The recent political shifts against the National Resistance Movement (NRM) and President Yoweri Museveni particularly in Buganda and Busoga, hitherto known strongholds, are grim pointers to what the future portends. The loss came against the backdrop when NRM first lost Kampala in 2001, and later Jinja, Masaka, Mbale, Wakiso, Kabale, and Tororo, and the conventional wisdom then was to dismiss it as an urban phenomenon mostly driven by the ungrateful elites.

Comrade Kajabago ka Rusoke, the lanky and maverick Marxist intellectual, who died this week aged 86, was son of Samson Rusoke, the Omuhiikirwa (prime minister) of Tooro under the reign of Sir George Kamurasi Rukidi Mpuuga, grandfather to the current Omukama Oyo Nyimbwa Ibamba Iguru. Rusoke also served the first reign of Oyo’s father, Patrick Olimi Kaboyo from 1965 to 1967 when kingdoms were abolished.

In Macbeth, William Shakespeare writes about the Thane of Cawdor, where loyalty, fate, ambition, greed, chaos, disorder and fall of man conspire to breed an obsession with power that goes unchecked by moral constraints. Sadly when one has visited the shrines and believes that witches can tell how bright their future is, they never listen to reason, except the daggers in their hand.

The presidential inauguration held on Wednesday this week at the Kololo Independence Grounds, passed off well, and hugely a success with eleven Presidents, Heads of State, and twelve delegations from across the world attending in personally, defying the Covid19 pandemic. Locally, close to five thousand Ugandans mostly leaders from districts, parliament and Cabinet, all tested for Covid19 three days earlier and found to be negative also in attended in person.