If you didn’t hear about the disappearance of Julius Ssekitoleko, the Ugandan weightlifter; well, now I’m breaking the news to you! He abandoned the Olympic team and vanished from his hotel room on Friday. Interestingly, he was polite enough to leave a note that said he wanted to work in Japan.
Just because the lad is a professional weightlifter doesn’t mean he couldn’t feel the weight of the lockdown back here in Uganda. So, you can’t really blame the guy for running away. After all, that’s pretty much what we do in Uganda, all-year long; year-in, year-out. We run!
We run from police on the streets during lockdown. We run out of food to feed our families during lockdown. We run a show about how we can dish out Shs.100k to half-amillion citizens to sustain them for 42days! But in less than a week, we already run out of the Shs.100k.
We run to stay healthy during lockdown cos we’re always running the fridge empty. We run to beat curfew. We run into a Boda-boda that is running to beat curfew. We run into traffic jam during lockdown! We run from LDUs (local security personnel) for failing to beat the curfew time. We run into countless roadblocks.
We run out of fuel for our planes. We keep borrowing and run further into debt. We run the economy into the ground. The Banks run after us cos we defaulted on our loans. We run against corruption while running towards it. We run 70% out of MBs before we even load the MBs!
We run from God! We run out of ideas on how to handle Covid-19. They run Covid Enterprises Ltd. They run Covid-19 tests on us and we run to avoid a forced 2-weeks quarantine in a lousy facility with no running water.
We run out of oxygen. We run out of masks. We run out of money to pay allowances to frontline workers. We run obscene supplementary budgets for a certain House!! We run to IMF. We run into more debt.
We run from the covid jab! We run out of job cos we run from the jab. When we reluctantly accept to get the jab, we run out of power and the women are not happy! They soon run out of patience and want to run away from us!
We run into trouble for inventing covidex. We run in and out of court cos we never run out of greed. We run out of covidex. We run into hospital and come out running from the medical bills. We then run to the bushes, gather leaves and run some steam into our lungs.
We even run out of ideas to run out of! Ask the Minister of Education! We run national exams, release results, and then we’re totally clueless about what to do next! Now we run schools that are empty.
We run mad when people start to run our obituaries on social media, yet we’re still alive. We send for their arrest, but many run into hiding.
We never stop running! We run into trouble for exporting fake gold through Kenya.
We run when everyone is running, even when we don’t know why they’re running. Cos that’s all we do—RUN!
