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Satire: Dr Kasenene’s tips on how to ace Uneb exams with no success card
Life is such a race. A terrific race, I tell you. Even Dr Kasenene is in it even when we are increasingly left wondering who of the nutritionist and the Genero, tweets more.
“Food like this may be the reason many people start developing bellies,” Kasenene tweeted the other day.
He was sharing a picture of a very yummy looking plate of kawaunga na maragwe (beans and posho). The platter was so appealing to the taste buds that many could have instantly yawned.
Yet this man added: “Refined grains like posho and rice are easily converted to sugar and then fat in the body.”
You see, he gives a lot of tips that are as good as success cards. Whether you receive one or not is irrelevant to your success or failure. And not receiving one does not mean no one wished you well anyway.
The other day, my Pakistani daughter brought home a success card. She is in P4. She said her friend had bought her the card to wish her success in a test. Yes, a test. Kids these days!
Well, Benazir is lucky the card was hand delivered by the wisher. I was lucky just once in my many duels with questions a man called Ongom and later Bukenya had decided I had to pass to progress to the next learning curve.
Ahead of PLE, I received a card from my sister. It was my first and only card. Because I never received another, I thought no one cared whether I aced Ongom’s and Bukenya’s questions (the two were the Uneb bosses in our era of tadoba education).
But this thought changed after my A-Level when an encounter with corruption revealed the unimaginable. A student who had been in a boarding school returned home, the cover of his metallic sanduku almost popping open because there were too many love letters and success cards to fit in there.
The love letters, it was like hundreds of Shakespeare had descended on us. Those young lovers could write!
Then the cards.
Just what happened? Well, the boy was the information prefect or something like that, so he was receiving these things from the students to send to wherever. Of course, postal service meant payment for the letters and cards.
The chap would receive a letter and the money for the postage, pocket the cash and dump the Shakespearean marvel of diction and figures of speech into his metallic box. Then the cards…
Of course, the poor senders would never know their letters and cards were not delivered, let alone sent to the postal service. There must have been many lovers in this Jinja school waiting earnestly for replies to their letters.
One of the letters by a guy called Opus said: “Eunice, your voice sounds like Celine Dion on the Titanic. Please reply so that I can confirm that a dance is the vertical expression of horizontal desires and that you are the string in my guitar and the wind in my flute.”
I don’t know how long Opus waited for Eunice’s reply – he could still be waiting now! But I know he would have killed someone had he found his letter being used for wrapping kabalagala in Kakira because they were never delivered in the first place.
It is that time again. Some prefect is probably doing it all over again. You’ve probably not received your card, not because Dr Kasenene disturbed the peace of the sender by saying yoghurt is bad for writing letters, but because of a similar corruption.
However, like capturing Kony’s guitar, saucepans and jerry cans did not finish off the LRA, just sit the exams without worrying about beans, posho or success cards. Life is a race – with Dr Kasenene, cards or no cards.
Wishing all Uneb candidates success in their exams!
Disclaimer: This is a parody column
