Golola Moses has always been a joke

I have always said that Golola Moses is a big joke, and now, as it has turned out, he has made Ugandans bigger jokes than he is. Here is why:

Not many people have heard of Jona Kagimba, and even less know him. But this mystery man, a graphic designer by profession, is reportedly the real genesis of all this Golola Moses drama. He is the man who started it all when, while living in Malaysia, he created the Golola Moses facebook page.

And get this, by the time he started the page he had never met the man, never knew what he was like or what he represented. All he did was watch a video on YouTube from NTV’s Point Blank, and he got a brainwave.

“I started it in early 2010, mainly for fun, as a joke,” Kagimba says. “I didn’t really think it would go anywhere...just added a few friends and started those jokes like he can tear facebook pages and all that...then people started joining really fast... then I started making videos( like the Hitler video and many others) and this made even more people join. I also did some funny pics about him and all of a sudden there were more than 3,000 people on the page, all sharing Golola Moses jokes.”

It moved from facebook to the main stream media, and soon newspapers and TV and radio stations were all on the wagon.

What Kagimba does not say is that it had all been done before, except it was for different people and in different countries. 

It really started with Chuck Norris, the legendary Hollywood martial arts movie actor. In all his movies Chuck Norris does almost the impossible when beating extreme odds. That’s when the jokes started about what the man can do.

“If you want a list of Chuck Norris’ enemies, just check the extinct species list. When Chuck Norris had surgery, the anesthesia was applied to the doctors. Chuck Norris has already been to Mars, that's why there are no signs of life. Chuck Norris can sneeze with his eyes open. Chuck Norris wears a live rattlesnake as a condom.”

Sound familiar? And that was decades ago. Even the Kenyans had their version of Chuck Norris, a fictional character they named Makmende (apparently some native Kenyan mispronounced Clint Eastwood’s famous line ‘make my day’). Makmende could do anything, and fought with everybody, and beat them. 

After the Makmende character was used in a music video by the Kenyan group Just A Band in 2009, it got so got so popular in Kenya that CNN did a feature on it. But it was all fiction, of course.

That was when Kagimba decided it would be interesting to turn that funny-sounding guy he saw on TV into a Makmende-like character. 

Is the rest history, as they say? Unfortunately not, because the joke is still on us. When the real Golola realized he was famous on I the media (or some people told him he was), he started believing he was actually a super hero, and many Ugandans started believing it along with him. They thought the man was funny, and a genius, where did he get all those jokes and lines? So last week they turned up in their tens of thousands, and paid their tens of thousands of shillings to see their superhero do all the things he said he could do.

But Golola Moses (who along with most Ugandans cannot differentiate between a first name and a surname) is not funny, or a genius. He can’t even fight. He is just a big joke that Kagimba created, and the joke is really on all those gullible Ugandans who took it all so seriously. And you know what? It’s not even Golola who went smiling all the way to the bank.