Yellow Pigs in Parliament

In June 2014, President Yoweri K. Museveni and the Ugandan Parliament presented their State of the Nation address and their national budget, without ever mentioning the scandalous unemployment rate of 84 percent among Ugandan youths — more than 10 million young people, around a third of the country’s population.

This provoked a small group of young activists to sneak two yellow-painted pigs (yellow is the colour of the ruling party, the National Resistance Movement [NRM]) into Uganda’s Parliament to protest government corruption and high rates of youth unemployment. This nonviolent action was inspired by similar protests in Kenya one year earlier, but this time activists took more of a prankster approach, releasing the pigs inside, rather than outside, Parliament.

Sometimes laughter can be the most effective way to dispel people’s fear or complacency and puncture a leader’s aura of invincibility.

Pigs are known for their greedy and sometimes cannibalistic behavior — when they are hungry, they sometimes eat their own piglets. The message of the protest: Museveni’s government acts similarly, “eating Uganda’s young people” to feed their own greed. The two pigs represented the president and the prime minister, who were responsible for this catastrophic situation and were the main beneficiaries of corruption.

The Ugandan Parliament was chosen as the site of the demonstration because it’s the place where all governmental institutions and decision makers meet to discuss and pass the laws that perpetuate corruption, injustice, oppression, and exploitation. The pigs had slogans pinned to their ears condemning corruption. And the two young activists who released them wore white T-shirts with red letters denouncing youth unemployment, corruption, and government extravagance.

By equating the dictatorial president and the prime minister with pigs, the action was designed to shame Uganda’s two top rulers as corrupt, and denounce their permanent neglect of the youth situation. Unexpectedly, however, the media and public attention that resulted focused much more on the security breach and the mockery it made of the government’s boasts about its strong security policies. This turned out to not be all bad, as making such a fool of his security forces undressed the dictator completely and created an embarrassing enough situation that the country’s inspector general of police had to come in and investigate. In the end, the action sparked widespread attention and debate, and the people behind the action were constantly invited to radio and TV programs to talk about the yellow pigs protest, which brought many opportunities to spread their intended message, possibly to an even broader audience than they would otherwise have had.

Originally published in Beautiful Rising.