The Dawn of a Bigger Struggle

It has been ages since I last made a post here. In fact I feared that the benign cobwebs like those of deserted homesteads would begin to litter my blog. It is just the way of nature; I would politely dust them off and reintroduce myself to the audience. Today I will make a spirited attempt to summon the writing gods again, with some success I hope.

At the stroke of 1pm on Wednesday 2^nd December, 2020, our invigilator clambered up the Law Development Centre (LDC) auditorium platform. He seized the lectern and bellowed through the only available microphone. Four words came out of his mouth and this was what he said; “Your time is up.” We had heard those words on a number of occasions throughout our innumerable examinations but somehow, these had taken on a different meaning. This was unlike any of those papers that we had done before, it was our very last. And somehow after many days of postponing, of tweaks and modifications to our schedule, we were seeing the light at the tunnel end. So when he said your time is up, the first thought that crossed my mind was that our time at LDC was up. But maybe I wasn’t over-thinking it, our time was actually up!

Ours has been a year like no other (I know everyone will say that about their lot) where we have shockingly done a 9 months course across three calendar years. This needs alot of explaining. The institution’s gates were flung open many moons ago in 2019 but I can say with certainty that even in 2021, we shall still be acolytes of LDC. Let that sink in because these are not normal times! We are going to have to do alot of explaining to our children in future. It doesn’t happen all the time and I have a hunch that the heavens may have been punishing us for side stepping the pre-entry examination. (Too many words were spoken after all, as if it was supposed to be our fault that we were having an easy entrance)

So my story...

I will let you in on the small bits and pieces. For the rest, you may have to exercise some patience as my autobiography is in the offing. (The wait won’t be long and I will be sure to dedicate a full chapter on my stay at LDC)

To get my story’s genesis, we will have to be transported back to an isolated event in my sophomore year. It had nothing to do with academics but was just a social event. Towards the end of 2016, I was honoured to be part of the wedding entourage of one of my father’s closest friends. He was a man of standing in society and had only delayed in formalising his marriage because of a few challenges here and there. You all know how this life can be. I was under obligation to attend because of the family ties but also that I had no reason to be elsewhere. So when it was time for the groom to give his speech, he summoned his children and had the opportunity to talk about each one of them. An important fact that we shouldn’t lose sight of was that the man was a lawyer himself. As he introduced his first born child, he gave me my biggest take way that day. This was what he said and I quote; “My daughter here is a big lawyer in town and she works with one of the biggest law firms in the country. And by the way, she got that place on merit because while she was at LDC, she was among the best in her class.” He went on and said, “I know many of you may not know what goes on at LDC but that is the hardest place on earth because I have been there myself.” It was the “hardest place on earth” for me, because at that point my body cringed. I knew deep down that it was only a matter of years before I got to that dreaded place.

I will hit the pause button for now and release the forward button.

When I got into my first class at LDC, there was nothing out of the normal. When I did my first assignment, it was normal too. The workshops were normal and so were the examinations. I don’t know if it was just me but I bet that I share this with a hundred others.

I speak mostly for myself but I know many others share my sentiments. Shortly after our final paper, as we sat over a farewell lunch with a group of friends, my brother in the struggle AJK advanced a similar case. In fact for him, he was blunter than I would ever be because he admitted that there was nothing difficult at LDC. Absolutely nothing! Every single thing we do is about attitude, he said and I agree.

I will share one of my highlights and this involved my close and dear friend Lillian. After our week of banking (the one considered to be the most difficult) we had a sit down as we always did and decided to run through our three workshop questions. As we concluded, Arinda paused and matter-of-factly asked, “But Patrick wait a minute, is this the banking that we were told was difficult or we should expect something else?” For me that was one of my all time favourite moments at the Centre. It was just a disarming question asked so innocently with such calm and collection.

I am of course alive to the challenges some of my colleagues faced and that is why I speak mostly for myself. Many of them had businesses to run, children to return to in the evening and nagging spouses that weighed like stones around their necks. But I for one, was a ‘baggage-less’ young boy with absolutely no excuse.

For me it has been a journey of faith that has kept me going every single day. I must be among the very few who have already acquired their graduation gowns (I actually bought mine last year after my first week in school). That is how much faith I have in the God I serve! I have walked through the ‘burning furnace’ and just like the Lord’s servants Shadrach, Mesach and Abednego I have emerged unscathed. The only difference with me is that my angel is invisible to the human eye.

