As close as two coats of paint that have brushed by each other, the traders and Mzee met this week.
As they all settled down to their seats, he stared at the traders and the traders stared back.
Silence reigned as the hall setting in which the meeting was held seemed to expand in size to create a lot of empty space around the verbal gunfighters, Mzee versus the traders.
Although they were all seated, it was definitely a standoff.
“As we told you, for us in the NRM, we support trade and not aid. That is our slogan: trade not aid. You see, there is no ‘R’ in trade. So reports of the NRM slogan being ‘trader not aid’ are false. Questions, please,” Mzee said.
Instinctively, a trader wearing a red beret found his arm shooting up. And with the excited intensity of a slay queen in a room full of wigs, he urgently wanted to ask a question.
“Somebody else, the only place I like my red tops is in my army or on the beer I have informed everybody I do not drink,” Mzee revealed.
“Your Highness, sir. I want to know why the taxes are many,” one trader asked.
“Why are you calling me ‘Your Highness’? Because I talked of beer? I need to inform you that I am 80 and about go to Heaven…which rhymes with Mus-Heaven,” Mzee said.
No way was he going to be sidetracked by political desperados, hopeless yahoos.
At that point, he wondered if Mbidde had exposed him to the word “Yahoo.”
Mbidde was indeed a great man. He was his own man. He was a man who could not be labelled lowbrow, middlebrow or highbrow. His brow was surely a unibrow. He was the good DP.
Not good as in good, but good as in good riddance.
Tearing himself away from that reverie, Mzee was confident he could outwit the traders.
They traded in wares but he traded in wheres, as in where is the love? Where there is a will, there is a way. And where were you when we went to the bush?
Sure mistakes are made by us, he mused, but that just means more mistakes are corrected as a result.
“Mzee, we do not want to pay new taxes,” one trader chimed in.
“My young son, taxes are supposed to be paid in full and it is government’s role to collect those taxes,” replied Mzee.
“But you never paid taxes to Amin or Obote’s Second Government. Did you?” the trader shouted.
That is when the meeting broke up like an Opposition rally caught on the wrong side of the Public Order Management Act.
Both the sides, the traders and Mzee, agreed to meet at a later date which was not NRM Day, Tarehe Sita or the CDF’s birthday.
Those three days were no-go areas; they were already spoken for by political suitors of the most exceptional skill.
Still, the politics of choosing a day to meet was not easy. To the traders, any day they could meet was fine.
However, the NRM treated days and dates as history making moments in which dramatic narratives of the NRM revolutionary spirit could be continuously reactivated and renewed.
Later, it was agreed that they should meet in June.
They chose June because June is the middle of the year and the middle is where Mzee is taking Uganda’s income status.
The traders huddled together in WhatsApp groups to plan what they would say to Mzee before he takes his unscheduled trip to the eternal North.
One trader said he respected Mzee highly and would respectfully ask Mzee if there are any genuine foreign investors and how much they are taxed.
“No, you cannot ask that question,” his colleagues told him.
“Why?” he replied.
“Because Mzee will get angry,” they chorused. “And that’s when he becomes a trader too…a trader of blows so fierce that he reportedly floored Tyson whose surname is Waragi.”
