I am Samson Kasumba and if you have been in the business of reading my work here or my tweets you need no introduction to my flirtations with controversy or perhaps it is even a full-blown love affair with controversy. So here I am at it again.
In many normal situations of marriage, it is easy to understand that there will be frustrations between spouses for one reason or the next.
Most women will get frustrated when they feel that their spouses have acted in ways that leave them insecure. The men on the other hand want their egos massaged and to that end there is no space for too much of anything is bad.
Now when things go south in a relationship there is unfortunately the worst-case scenario. This is when one of the spouses finds themselves feeling that anything but this man or woman is OK.
Let me interrogate this a little more. How can the maid be better that your wife? Is this because you and your wife have fallen out too much that anyone but your wife is better?
Fine you have chosen that your wife must go, but to replace her with the maid may be bordering on reckless as a result of frustration. I have not yet believed that my houseboy is a much better replacement of myself when I fall out with my spouse.
Fine we may argue that the houseboy needs to be given a chance. Who knows he may be better than your departing PhD holding spouse who has battered you for years. What if he does not prove to be what you just suspect he is?
Are you not falling from your frying pan right into the fire? Should you not give yourself time to study who exactly you want and do not want?
Must we gamble on our lives with anyone who seems to have so called potential on the assumption that everyone deserves a chance? Should we give a student of medicine with incredible potential a major surgery because have issues with the senior surgeon? Of course you may argue that why not, if that student is conducting the operation on your enemy or co-wife. Because then you do not care whether the patient lives or dies! The response is different if that student is conducting an operation on your mother.
This is not an argument against giving those with potential a chance. I am just saying that is it wrong to allow our frustration to form a major part of our choices. From experience when that happens we never end up better than we wanted to be.
This for me is how we have never had a president out of careful deliberation on what we want and do not want as a nation.
We got so frustrated and fed up with colonialism that we ended up with leadership in a combination we never needed.
Let me know other than let the white man go at all costs how else can brilliant minds expected that Muteesa and Obote, in that set up, were going to lead a young nation?
I can hear some saying let us have these white people away we shall sort the rest later. That never happened.
We then got so fed up with Obote we ended up with Amin. Then many later.
The bush war was supported by some because they were so fed up of Obote. Obote left more than 37 years ago. I am sure they are now contented. Now the frustration is back.
Anyone that is not Museveni is better than Museveni. Is this really true? Have we not been here before? Well, I am sure that many do not know that we have had these very sentiments before. They were not alive when Museveni was better than Obote.
It is quite interesting to note that some openly say that Obote was better than Museveni. You could have been lynched in open air if you had suggested this in 1989. History repeats itself so we hear.
The sad fact is that many never live long enough to see that happen.
I see things and hear things that make me worry that I may be led by a young person with huge potential who thinks they have new ideas and yet they are recycling what we have seen before and whose results we know.
Let me just say that please get rid of your spouse if you have to but do take serious steps in choosing who replaces the void they leave behind. It better not be anyone simply because they have potential. That potential may remain just that and nothing concrete.