Last week was anything but Holy Week in Uganda. I can’t recall a time when, collectively as a people, we have scowled and muttered expletives and obscenities with such thoughtlessness and reckless abandon. And not just that, during the Passion Week, if you dissented to this new found national freedom of expression, you got mobbed. Big time. By friend and foe alike. Barabbas was the people’s favorite and those who dared speak decency were roundly labeled saboteurs and as punishment for that, got flogged and paraded to the town dump to be made an example of. Turn-the-other-cheek and all that mumbo-jumbo took the back-burner. It was a thug’s life out on Main Street last week.

The season of life am in now dictates my judicious use of time. I don’t watch TV and I find radio mostly depressing. All the news I get is from the newspapers and online sources but even on these usually sanitized streets, there was no escaping the tirade. Granted, when the madness of an entire nation disturbs a solitary mind, it’s not enough to say the woman is mad.

I agree: It’s impossible to reduce public anger and dissatisfaction (Politics for that matter) to a rational, controlled process. There’s always going to be moments of painful, intractable social conflict and unbridled passion, as has lately been the case.

I agree: Everything rises and falls on Leadership.

When a few public servants spend 2 Billion tax payer shillings, in a record 6 days, on a non-eventful trip, hard questions need to be asked.

When our representatives brazenly look aside, hold their noses up in the air and ignore the stench from our hospitals but insist on being allocated colossal sums of money as their first order of business, answers must be given.

When state coffers become the go-to cookie jar for a chosen few and we are told State House is to spend a whooping One Million dollars per week in the next financial year, we know we have been left with more questions than answers.

And that is just the beginning.

So we wail. And in between the sobs, we shout ourselves hoarse but are still ignored. And now we resort to name calling and expletives. And at last, we are heard. But beyond that, what are we to do? Curse some more? Then what?

In the early days of the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr was often accused of straddling the fence with his mode of ‘‘non-violent” resistance which he called ‘‘a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love.” Talking about this perceived conflict, he said: “One of the great philosophical debates of history has been over the whole question of means and ends. And there have always been those who argued that the end justifies the means, that the means really aren’t important; they may be violent, they may be untruthful means; they may even be unjust means to a just end. But we will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in process, and ultimately you can’t reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.”

May hate be too great a burden for us to bear. And like the late Bishop Festo Kivengere who boldly declared, “I Love Idi Amin,” may we wear out those who seek to oppress us with love.

And make no mistake about it. Love is not passive. Love is powerful.