As said by the Oracle of Kifuuta, Kyotera, Buddu

Listen to me, my people.

There is a slow murder happening in our markets, in our kitchens, on our roadsides. Not with knives. With dirt. With carelessness. With the very food we put into our own mouths.

You ask, what has confused your minds? It is as if someone pays you a salary to destroy us from the stomach outward.

THE NIGHT DANCE WITH DOGS

Go to the meat market at dusk. Watch our brothers, the butchers, finish their day. They wipe their knives and leave. The table remains - that black, charcoal-black table, soaked in blood and grease for ten years, never washed clean.

Then the night owners come. Dogs. Hungry market dogs circling, sniffing, licking the board where your children's meat will be cut tomorrow. A dog - you know its nature - it vomits there, and then eats its own vomit from that same place.

Dawn. The butcher returns, whistling, unaware. He lays fresh, red meat on that desecrated altar and chops it for you. And you buy it. You take it home as love for your family, but my friend, you are carrying cancer.

What you carry home is not just meat. It is bacteria. It is germs. It is infection.

THE HUMAN FILTH

I have seen a man in Busembatia scratching a fresh, open wound, pus and blood at the edge, and with those same fingers, serving rice.

I have seen a cook whose hair made my own hair stand up. If I had power, I would have arrested him for assault.

I have seen children sent to the roadside to sell. "Go and work," their fathers say. What does a child know about hygiene? He scratches his head, his nose, his buttocks, and then his innocent hand dives straight into the roasted maize, the chapati, the samosas you will eat.

I met a girl in Bukomansimbi. Skirt torn, underwear showing, and she, unbothered, after scratching herself thoroughly, went on to slice the Juuni and Baluugu. We laughed. But God was not laughing.

I saw a man selling nsenene in Nyendo - our beloved grasshoppers. When business slowed, he overturned his table onto the dust, onto the mud where people spit and urinate, then flipped it back and poured the grasshoppers on again. And his nails! Inches long, black caves of dirt! He does not need a spoon. His nails ARE the spoons.

Look at the smile of those boys in Ngoma and Migyera - teeth yellow, turning blue. That is not just decay. That is a warning.

If I had authority, I would put all those who dry seeds by the roadside, that spoon, those men in a glass cage in the centre of Tirinyi-Pallisa and write in big letters: "COME AND LEARN HOW WE KILL OURSELVES."

THE SPOONS OF MUKAYEMBE AND THE SOUP OF THE MADMAN

Genda wali Mukayembe ewa Mulyanimire Kitamilike. Ask for a spoon. They pull it from a black polythene bag. You touch it and the grime sticks to your fingers and paints your lips. Its colour is not silver. It is the colour of forgotten sins.

Go to any hotel in Rubindi where the doorway is broken and flies - fat, green, buzzing flies from the latrine - drop directly into the sauce.

In the heart of Nakulabye, I saw a woman - a mobile food vendor - carrying a leaking sack covered with polythene. A madman, heat having cooked his brain, walked up and spat his thick saliva straight into her soup, thinking it was a rubbish bin. She just picked it up. Shook it. And continued walking... towards her customers.

Hooooo! My PEOPLE!

The road to Mbale, Tirinyi, Iganga - you find cassava, maize and groundnuts being dried on the road pavements, where cars spit petrol, where tyres grind, where dust is poison. My people, this is preparing our coffins by the roadside.

And those drainage channels? They no longer carry water. They are blocked, constipated with intestines and offal from our fish markets, rotting, stinking. That stench you smell? That is disease fermenting in the open air.

THE ORACLES SAY, WHY WE WILL CRY ABOUT CANCER

Now let me tell you what excites and terrifies me about knowledge.

Cancer is not a curse from the sky; we cook it.

Hear this science from the Oracles of Kifuuta like a drum:

When meat rots overnight in a hot polythene bag, when you keep reusing blackened cooking oil until it smokes like a factory, you create chemicals called carcinogens - poison that tells your healthy cells, "Go mad! Grow without control!"

When your groundnuts, your maize, your cassava sit in damp, dirty sacks, they grow invisible mould - aflatoxin. That is one of the most powerful liver cancer makers on earth.

When you eat food licked by dogs, touched by hands that scratched wounds, cooked in water splashed from a dirty kitchen floor, you swallow Helicobacter, Hepatitis, Human Papilloma - silent viruses and bacteria that live in you for years, causing stomach cancer, liver cancer, throat cancer.

When you drink water blocked by rotting offal, you drink chronic inflammation. And chronic inflammation, my friends, is the fertile soil where cancer plants its seed.

We are not just getting sick. We are feeding cancer. We are inviting it to sit at our table.

THE HARD TRUTH - THE GARDEN AND THE PESTICIDE

And when cancer has grown, what do we do?

Let me tell you the truth about Chemotherapy, because many of you fear it and abuse those who receive it.

Imagine your body is a beautiful garden of beans. You planted beans to feed your family. You watered them. You loved them.

Then, in the middle of your beans, a stubborn, greedy weed grows. It grows faster than the beans. It steals all the water, all the sun. That weed is cancer.

You cannot pull it with your hands anymore. Its roots have gone deep.

So you must bring a strong pesticide. That pesticide is Chemotherapy.

THE gods of Kifuuta ask you to listen: That pesticide is very strong. It does not know how to choose. When you spray it, it will burn the weed, yes, but it will also burn the leaves of your beans. Your beans will turn yellow. Their leaves will fall. The garden will look like it is dying.

That is why when our mothers and brothers are on chemotherapy, their hair falls out, they vomit, they become weak, they lose appetite. The medicine is killing the weed, but it is also beating the beans.

So what does a wise farmer do? Does he abandon the garden?

No!

He fetches more water. He brings more manure. He adds support. He shades the beans. He talks to them every morning. He says, "Hold on, my beans, I am cleaning the garden for you."

That is what we must do. More clean water, more good food, Extracted fruit juice, know how to add water and manure while the pesticide does its work.

Chemotherapy is not death. It is a hard fight to give your beans a second chance to live.

So the Kifuuta Oracles ask you again:

The next time you see that black table, will you still buy?

The next time you see that cook with long nails and a wound, will you still say, "Add more soup"?

The next time you let your child sell food on the roadside without washing hands, whose grave are you digging?

Cleanliness is not for white people, to be sincere. Whites buy more meat in Lusaka than Kampala because in Lusaka, even deep in Mufumbwe, they use a butcher boy, refrigerate the meat to keep it clean. It is not for rich people. It is the first medicine. Naye wano ewaffe Uganda olemwa.

Wash the table with hot water and soap. Scrub the spoon until it shines. Cut your nails. Cover your hair. Wash your hands until your children laugh at you. Keep meat cold, not in a sweaty bag. Cover your food. Unblock that drain. Do not dry food on the road.

Because if we keep doing this...

We will not just complain about cancer.

We will become its food.

And the Oracle still asks, with tears in my voice: Where is this country taking us?