Even the most unobservant person will notice inequality in society regardless of gender, organization, geography, or nationality. Often, inequality has been around us from childhood that many people consider it natural. Worst of all, they think it is written in stone, unchangeable to the extent that some Church leaders feel that they are entitled to be driven in Mercedes Benz cars and to live in palaces; a president can shamelessly proclaim that he works for nobody but himself and his family etc.
By Okot Nyormoi, editor, retired cell biologist, author of the novel, Burden of Failure
Though the finality of life is the same for everyone, how one dies may depend on one’s status in life. Below is an excerpt from a novel based on life in the 1980s and 1990s, but it is so true in real life even today. The story began with a radio announcement which went like this,
“Here are personal announcements read to you by Labalpiny. Mr Joseph Inyangat passed away on Saturday morning”.
That was the announcement of my girlfriend Alice’s father’s death.
Despite his age, the man was a dandy. Dressed in fabrics made entirely of palm leaves. His name is Michael Santos. Santos lives in Jinja Camp, which is a suburb of Lira City in Northern Uganda
Every item of clothing he wore, was made of dried palm leaves. The round safari hat. His short-sleeve jacket. His wide pair of shorts with crisp trendy lines. As though freshly laundered, pressed, and all that. His flat footwear. All of them, are made of palm leaves. Palm leaves as everyone knows, are the material used primarily for making mats and baskets. Santos puts it to good use to create his amazing wardrobe.
By Akena p'Ojok, former Minister of Transport in the Obote II government
Who says Presidents do not soliloquize? Dr. A. M. Obote was very good at it. When agonizing over the bad state of Uganda economy, he was often overheard saying, 'it is bad enough for a person to be poor, but for a country to be poor is a terrible thing!' He would then, almost instinctively ask any person nearest to him about 'this rumor about the smell of paraffin on Lake Albert, is this true? Could this indicate the presence of Petroleum deposit? If there is Petroleum nearby in Southern Sudan, why can't Uganda have a bit of it also?
Plato, the great scholar of Ancient Greece, said that the differences between rich and poor should not exceed a ratio of one to four. In the eighteenth century the influential writer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who gave birth to the notion of the “Social Contract”, argued that the invention of private property and immoderate accumulation are the origins of great discord among peoples. He also was one of the first to advocate a return to democracy, a system of government that had got lost once the Greek empire declined. He saw the modest reforms of his era as “garlands of flowers along the chains of iron”. He died a decade before the French Revolution but was celebrated by its leaders.
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