By Ted Malanda
While everyone is going bananas about the length of school skirts, a scandal of monumental proportions is going on at the Department of Defense (DoD).
Just last week, they advertised a weird tender in the newspapers. I’m shocked that civil society activists have not sprung forward to condemn what amounts to blatant human rights violations.
First, the people at DoD want someone to supply spaghetti. What’s going on here? Our boys are built for war, not a beauty contest and it’s sacrilege to feed them on that sissy stuff. What they need, and in gigantic amounts, is sembe — ugali. And not that rubbish that is bought in shops. It must be ground in a posho mill to ‘catch’ the stomach properly.
In the same manner, the tender for supply of white bread is clearly in bad taste.
A lad marching to Kismayu with a rucksack full of bombs and associated crude weapons needs serious breakfast in his belly. Something like a big plate of githeri washed down with thick porridge and a calabash of cold water mixed with gunpowder. Not bread and tea. That is food for shopkeepers.
But what was that madness about ‘supply of unfertilised eggs’? Where I come from, such eggs are referred to as ‘foolish eggs’. I’m outraged that the Commander-in-Chief — a champion of free primary education — is allowing our boys to be fed on eggs that never went to school. This athletic country is not short of cockerels to run marathons after hens and educate eggs for our boys to eat.
Something else caught my attention and that is foot powder. Frankly, I have no idea what that means. But I suspect it’s some medicinal dust our boys smear between their toes to ensure fungi doesn’t germinate on account of spending three days stuffed in jungle boots.
But why must our boys wear jungle boots anyway? The Al Shabaab seem quite comfortable running around in torn slippers so we have no excuse to stuff our boys in jungle boots.
Meanwhile, does anyone know why Ugandan soldiers wear gumboots?
And there was something else in that tender document that miffed me. Why in the name of God would our boys need mosquito nets?
Does anyone at DoD seriously imagine that a mosquito would have the guts to bite a soldier armed with an M16?
