It Could Get Worse Before It Gets Better

*"The best leader is therefore the enlightened leader. The best ruler does not wield an ax but raises a lantern. Those who try to rule by fire are destroyed by fire. Those who rule by bringing light to others join with ever-increasing radiance.
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“An attack against you is an imbalance in the natural course, and you must apply as much vigor as necessary to restore balance.”
(Ming-Dao, 2006)

*If you are a coward, go back into your mother’s womb.
----Ancient Acoli Warrior

*Rwot, i neka ki nyero (Chief, you kill me with laughter!)
----Acoli aphorism

Things are heating up: The so-called development partners have tossed the gauntlet with a salvo to the EC: you are a spoilsport with the voter registration hanky-panky.
This touched off a raw nerve in the favorite son, the once head boy of the celebrated “new breed” of African leaders. Like a spoilt brat, he hyperventilated and declared or, rather, ordered: stick to developments in areas of your competence without tying them with governance. I know governance. Governance is my expertise.

Excuse me, Monsieur le President, just what is your understanding of good governance? There is more to it than artificial stability, important as it is. If we are to read you from how you have operated so far, we take it that you prefer to be, effectively, an absolute monarch. This is your default predisposition. All the grandiose posturing is just a means to an end: absolute and unadulterated power. This is sooooooo primitive and backward (your own favorite adjectives) by 21st century standard.

If the taxpayers of the development partners were aware of what they were propping, they would agitate to turn off the money faucet. So, beware, Mr. President. The Chinese might even shun you.

What is going on here? The man has been their agent of convenience. He was more ecstatic than the master when a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory was bombed by the Americans. He was rwot-i-neka-ki-nyero(chief, you kill me with laughter: butt-kissing in Acoli). The man was probably the go-between messenger in the process leading to the settlement in the Kaddafi-Lockerbie case when he made frequent trips to Tripoli. No African potentate could be heard louder across the Atlantic than President Yoweri Museveni. In Washington he was the toast of Black Congressional Caucus and white liberal lawmakers. Thanks, in parts, to the charm of the then long-serving ambassador and the well-paid African-American lobyist. These lawmakers were in his corner to approve the bill to forgive Uganda’s debt even as the Uganda president was purchasing for himself a 40 million-dollar jet with all the trimmings. Do the math: American taxpayers, in effect, bought the dictator a jet! Talk about the fleecing of America. Wait until the media hounds get a wind of this.

The question of immediacy for us is: will the sugar daddies, led by Washington, pull the rug if the dude doesn’t shape up? Chances are they won’t, and the man may or may not capitulate by threats alone. He may feel trapped in a corner like wild a dog. What are his options? Will he lash out like a cobra if you mess with its tail? By all indications, deep down, he is coward who could resort to nefarious and underhanded means to silence the opposition. The opposition should brace up for dark days ahead—days when the ancient Acoli warrior’s refrain warned: If you are a coward, go back into your mother’s womb!

As the night darkens before sunrise, the end of an era may be nigh yet so far away. This is the time for skillful actors. Rash, raw ambition only won’t cut it. In the end, the "butterfly effect," in the Chaos Theory may initiate sorting things out.