As the sun sets on the struggles of our today, we are reminded of tomorrow and if we get to see it, I can guarantee that we shall be great.  

 

Power, Privilege and the birth of Entitlement

At a time when many of us have been hoarded into our homes like unripe bananas, it would be an opportune moment to have a discussion about privilege and its begotten child entitlement. The subject is more apparent given that the world is afflicted by a global pandemic as World Health Organisation puts, a ‘privileged disease’, as I sometimes refer to it. Privileged, because it has been to apartments and palatial mansions (a rare occurrence for pandemics) but we also know for a fact that it has sojourned in the corridors of the Buckingham castle. But that is not a conversation for today.

I will use a familiar tale, one that has been music to our ears for quite some time now; it has been drummed into us. We now know it like the back of our hands. In 1980, the current President of the country garnered courage (he picked up the guns later) to wage war against the government of the day. He was followed by his close friends, in-laws, kinsmen and well wishers. From a rag-tag rebel outfit, they became an embellished army who sustained a military offensive that unsettled the sitting government. However, for the eagle-eyed there was something fascinating about their organisational structure and ranks. There were fierce fighters who earned their pips on the basis of their heroic acts in battles and these were called loyalists. There existed another equally conspicuous group who enjoyed special status not because of their military abilities but majorly because of their tribal leaning.  These were called royalists. Stories abound of how time and again their Commander in Chief had to deal with various standoffs between the loyalists and royalists. But again that is not for today. The takeaway here is that status has a way of bestowing immeasurable leverage over and above the others. It is this that has the metamorphic ability to sire privilege.

In an attempt to underscore the context within which I talk about privilege, do not only imagine a politician who is chauffeured in a state of the art latest SUV. Consider those who are fortunate to pick their food from freezers, those whose deliveries are made at a click of an imaginary button or even the farmer who picks hanging fruits from their garden that sits on hectares. Privilege is more about possession and how it is used. But it is broader if you look at it in the context of race, of sex and gender or even tribe as Museveni’s royalists will tell you.

To look at privilege, we need to consider the bigger outlook that our society is. It was supposed to be organised to function smoothly and effectively with members sharing some basic tenets but that did not happen. Humanity was supposed to have a face whose outlook was accommodative rather than combative but that was only a utopian setting.

But what is wrong with being privileged? What is wrong with having the wherewithal? Absolutely nothing to start with but it can be everything in the long run. Privilege for starters has a position of thinking that it confines its hosts. They tend to look at the context of things quite differently. People can be insensitive to the suffering of others because they don’t have the imaginative ability of getting into the skin of another, to be able to see the world through the eyes that for once are not their own. There are people who have amassed power and with it come privilege. Their children’s main struggle is normally over the remote control in their plush living rooms, and many times the greatest danger they face is boredom. For others the greatest risk their lives are facing is not being texted back. They don’t understand that meals can sometimes be a luxury, that basic human decency, like water and food is a consistent inconsistency for many. But the dictates of life wouldn’t let many understand this because the only time they interact with food is on the dining table. The food chain is what they read in academic books but they don’t make as much meaning out of it.

So what then is the point? The point is that many times our selfishness that is born out of privilege hinders our ability to step in the shoes of the less privileged even for a moment. You can tweet from the comfort of your sofas, knowing that your fridge is fully packed, calling for the Fountain of Honour to impose a total lockdown on the country. The rest can always find a way after all there is an imaginary threat to your existence. How about those whose existence is being threatened on a daily by real dangers? Harm and peril that stares them in the face and lurks around them! Of course we would never know because they don’t have the luxury to tweet about it or be hosted in mainstream media to air it out. But like Achebe famously said, privilege, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.

So what should we do? Social exclusion, identity seclusion and isolation from the social mainstream are still the dark realities faced by individuals today. It is only when each and every individual is liberated from the shackles of such bondage and is able to work towards full development of his/her personality that we can call ourselves a truly free society. We concede to the diversity and variegated hues that nature has created but we can take steps by vanquishing the enemies of prejudice and injustice and undoing the wrongs done so as to make way for progress and inclusion.

