Monday, October 6, 2003
JOACHIM BUWEMBO
All Uganda Loves Dear, Bumbling Old Nigeria
Normally, athletics is not the hottest subject in this country. While people follow football all the year round, athletics only captures public attention once every four years, during the Olympics.
Even the recent World Athletics Championships in Paris did not get any attention worth talking about in Kampala. But the Abuja 2003 All Africa Games have been talked about by everybody.
Don’t jump to conclusions yet. We are not interested in people breaking records and winning medals.
No, what we are excitedly discussing is the mess surrounding the (dis)organisation of the games. And we are loving it.
You should listen to the FM stations as they describe a sports village with no toilets. In the morning, we wake up to hilarious stories being narrated by DJs about Nigeria, obviously with lots of exaggeration thrown in.
You tune in and hear someone with a heavy Nigerian accent giving people tips on how to fight mosquitoes. That arises out of the advice cum consolation President Olusegun Obasanjo gave to his country’s athletes as they headed to the ill-prepared games village.
Obasanjo also reportedly asked his country’s team to persevere with the poor meals that they were to be fed, and all the hardships of the games village.
In case you had forgotten, Obasanjo is the president of the host country.
The tales of transport hardships, including daylong delays in transit (within Nigeria) have convinced Ugandans that their country is not so badly off after all. It is what we needed after all these years of complaining about poor planning and mismanagement.
When the Uganda team was stranded in Lagos without an onward connecting flight to Abuja, despite having paid the organisers for it in advance, the reason given was lack of aviation fuel. This in a country that produces high quality fuel! That is the kind of story we have been waiting for to reinforce our pride.
Nations, apparently, are just as prone to human nature as individuals. If you were honest, you would admit that a story of a rich man who becomes poor due to mismanagement doesn’t make you sad – unless you are the rich man.
Normally, such stories give you secret joy. When a high flying couple breaks up and are busy insulting each other during the divorce case, does it fill you with sadness that there is a family unit breaking up? No.
And we relish the story of a big official being caught stealing millions. Are we happy that public resources are being rescued, or because an important person has been humiliated?
You can now see why the horror stories from the All Africa Games village are so keenly appreciated in Kampala. It is like the undressing of a king. Nigeria recently disappointed us by acquitting Amina Lawal, the woman who was supposed to be stoned to death for conceiving a baby out of wedlock.
We were already fired up to lecture them about sperm banks, telling them that with modern science, a woman doesn’t need to commit adultery to conceive a baby. Hasn’t the world just celebrated 25 years of the first test tube baby, with over a million healthy others born and living well ever since?
Then the Nigerians disappointed us by freeing Lawal. But they have compensated by giving us the games fiasco. With exaggerated dismay, we are loudly wondering why they offered to host the games when they knew that they lacked the capacity to organise them properly. We need these kinds of horror stories about other people to feed our national ego. Long live Nigeria! May the mess in the games continue so we can continue feeling good!
Joachim Buwembo is Editor of The Sunday Vision of Kampala
E-mail: newvision.co.ug
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