I was in Kampala a couple of days last week. One of those evenings, I went running, in keeping with my exercise regime. I left the office as the sun was setting and after a long-winding 18km, I wound up at the city square at 7:30pm. My end point was intentional. The season that we find ourselves in as a country calls for the unusual. From this point on, I prayer-walked; past the Central Police Station, the High Court and Parliament before heading home.

When I turned my phone on later that night, I found a message from a dear friend of mine. She was wondering what I was thinking walking in the dark by myself; snaking through the late evening traffic, she had spotted me somewhere in Naguru at around 8:30pm. That reminded me of another friend who, a couple of months ago, had seen me running on the Northern ByPass before day-break; he called me later in the day to ask if I was out of my mind to risk my life running on a deserted road, by myself, before the sun was up.

That we now have to worry about what time we can be up and about is a tell-all sign of how far down we have spiraled as a country. That the rule of law is skewed towards the say-so of a few people in “powerful” positions is a damning indictment of our collective existence.

And so we ask, in this new dispensation – the democracy of bread – where should we run to? Certainly not to our lawmakers and politicians. They are the problem. They are the turn-coats: troubadours who swing at will from one side of the political divide to another, singing for their supper. They won’t even stay for dessert. And it doesn’t matter which table they are eating at. Their loyalty and service are to the highest bidder!

Increase in crime. Regime functionaries saying different things about the same issue. Meanwhile, “Insiders” are equally being locked up for unspecified charges and security personnel uniforms are getting crispier by the day.

At such a time as this, the words of Jesus, the itinerant preacher who walked the dusty streets of Jerusalem 2000 years ago come to mind: As soon as you see a cloud coming up in the west, you say, “It’s going to rain,” and it does. When the south wind blows, you say, “It’s going to get hot,” and it does. Are you trying to fool someone? Frauds! You can correctly predict the weather by looking at the earth and sky, but for some reason you don’t really know what’s going on right now, do you?

In Uganda, it’s about time in our history that we have to turn the bottom of the tin to look at the sell-by date. Again.