Uganda · Politics · Satire

The Weeks Where Decades Happen

We were told, it would be a term of no sleep. What we weren't told is that we would be the ones lying awake, refreshing a timeline, waiting to find out who is still in their chair.

SEGAWA ELVIS WILLIAM 16 May 2026

Parliament House, Kampala. The chair inside is the same chair. It is only the person sitting in it that keeps changing.

"Buli kintu kirina ekiseera kyakyo, na buli kigambo wansi w'eggulu kirina ekiseera kyakyo."
To everything there is a season — Omubuulizi (Ecclesiastes) 3:1

Since Tuesday, this country has not rested. One thing has been happening, and then before you can sit with it, another happens. The President stood up on Tuesday and told us this is a five-year term of no sleep. Now, I do not believe anybody in this country has slept properly since as far as I can go, so in that sense it is not news. But from this side of Mukono, where we cannot even hear the noise that is coming from Nakasero and Kololo, I can confirm one thing. The no-sleeping part is going very well.

A lot is going on. And the people in the positions, the ones who were comfortable, are the ones the no-sleep seems to have found first. There is a saying for this, and I will get to it. But first, let me tell you about the joke that turned out not to be a joke.

The Outgoing Speaker

You know the commentator,. The verbal assassin. Honourable Norbert Mao. For a while now he has been telling us, calmly but certainly,  that Honourable Anita Among will not be returning as Speaker of Parliament. He kept saying it. He kept calling her the outgoing Speaker.

And most of us laughed. Of course we laughed. If you watched the 11th Parliament at all, you saw the power and the energy this lady carried over those Members. She did not look like someone who was going anywhere. So when Mao kept saying "outgoing," we treated it the way you treat a man who insists it will rain on a clear day. You smile, you carry on, you do not bring an umbrella.

Then yesterday night. I think it was yesterday night. The CDF, who also chairs the Patriotic League of Uganda, comes out and tells us that Honourable Oboth Oboth, (yes those are 2 Oboths) is going to be the next Speaker.

Now here is the small lesson in Ugandan political grammar. When somebody from the NRM, or in yellow for matters of certanity, tells you who the Speaker is going to be, that person is not predicting. They're announcing. Because the numbers were counted a long time ago, in a room you and I were not invited to. So the joke was not a joke. The man reading the weather had simply seen the clouds before the rest of us looked up.

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen. Vladimir Lenin

Sit with that one. We have just lived a week that ate a decade. And it is not finished, because the same announcement told us a female Deputy Speaker update is still loading, which is a polite way of saying Honourable Tayebwa should also not get too attached to his current seat. Decades, in this country, can be processed in a single afternoon.

One Tweet, One Life

What I keep thinking about is not even who is up and who is down. It is the speed of the door. We are watching political doors being opened and, at the very same moment, political doors and windows being closed, and almost all of it is arriving through a phone. A post. X, formerly Twitter, formerly X.

One tweet can change a life. I am not being dramatic. A man can go to bed a Deputy Speaker and wake up as a sentence in someone else's announcement. A woman can carry an entire Parliament on her shoulders for one whole term and then read, on a screen, in the same font we use for drafting bills, that she is the "outgoing" one. We are not being governed in a chamber anymore. We are being governed in a timeline, and the timeline does not buffer for anybody.

One post goes up. Somewhere, a career goes down.

What I Watched This Week

The tower that used to tell Kampala when Parliament was sitting. These days the announcement reaches us by phone, and faster.

So in the middle of all this, I did what any sensible citizen does when reality becomes too much. I watched something. There is a Korean show, one season only, called The Whirlwind. I went in for entertainment. I came out feeling like somebody had been recording us.

It is about a Prime Minister and a Deputy Prime Minister and a president who is not as clean as the photographs suggest, and a fight over who really runs the place once you remove the smiling. Power moving. Chairs moving. People who were certain on Monday becoming "former" by Thursday. I am not saying it is about anywhere in particular. I am only saying I watched a show, and the show watched back. If you have a free evening between posts, I recommend it. It is a good read of what a transition actually feels like from inside, which, conveniently, is also a thing we are currently experiencing for free and without a subscription we chose.

And we have tuned in. 

For God and My Country

We put it on the motto. For God and my country. God first, even. So let me bring the Book, in the language I praye in, because some things land harder in Luganda.

Abatuukirivu bwe baba bangi, abantu basanyuka; naye omubi bw'afuga, abantu basinda. Engero (Proverbs) 29:2

When the righteous are many, the people rejoice. But when the wicked rules, the people groan. You can read that line in any trading centre of Uganda you'll and watch heads nod before you reach the end of it. The translation is old. The address is current.

This is the part where I should be angry, and I find that I am mostly just awake, which the President did say I should be. The men and women in those chairs are not, all of them, bad people. Some of them mean well. But the chairs do not belong to them. The chairs are handed out, and handed back, and the person doing the handing is not the voter in Mukono. We say God and country. What we are watching is closer to numbers and convenience.

I have my own suspicion about why a particular chair mattered so much to particular people, and what it was meant to preside over. The sovereignty business. The other bills the 11th Parliament rushed through while we were busy living. But that is its own story, with its own receipts, and I am not going to throw it in here half-dressed. I will give it the full post it deserves next time. From this side of Mukono it only looks like a pattern. Next time I will lay the pattern on the table properly.

So We Wait

The bird on our flag. Still standing on one leg. Still waiting, like the rest of us, to see what happens next.

The 12th Parliament has not even properly sat. The first sitting is later this month. And already the chairs have moved, the joke has stopped being a joke, the commentator has been proven right, and a whole leadership has been reshuffled in the time it takes to read this far.

My father's advice for a season like this is simple, and I will give it to you the way he gives it. Make sure your stomach is well fed. Keep the phone charged. And wait for the tweet to pop up on the screen, because that, and not the chamber, is now where you will learn what has become of your country.

         Buli kintu kirina ekiseera kyakyo. Everything has its season. Even this one. Even them.

The decade that happened this week is not the last one. There are more weeks coming, and if Lenin was right, more decades folded inside them. We have tuned in. We will see what happens. We did not choose the show, but we are not going to pretend we are not watching.

May God, who put Himself first in our motto, remember that the country put second is still here, still awake, still waiting.

Amen. And Selah.

⁂

P.S. — To the Honourable who reads this and recognises his chair in it: do not take it personally. Take it seasonally. And to the one who is sure his seat is safe, that is exactly what the last one thought on Monday.

IMAGE CREDITS: Parliament of Uganda building by Andrew Regan; Parliament tower, photographer via Wikimedia Commons; Grey Crowned Crane by Francis C. Franklin. All via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.