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  Pastor Robert Kayanja: Good Shepherd or Deadly Poacher?

Daily Monitor
May 23, 2009

http://www.monitor.co.ug/artman/publish/Ejiet/Pastor_Robert_Kayanja_Good_shepherd_or_deadly_poacher_85282.shtml

It’s a delightfully warm spring evening. After six months of bitterly cold weather I am happy to stroll through the main street of an American city, from the university to my Apartment Hotel, instead of taking a bus. Suddenly a young African-American man materialises by my side and falls into stride.

“Great weather, Sir,” he quips. I concur, adding that back home the weather is like this all the year round. Out of the blue he asks: “Do you like women?” here we go again, I say to myself. Another pimp with a bevy of tasty flesh to peddle. Aloud I say: “I love women, man! I eat, breathe and sleep [with] women. They are part of my DNA! So what are you saying?”

His next question just about knocked me over. “Do you like men?” “I DO NOT LIKE MEN!” I hissed and resumed my walk. The kid was tenacious. If I crossed the street to try and lose him, he would be there waiting for me.

He decided to advertise his wares or whatever else he thought he was marketing, by walking a few feet in front of me, swaying his waist from side to side like a village girl trying the cat-walk. If I stopped or ducked into an alley, he would be right there when I thought the coast must be clear.

Finally, I had to jump into a bus as the only means of getting rid of him.

My views on this business are well known. I have stained these same pages with my thoughts on alternative life-styles or sexual preferences on at least two occasions over the last ten or so years. I refuse to judge people.

The founder of my religion once counselled his followers against judging others lest they themselves be judged. You cannot condemn slavery, apartheid or any other evil visited on a people purely on account of the colour of their skin, and in the same breath damn those whose sexual orientation, however deviant, might be different from your own.

This has not prevented me from flaunting my own inclinations over this matter. Followers of this column with long memories may recall that I once likened this business to a traveller who is given a choice between driving a state- of-the-art chariot from the foundries of Toyota, Rolls-Royce, or Daimler Benz, through a washed and perfumed Kampala Road on the one hand; and swimming through the super polluted Nakivubo Channel on the other hand.

The traveller who opts for Kampala Road not only has traffic lights to help him along, but can also enlist the assistance of an attractive traffic police woman to help him gain entry in case he is not yet a proficient driver, the swimmer who decides to exhibit his skills along the Nakivubo Channel has to navigate between little islands of rotten fruit, dead animals and putrid buveeras. Dual airbags for the chest area, or mounds of filth?

Me, I’ll go for Kampala Road any day. But if some individuals, for whatever reason, decide that the Channel is that way to go, so be it. It will leave Kampala’s main thoroughfare for the rest of us.

Now, this pastor Kayanja business is beginning to go up the nostrils of even liberals like me who would rather not poke their noses where they have no business. Is the good churchman bonking the wrong bed-mates or is he not? Why would half a dozen young men all conspire to come up with an identical tale?

And why would five of the six boys or men suddenly retract statements they had presumably made on oath, after a lengthy visit to the CID headquarters? Before Pastor Kayanja helped renovate Old Kampala police station, he was a lone ranger, fighting lonely battles. Now he appears magically to have found new and powerful allies!

The young men may well have been promised huge sums of money to set up the man of God, as some of them now claim. But equally plausible is the oft- repeated allegation that fabulous amounts of foreign money may have been injected into the country on a fierce recruitment drive.

Unlike the African-American seducer who clearly expected me to pay for his services (having diagnosed wrongly that I might be inclined the Nakivubo Channel way), some organisations have decided to use the power of money to swell their flocks. In a hungry country and continent where a fistful of dollars dramatically improves one’s material standing in society, we are not safe, citizens; we are not safe.

Contact: ejieta@yahoo.com

 
 

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