This is our Country

Well, I can stand beside ideas I think are right

And I can stand beside the idea to stand and fight

I do believe there’s a dream for everyone

This is our country

Those are the opening lines of John Mellencamp’s famous song ‘Our Country’. He sings about what we all call home, he voices out a desire for freedom, where a country belongs to all, from the east coast to the west coast. That science should live, there should also be room for religion to forgive, and all should be accommodated irrespective of diversity in opinion and thought.

We live in a ‘small’ space, occupied by a multilingual society, enclosed within colonial generated geographical boundaries, governed by a group of people who by our choice or otherwise have occupied those spaces. Gathered in huddles, our artificial habitats are sprawled all over the country, the rich and the poor alike and for those who claim to be neither. However something invisible to the human eye seems to separate us, something that seems to give more entitlement to others, that which lets them off the hook when they err and allows others to rot in prison even when their conscience is clear.

This week alone, power and might was once again at display. Not new to us, same old script but this time with a different setting. We fixate our attention on the incident that involved a retired army general who reminded us that laws are not made for all. They are made for a few; some choose to respect them out of courtesy while others outrightly violate them but there is that class that sails above everything, to them they don’t even exist.

One of the famed two-star generals that this country has been gifted with, not in the heat of the moment, obviously not in combat, certainly not in a war zone, found himself provoked enough to draw a gun and shoot at a civilian’s car. Not the first time he has been involved in a controversy but we have since been acquainted with the ending. We look at all the actors involved and all have a stake in this country but ultimately, like in a lottery some have more stakes than the others and you could be forgiven to call them the real owners of the country.

This story reminded me of Martin Aliker’s own narrative in his memoir, The Bell is Ringing. When he was exiled in Kenya, being personal friends with President Kenyatta, he was offered the kind of protection any first class citizen would deserve. He was also sent to a training school where he would learn how to use firearms, how to assemble and dismantle a pistol. While there, he writes and says that he was told something that scared him. They said, “If you think your life is in danger, shoot not to hurt, but to kill. If you kill someone, we will arrange for bail, and the case will never come to court.”

Governments everywhere in the world are run in a similar fashion, there is Adolf Hitler and there is Arthur Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister who failed to restrain the German Dictator in 1938. There is Joseph Stalin and there are Western supporters who defended the gulags. There is Saddam Hussein and there is the American government which in 1989, a couple of months after the gassing of hundreds of Kurds, doubled its aid to Iraq. There is Gideon Johannes Nieuwoudt, torturer of black and coloured people, and the foreign supporters of apartheid. There are the journalists from the hate radio station Mille Collines in Kigali, and there is the Pentagon which didn’t wish to disrupt the channel. There are the predators who kill and torture and there are those who watch and applaud or close their eyes.

But like President Museveni has on several occasions noted, there are three things that we should not be in hurry to mix together; a country, a nation and a state. I don’t know much about the last two but I am certain beyond doubt that this is a country for us all and I won’t hesitate to add that we own it.

Blessed week!