By Seruga Titus
Charles Onyango Obbo has taken to dancing on a dead man’s grave so much, that it’s about time, someone said something. Pierre Nkurunziza was a lecturer at Bujumbura University in 1993, when the military invaded the University precincts looking for Hutu elites. Many were arrested and killed. Pierre Nkurunziza survived, because he put his fitness to good use & escaped with a few surviving friends to the bushes where they found themselves surrounded by thousands of defenseless people that an extremist Tutsi army was massively slaughtering as they had done in 1972, when Pierre Nkurunziza had lost his father while he was yet a young man.
The elites amongst the people, organized defenses with a few rebels they had found in the bush, women and men came together and spontaneously created an organization with a French acronym FDD. It began as a people’s defense force exclusively, then grew into an organized military resistance force with a sophisticated command structure & a minimum political goal; survival. CDD came in later as the political wing for negotiation purposes. Unlike Kagame who shot an individual he had signed a peace agreement with, out of the sky, Nkurunziza negotiated a peace agreement and died after CDD/FDD had chosen another leader and after Gen. Evariste Ndayishimiye had won a landslide victory in a national general election.
The people who recently voted in Ndayishimiye are the same ones who made CDD/FDD. It’s a fragile & heart wrenching peace (to the extent that many who won it are dead), however Pierre Nkurunziza has won it where Kagame is still digging ever deeper war trenches. But Burundi’s peace still needs nursing & my prayer is that the East African Community lovers of peace and the members; Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and South Sudan should strongly stand with the people and especially the new leadership of Burundi.
One of Bob Marley’s best beats is a song called Pimper’s Paradise. It’s an elegant blend of a reggae beat, it would make the worst electronic speaker systems come to life, however, it’s most relevant now because it teaches about the world of deception, immoral profiteering, corruption, exploitation & superficial living or just Pimpin’!
“I Told you he is a pimp”, I said to some of my colleagues yesterday morning. The only person who would descend on Nkurunziza & belittle his way of life and governance while contrasting him with his own angel but a certified killer in Kigali, is a pimp, I told them. Today, when one colleague saw another tweet from, I overheard him saying that someone has to talk to Obbo about Pierre Nkurunziza & Burundi.
In an opinion article that appeared in the Daily Nation, Charles Onyango-Obbo belittles the entire Burundi history & especially FDD/CDD, negates it to a village night-over, calls Nkurunziza an Avocado man (subsisting/village man), thereby negating its leadership. He only mentioned Gen. Ndayishimiye in respect of his talk about Nkurunziza’s demise & never once as hope or prospect for the good fortunes of Burundi, against the backdrop of a fallen President. That’s what pimps do. They are so bad at living, mafiosos can’t stand them. A pimp will give out his sister as a sex slave so he can get his cut. A pimp will sell out a 60 year old for a price of a 16 year old & when his customer complains, he will yell out; “com’on man ask her, knowing she has been pimped to say “16”.
Listening to the song, one would imagine Bob Marley’s singing about the girl which is true, however, his message is about how that immoral business that cheats both client & service provider. Bob Marley obviously hated pimps as much as he hated imperialism as others do and for good reason.
If you are an East African, born in East Africa’s food plentiful capital Kampala, living in East Africa’s business capital, Nairobi & running a “bar & restaurant” in Kagame’s Kigali, I have a name for you. Charles Onyango Obbo checks all the above three boxes except that his eatery in Kigali hardly survives on any food vending, for the brochette served in Kigali is nothing for a less than average carnivore at Kumbuzi, on Gayaza road, Kampala. So why Kigali? There is no pimp where there is no woman & we hear Kigali is the best place in the region with regard to that business. Obbo is also a regular user of social media, a weird thing because pimps don’t regularly tweet. However, because Obbo has to pimp a criminal regime & nonchalantly dismiss a non pimped but genuine article like the people & country of Burundi, Twitter is now a pimp platform as well.
Ordinary old cars are pimped to look exotic, 60 year olds become 16 and murderous regimes become progressive paradises. Here we come again to Bob Marley’s choice of words: “Pimper’s Paradise”. It could be a Singapore of Africa, but the orientation is always towards some paradise.
For the inward looking of the CDD/FDD leadership, Obbo saw leaders who were not smart enough to cover up human rights abuses and borrow money or attract lenders. A pimp mind can’t imagine anyone sitting on people’s precious resources & not taking cash, for a pimp’s life is that instant paradise. Obbo’s contempt for Nkurunziza, is asa result of his decision to decline all Western tricksters who wanted to exchange Burundi’s rare earth metal resources with debt. Obbo’s contempt has no other tenable explanation, other than that he is a pimp. Now that Nkurunziza is gone, the hyenas are laughing, scavengers are circling & pimps are Pimpin’.
I have never heard where being prayerful was so scoffed at, as Obbo did in his article against President Nkurunziza and his wife, where being down to earth was somehow a disablement. Then Obbo gets even lower & talks about a private visit by one of Kagame’s friends who had gone to ask what “Burundi wants”. If Nkurunziza told him balls and uniforms it’s because he had no business with him & one wonders what Obbo thinks Nkurunziza was teaching at the University back in 1993. Was he teaching balls & uniforms?
So Bob Marley sings:
“She love to party, have a good time; She looks so hearty, feeling fine; She loves to smoke, sometime shiftin’ coke;
She loves to model up in the latest fashion.
She’s in the scramble and she moves with passion
She’s getting high, trying to fly the sky.
Eh! Now she is bluesing when there ain’t no blues.
A pimper’s paradise: that’s all she was,
A pimper’s paradise: that’s all she was now;
Every need got an ego to feed;
A pimper’s paradise: I’m sorry for the victim now;
Soon their very heads will bow.
Don’t lose track – don’t lose track of yourself, oh no!
Don’t be just a stock – a stock on the shelf”.
Well, we now know that President Pierre Nkurunziza refused to allow Burundi to become a pimper’s paradise
#theinformant
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