Take the bus to work, cycle, ride a broom, or fly — but under no circumstances should you walk. Not in Kampala, anyway.
Walking is the kind of behaviour that incites people and causes unnecessary upheavals in peaceful societies like Uganda. Before you can say inflation, everyone would be protesting against the escalating fuel prices and the subsequent rise in the cost of living.
Someone like Dr Kizza Besigye, the leader of Uganda’s Forum for Democratic Change, should know better than to try to walk to work because of high fuel prices. And where would that leave everyone? They would be late for work, tired, on the verge of losing their jobs and faced with the prospect of starvation.
The 55-year-old former army colonel should know that at his age, walking the 20 kilometres from his house to his party office could put him and thousands like him into hospitals, serving a challenge to his country’s healthcare system.
The next thing you know, people would be blaming the democratic government of President Yoweri Museveni for sickness, poverty and death.
People who are walking to work to protest against the rising cost of fuel and other commodities behave as if President Museveni has cousins in the Abu Dhabi National Oil Corporation whom he can telephone and persuade to lower world fuel prices.
Everybody knows how Mr Museveni tried to get Libya’s Col Muammar Gaddafi to build a direct oil pipeline from Tripoli to Jinja in an effort to cut out the Kenyan middlemen.
With the colonel preoccupied with a war on the home front, poverty in Uganda is illegal. One would have expected the citizens of that country to borrow, beg or steal in order to bridge the financial gap they face in their personal lives until Col Gadaffi is able to turn his attentions south again.Continued
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