Mr Bruce Baraba Kabasa, the Chairman of the appointments board Makerere University wrote to Vice-Chancellor Prof John Ssentamu on Friday last week, directing him to suspend Dr Nyanzi for using vulgar and offensive language to criticize Ms Museveni on social media.
This particular post on Dr Nyanzi’s Facebook timeline had by the time of this report generated over 5.6k likes and 1,908 shares.
The same vulgar prose was seen on her facebook time line April 2016 during a protest against the lock out by the institute’s director Prof. Mahmood Mamdani; she later stripped naked while on the school premises, sparking massive debate in and out of the country.
In a Monday media interview, Dr Nyanzi, a mother of three, told Journalists that she is simply maximizing of her God given tongue to fight for what she believes is right, quoting James 3:5 which says; Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark.
“I work with words and words are really very powerful. The Bible says that the tongue is a very small body part but it is the most vicious, most dangerous. I don’t think that God was foolish when he said that. So, I believe in the power of the word and I think what I do is very much within the Ugandan context. I know how to play with words and I have done so, so beautifully that people have begun to struggle to make meaning out of them.” She told the Observer Newspaper, explaining her choice of words used against the First Lady recently.
What is surprising to the research fellow is getting a bigger audience when she uses such words as opposed to use of decent words.
“I have a larger following when I say particular body parts. I don’t have bullets; I don’t have anything; so, I use the words. I know how to use rhetoric to persuade people. I did Communication Studies and Literature as my first degree.”
“Anyone who knows my timeline on Facebook knows that when I write in the so-called clean language, my likes and shares are very small. When I write using graphic language, which I have no problem with because I never created these words; I get hundreds of likes, comments and shares. A language like Luganda is over 1,000 years old and the English language is even older; so, I didn’t create these words but I found them; let’s use them.”
Nyanzi notes that she is not the first person to critic the President, Mr Museveni or his wife.
“When I call Museveni or his wife the names I call them, I’m not the first critic to say what I’m saying. People started criticizing him in 1986 or even earlier like [the late President Milton] Obote but the day I called him [bum], I got 7,000 likes.” She said, adding that she doesn’t really care how people perceive what she writes as long as they take the message.
cnakalungi@ugchristiannews.com