*Inspired by Arinda Lillian

De’-Pato, you forgot to say Goodbye! Rest in Peace

It's too hard to say goodbye
It's too hard to say goodbye
just can't say goodbye
              Westlife


On Thursday March 26, 2020, as the cover of darkness slowly lifted to give birth to a new day, it took with it a life of a bright, promising young man. It took with it my good friend and brother, Patrick Kansiime. The account by those who were with him in his last hours is that he was fine (atleast by looks and deeds). He wasn’t complaining about anything the night before, made plans for the following day and went to bed like we all did. He actually woke up very early in the morning (around 6am) and even took a glass of water before shortly going back to bed. Patrick didn’t wake up again! The postmortem report indicates that he died from pneumonia related complications. It is a life full of uncertainties! I will not delve into the complexities of this earthly life but I will recount some of the fondest memories that we shared with Patrick.

In school (Ntare), we didn’t have many students that went by the name Patrick. In fact, I was certain that I shared my Christian name with only him. But now the challenge came with having to call us out since we all went by the short name Pato. At first we fleeted with the idea of referring to him as Pato the basket-baller and me as Pato the debater but this would defeat the whole purpose of shortening our names because those would be a mouthful in themselves. Because he was the author and finisher of most of the school’s slang, he was a man who was never short of words. He had the seamless ability to conjure a word from nowhere. He was the one who came up with a solution when he decided to add ‘De’ before his short name and made a print at the back of his shirts with “De’ Pato” on it. Problem solved or as you would say, crisis averted. From then on, you would be looking for him if you mentioned “De’ Pato” and omission of the first word would mean it was me you were coming after.

De’ Pato and I shared many things beyond a name; we shared a class, a room, a football team, did the same combination plus many other preferences that space and time can never allow me to exhaust. The most prominent thing he was known for was probably basketball. He was never born playing basketball; he only learnt this in High School and boy he became a super star. He made the game look so easy, we called him the king of 3-pointers. He was the talk of school. For any basketball game that the school competed in, there were three constants, his signature 3-pointer, a dunk and a world class run. He was a real talent. In room, he was always throwing around things to hit imaginary targets and soon it rubbed off against many of us. On the sidelines of his stellar basketball career, he also groomed a tennis career and with this he was also part of the school’s elite brigade. If Ntare School was a military outfit, we would easily say that in as far as sports were concerned Kansiime Patrick constituted its top brass.

For many reasons, after joining different Universities, we wouldn’t talk as often but whenever we caught up, it was always a continuation of where we left it the last time. My last conversation with De’ Pato was about three weeks ago when he called in to wish me success in my forthcoming examinations. We wandered alot in our talks and I do remember how he kept teasing me about one of his beautiful cousins. We laughed about how I have always used academics as an excuse for not pursuing my woman crush. He always liked to tell me that the moment you like someone, reach out to them and make your feelings known. “Knock on the door and let them know that you are around. They can choose to open but even if they don’t, it will only be a matter of time before they do.” Oh I already miss those calls!

I can never forget the days during our holiday when he would connect the entire room on a conference call and then allow us to catch up. He had the luxury to do it because never in his life had he been short of resources but beyond that he had a heart that loved to give. He didn’t give because you asked but it was in his nature to make comfortable those around him. Phones were not allowed in school but somehow he had created exception to that rule. He carried his phone to school but it looked like it was never his. Most of the time, it was one of us either playing a game, texting away or even making those late night calls that many times yielded nil. For those who had girlfriends in other schools, it was that phone that helped keep the communication going, for some who were trying out their luck; he offered us hope through his phone. As people who spent our school days with him, these memories will forever remain part of us.

But like any other mortal, De’ Pato wasn’t without his flaws and struggles. He battled some illnesses and his education was at times interrupted but like a fearless warrior who never gave up, he soldiered on. He studied with dedication, completed his education and had started on the bitter-sweet arduous journey of employment. He had his other personal difficulties and many of those we may never know. Some he shared with his friends but others he only confided in his creator. It is heart breaking that the ugly pangs of death snatched him when he was only getting started with his life!

Patrick will be dearly missed by all of us that knew him, that laughed and enjoyed basking in his jokes and all that had an opportunity to cross his path. The most painful thing however will be that we won’t have the opportunity to send him off and say our final byes.

The angels in heaven will still welcome you Patrick!

Rest well De’ Pato!

We shall always miss you.