The adoption of the pig suggests that a common mental map is developing among the region’s youth about the lack of jobs, and the corruption that steals prosperity.
Ugandan police Wednesday arrested two men over an anti-unemployment protest in which they paraded four piglets painted yellow and branded the country’s leaders “pigs.”
Protesters in the capital Kampala also carried banners to denounce a city carnival due on Sunday.
“We cannot celebrate Kampala Festival due to youth unemployment,” one banner read, while another blasted the carnival as a “waste of money.”
In June, two anti-corruption protesters sneaked two piglets into parliament.
Blame the Kenyans. It all started in May 2013, when protestors in Nairobi released a pig and about a dozen piglets outside parliament to show their anger at newly elected MPs demanding higher salaries.
The unusual demonstration, organised by civil society groups, was intended to portray the MPs as greedy… giving rise to the description of legislators as “MPigs.”
It is likely that in years to come, the pig could spread around the countries in Africa that don’t have majority Muslim populations (who frown upon swine as impure) as a symbol of protest.
It is an interesting development because protest movements in Africa, especially youthful ones, have been derivative, drawing from international ones. Thus while Kenyans invented the protest pig, that campaign last year was called “Occupy Parliament,” after the “Occupy” concept was popularised by the “Occupy Wall Street” protests in New York that quickly spread around the world.
One of the biggest in Africa was “Occupy Nigeria” in 2012, which was launched to protest the scrapping of fuel subsidies and grew to a national protest against all the nation’s ills.
However, to give credit where it is due, “Occupy Wall Street” was inspired by the North Africa protests that toppled the region’s strongmen in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.
But our Arab brothers and sisters were so busy uprooting long-entrenched regimes, they forgot to baptise their movement. The usual suspects from outside swooped in, and called it the Arab Spring. And so it has remained.
So should Power be worried? A little, yes. The adoption of the pig suggests that a common mental map is developing among the region’s youth about the lack of jobs, and the corruption that steals prosperity.
Outside music, we have not seen that kind of convergence on the more serious bread and butter issues among the region’s young people.
Also, it shows that some thought is going into these protests and not just rushed anger; you don’t have to explain to anyone, however illiterate or detached far off in some privileged tower, what a pig used this way represents.
But there is something else many may have missed. When the Kenyan protestors unleashed the pigs on parliament, it was bloody. They brought buckets of blood and splashed the stuff around, and so the area outside parliament looked like an abattoir. Which was the point; that the politicians were chopping up the country and feasting on it.
The Ugandan protestors painted them the colour of the ruling party. This is an elegant evolution. Someone bought paint, brushes, and went to work. So which is the next pig stop?
Charles Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa (mgafrica.com). Twitter: @cobbo3
