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Doctors of worries in the EA Federation...
2007-05-02 09:41:49
By Wilson Kaigarula
The much-awaited and much-feared East African Federation – depending on which side of the fence you are – is threatening to disrupt and even kill, bury and fast-track the best friendship between me and James Kalubandika to heaven.
I hope that the fence in question is not barbed wired or, worse, electric circuited because some people are not sitting, sleeping, standing or squatting on either side.
They are fence-sitters. You can imagine what it would feel like sitting on an electric circuited barbed wired fence !
Don`t mind them, though. They may as well be electrocuted as a punishment for indecisiveness. A person must be able to decide whether to become a Simba or Yanga fan.
If someone tells you that he supports neither the Red Lions of Msimbazi in Kariakoo nor the green-and-yellow-shirted and ``shorted`` sons of the flood-threatened Jangwani valley, but that he is a neutral soccer lover,
then know, automatically, that he is a fence-sitter.
On soccer matters, I am not a fence-sitter. I love neither Simba nor Yanga. I am, instead, a 100 per cent Tanzanian patriot, because I love Taifa Stars almost at the same level as I love my wife.
On the EA Federation issue, Kalubandika accuses me of being a fence-sitter because every time we meet at TB Bar, he asks me whether I have made up my mind on which side of the fence I am standing, sleeping, yawning or dozing.
The name of the bar should not scare you. It doesn`t stand for the horrible disease that involves coughing like nobody`s business. TB stands for Teketeza Bia , and not tuberculosis. Amen.
I defend myself that whereas I have not declared to which side of the fence I belong, I am not a fence-sitter, but an FA.
FA doesn`t stand for Football Association but Fence Analyst. I tell Kalu that I am still analysing the federation issue critically before I make up my mind.
I stress to my best friend that I am as careful as a wise person who doesn`t rush into marriage, lest one ends up with a wrong partner.
A young lady should not be impressed by a young man and rush into ticking him off as the best male creature that God created after Adam, because he is handsome and holds a high executive post.
She should also not be emotionally the posh car that he drives; a BMW, which is also known as Be My Wife, but should relevantly be called Be My Husband (BMH).
The lady must probe deeply into the man`s history, to establish whether or not his great-great-great grandfather was a petty thief, lest one of their children becomes one by inheritance.
A man, too, should not be emotionally enslaved by a girl called Suzie, whose beauty approximates that of the late Princess Diana. He may discover, when it is too late, that she had aborted about one million times and that`s why they can`t have children.
He may also contemplate killing her or committing suicide after discovering that she has converted her mouth into Radio Suzie.
She broadcasts lies to the whole world, to the effect that she made a huge mistake by marrying a man who is kaput downstairs and that`s why the couple can`t have children.
An attendant king-size lie is that she is too culturally and religiously disciplined to have a baby secretly out of wedlock !
So, don`t whisper nasty things about a man who is nearly as old as Mzee Kawawa but is still single. He is still searching for the right bride, wife and mother.
But Kalu does not buy my arguments. He says the East African Federation is a fantastic proposition which he wants me to support as well, saying that otherwise, our friendship would die.
He says it would be pointless for him, as an East African citizen, to have a best friend who would still be clinging stupidly to Tanzanian-ness.
Kalu proposes that the federation should be known as Tauke: ``Ta`` for Tanzania, ``U`` for Uganda and ``Ke`` for Kenya; and cites several benefits that the bigger regional country would generate.
One of them, he says, would be the creation of genetically superior children. It is good to have a mpare man marry a mpare woman; it is better to have a mkurya man marry a mnyakyusa woman; but it would be best to have a makonde man marry a woman from the wakamba tribe in Kenya, a Karamajong woman in Uganda being married to a mzaramo man in Kisarawe; and a mdigo man on the Kenyan coast husbanding a mnyankole woman in the part of Uganda where President Kaguta comes from.
East African or, precisely, Tauke children would be genetically superior and thus more intelligent than those who are purely Tanzanian, Kenyan and Ugandan, so Kalu theorises.
Skills would also be polished and upgraded, through mutual sharing; such as Kenyan cattle rustlers exchanging notes with their Tanzanian counterparts, the cheque forgers of Gerezani exporting their skills to Uganda, and Kenyan car robbers teaching a few unforgettable lessons to their less-skilled cousins in both sub-countries.
Then, the bombshell: We would form a company called KK Limited, the two Ks representing Kalubandika and Kaigarula.
We would style ourselves doctors of worries, setting up clinics in various parts of Uganda and Kenya, pretending to advice people in distress on how to overcome their worries, at a modest fees.
Since the treatment or, precisely, worry expulsion period would be four weeks, we would have ``helped`` hundreds of people before the patients would discover that they had been conned.
By then, we would have returned back to the Tanzania part of Tauke to invest the millions of East African shillings we would have illegally minted.
We would then export our make-believe worry-expulsion skills to Zaire, Rwanda, Burundi, Malawi, Mozambique, Malawi and Swaziland.
By the time Interpol would have been sounded off, we would be leading the lives of Hollywood film stars on some beautiful island in the Mediterranean Sea.
I have told Kalu, point blank, to go ahead and expel me for not supporting his stupid ideas about the proposed East African Federation.
I would be grossly stupid to live like a king, but in hiding in a State House-like villa, perpetually worried of being arrested, charged and jailed for cheating millions of people out of their money, in the name of curing them of their worries !
Now, in the same way that I am still undecided on whether the federation is a good proposal, a bad one, or a 50-50 affair, Kalubandika is undecided on whether to retain me as his best friend, to expel me, or to demote the friendship from ``best`` to ``ordinary``.
wkaigarula@yahoo.com
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