Zaake’s bad English and Uganda’s rotten politics

Watch your distance. You could be splattered with mud, bad milk, or worse.

I am contemplating this sickening African thing about the English language, and Francis Zaake’s rickety delivery on Voice of America. An honourable Member of Parliament. A man of action. Those who are patently unjust now watch Zaake’s clenched fist more closely than his lips.
Okay, a flawed man. But what is this fuss about his English?

At first I thought it was another of those forgettable Abirigaesque language exhibitions that will multiply under NRM rule; some by NRM members; others by Opposition politicians like Zaake; all talking like they had crocodile tails in their mouths.
Ruling party talk-show junkies who have been ridiculing him forget that young Zaake is completely a product of President Museveni’s education system.

When Joseph Serwadda brought up the legislator’s English troubles during his rambling Sunday morning talk-show on Impact FM, I laughed.
The ‘apostle’ himself speaks English with great competence; but this mastery does not prevent him from dabbling in demon exorcism and other supernatural rubbish; just like Maama Fiina, who speaks very little English. Or prevent him from forming thoughts and ‘hearing’ them as divine voices. Psychologists are interested in such delusional experiences.

Anyway, in English-speaking Uganda, the ‘apostle’ had in the very same studio a bishop – yes, a bishop – who cannot pronounce ‘characteristic hypocrisy’ without biting off half of his tongue.

The studio functionary, Gyagenda, who fired a clip of Zaake’s voice into the show for public ridicule, had only two days before been worshipfully hosting a man who screams mostly in Luganda, and then in pidgin English, and who would have to become an honorary Red Indian before he can say ‘Oklahoma’, but who had served as His Excellency the President’s spokesman for many years.