UGANDA VOTES; REALITY

We are a product of the society we come from, jubilant or disgruntled after the February 18th polls now this is OUR CURRENT CONSENSUS. We shall bear with the consequences of our choices. The good and bad. If you had theories in mind about politics in Uganda, think again. This is a country like no other...its setting its own path. Corruption and bad governance may cause regime change else where but not here as yet. Ugandans as a people have decided, cry if you may but you cant change that.The desire for change is human but not many are willing to pay the price for the change so blame not the Ugandans, they simply think change is costly. If this is true or not is another debate. The writers of history must be very confused because the aspirations of Ugandans and their political choices are IN-CONGRUENT. The defeat of the opposition may be the single most important thing that has ever happened to them. This time round they have no choice but go back to the drawing board. They are to build their opposition  de novo. I believe regardless of our political aspirations we all have a reason to celebrate at least for the low level of violence and the improved quality of debate. Uganda at 48.

Thinking about Ug!

I am so sure and need not to apologize for my certainty that many of my friends are doing so badly when it comes to critical thinking as regards this country(Uganda) and its future. You have either deliberately chosen to think its not your business or if you have thought about it,you've not stretched your thinking beyond the confines of your experience and popularist views around you. Of course there are those of us who are consciously thinking and studying about this country and the rest of the world and trying to match it to where it is from where it should be.There's a general malaise among Ugandans that usually catches successful people when their success appears so sudden. They tend to  attribute it to a single factor in their struggle and more often than not their success becomes the biggest stumbling block to their future successes. A story will be told of an oppressed people who were liberated at certain point and to this new found freedom they made merry for three decades and at no point did they consider laying strategies of ensuring continuity of this freedom.The only strategies they laid were those of how to ensure continuity of gratitude to their liberator. For years they thought they were free and never questioned anything that went on, they surrendered their thinking to their "liberator". It was always a multi-factorial process not attributable to an individual alone but several other things happening concurrently, this they did not see. They were  blinded by abrupt success and became disenfranchised. They practically saved their brains for other things that they considered more important,so they drove costly cars on potholed roads,they constructed their houses in unplanned neighbourhoods, they believed the line between police and army is thin and actually others thought these forces were meant to be the same,they thought electricity was a luxury for the urban rich, their neighbour's child's education in a poor third world school was the neighbour's business alone and so long as they afforded duplicated drugs from India their health was guaranteed. Little did they know that all of life was multifactorial, a mistake at one stage would affect the outcome of the whole process. They despised contradictory views and alienated those holding such views. They were actually building a new wall for around themselves years after they had managed a prison escape. These are the challenges of abrupt success and failure to predict a pattern of future events and avoid the pitfalls. The deception of a warm bed!!!

SELF MADE MEN

By: Frederick Douglass

That there is, in more respects than one, something like a stoicism in this title, I freely admit. Properly speaking, there are in the world no such men as self-made men. That term implies an individual independence of the past and present which can never exist,

Our best and most valued acquisitions have been obtained either from our contemporaries or from those who have preceded us in the field of thought and discovery. We have all either begged, borrowed, or stolen. We have reaped where others have sown, and that which others have strown, we have gathered. It must in truth be said, though it may not accord well with self-conscious individuality and self-conceit, that no possible native force of character, and no depth of wealth and originality, can lift a man into absolute independence of his fellowmen, and no generation of men can be independent of the preceding generation. The brotherhood and interdependence of mankind are guarded and defended at all points. . .

Nevertheless, the title of my lecture is eminently descriptive of a class and is, moreover, a fit and convenient one for my purpose, in illustrating the idea which I have in view…Self-made men are the men who, under peculiar difficulties and without the ordinary helps of favoring circumstances, have attained knowledge, usefulness, power and position and  have learned from themselves the best uses to which life can be put in this world, and in the exercises of these uses to build up worthy character. They are the men who owe little or nothing to birth, relationship, or friendly surroundings; to wealth inherited or to early approved means of education; who are what they are, without the aid of any favoring conditions by which other men usually rise in the world and achieve great results. . . They are in a peculiar sense indebted to themselves for themselves. If they have traveled far, they have made the road on which they have travelled. If they have ascended high, they have built their own ladder . . . Such men as these, whether found in one position or another, whether in the college or in the factory; whether professors or plowmen; whether Caucasian or Indian; whether Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-African, are self-made men and are entitled to a certain measure of respect for their success and for proving to the world the grandest possibilities of human nature, of whatever variety of race or color.

Though a man of this class need not claim to be a hero or to be worshipped as such, there is genuine heroism in his struggle and something of sublimity and glory in his triumph. Every instance of such success is an example and help to humanity. It, better than any mere assertion, gives us assurance of the latent powers and resources of simple and unaided manhood. It dignifies labor, honors application, lessens pain and depression, dispels gloom from the brow of the destitute and weariness from the heart of him about to faint, and enables man to take hold of the roughest and flintiest hardships incident to the battle of life, with a lighter heart, with higher hopes and a larger courage.