The so-called “Service Award” is now in vogue. This is strange because service is its own reward.
However, since politicians have bastardised the term service, why not rescue it from their machinations?
I propose what a logician would call Reductio ad absurdum. It is a Latin phrase which means “reduction to the absurd”.
In this vein, let us have the Annual Service Awards. You know, like the Academy Awards in America.
The latter, according to Mr and Mrs Google, is an annual award given to a performer, director, technician, etc., of the motion-picture industry for superior achievement in a specific category: judged by the voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and symbolised by the presentation of an Oscar.
As with the Oscars, we can have different categories for different winners.
For instance, there’s an Oscar for Best Picture, performance by an actor in a leading role, performance by an actress in a leading role, performance by an actor in a supporting role, performance by an actress in a supporting role, animated feature film, cinematography and costume design.
Accordingly, the nominees for Service Award Best Picture would go to: 1 A picture of the Speaker radiantly smiling, presumably to the bank where the Service Award is kept.
2. A picture of every National Unity Platform member smiling, with a sneer.
3. One of Mzee when he said, “I am nobody’s servant”.
4. A picture of Honourable “Seki”, as the Speaker calls him, during the 2006 elections, when he was accused by some people in Lwemiyaga of pulling out a gun against an LC1.
The nominees for Performance by a Service Awardee in a leading role would be hotly contested between every Member of Parliament who has ever received an all-that-glitters-is-not-gold handshake from the government.
The award for best costume design during this Service Award saga may be extended to the lady from Bushenyi who once coined the colourful expression: “Ekimansulo of the Mouth”.
The Annual Service Awards could be called The Eaters Awards, apostrophe having been eaten. At the annual ceremony, which can be held at Speke Hotel so that Madame Bad Black can host it, there will be spectacle and ceremony; glamour and grandeur. We hope to see Kabindi Fashions designer gowns and tailored Abryanz tuxedos.
That way, on the red carpet, we can ask the winning politicians who they are wearing. To which many would reply, “Wangi?!!?”
Of course, most of them would turn the red carpet into a runway for corruption’s elite.
All bleached skin and dyed hair, the anticipation would build as the “Chai” stars arrive, creating an atmosphere of expected payoffs, bailouts and bribery anticipation that sets the stage for a night of vampires. The winners in each category will be sure to deliver a gang of speeches. From emotional acceptance speeches, “I could not have done this without the people of my constituency who I have routinely robbed.”
To unexpected wins where suddenly we see a Reverend or pastor receiving an Eaters Award.
The Awards themselves would be statuettes, like the Oscars.
The Oscars are a stylised figure of a knight holding a crusader’s sword standing on a reel of film with five spokes signifying the five original branches of the Academy (actors, directors, producers, technicians and writers). However, the Eaters Awards can be a pot-bellied figure standing on five wads of cash signifying each hundred million dished out to a now beleaguered parliamentary commissioner.
Naturally, we must guard against tribalism. So there must be regional balancing in dishing out the Eaters Award.
We must also guard against lies. For example, it was recently disproven that “the brother always dies first” in a horror movie.
This trope was exposed as a fiction by Complex Networks, an American media and entertainment company for youth culture. It compiled a survey of 50 horror films starring Black actors. Only in five of these (10 percent) did a Black character die first.
In that spirit, let us not assume that the robbed citizens will attend the Service Awards stark naked.
Disclaimer: This is a parody column
