “ffe twazza gwaaki… nga twaggirwa!”
*”…to what do we Ugandans owe this unending misfortune?!”
karamagiandrew@gmail.com
