Author: drmartin

John Kittobe, my old and close colleague at Uganda Management Institute (UMI) who was shot dead on November 18th during riots, shall continue to live in the hearts of many who knew him. Although it is easy to say that he was shot accidentally, by a stray bullet, after having seen some videos of targeted shooting of unarmed civilians, by hate- filled goons, I, for one, shall not buy into that. A brilliant accountant who served his nation honorably including teaching many accountants and public servants lost his life needlessly at the hands of cold assassins.

I can’t recall exactly when we first met. Together in the 2000s we served on the staff of UMI and shared an office on the same floor. But he was in a different department and we rarely interacted. What struck me was that he was much older, looked a bit stern and, usually came to work in a white short-sleeved shirt, always with a necktie fitted, typical of British trained accountants.

One day an event brought us closer. I represented academic staff on the council. A matter was presented and I had a different view. I canvassed for support and this is how we started a long friendship. Council had proposed an ecumenical prayer to be read at the start of every business meeting. I felt strongly that even in public institutions anyone should not be constrained in their prayers with a written script from the high.

After that event, which we lost, John and I started a lunch hour Christian fellowship, not without opposition, but which has persisted. As head of Higher Degrees Department he saw to the graduation of hundreds of students with Masters degree. He started the MBA degree program, a project we worked on together and, gave us much fulfillment when it finally came to fruition and the first class started.

Other than academics we often met to talk about life. What drew me closer to John was that we shared as much concern about Uganda. “Where is this country headed!” many times waiting for traffic to clear, overlooking the busy Jinja road, we discussed Uganda with lamentation.

About 2012 John decided to retire from UMI as I also decided to move to a different work station. We kept in touch rather infrequently. But in 2018 we bumped into each other on a plane out of Entebbe. John and his wife, Lois, were en route to visit a son, Michael, who worked in the US. I moved seat, sat next to him and Lois. We talked and laughed most of the way. As he had always done he told me all about his children. He was so proud of their achievements. At Brussels, we took different flight routes, my last sight of him smiling back, a happily retired man relaxed and at peace with a Scottish cap on.

In the course of our friendship John used to share with me much of his interesting life story. He was a brilliant boy who started at Mushanga Boys school in 1957. This was a Catholic school and one of the requirements was to confess Catholicism. Kittobe’s family was of the Anglican faith. But to get education he agreed to be baptized in the Catholic church taking the names of John Mary.

He emerged as one of the best five students during the national junior exams in the western region. This earned him a place at the elite St Mary’s College, Kisubi. But his time there was unhappy and short lived. “I was coming from a humble background,” he once told me, “and there was this Brother who kept harassing me for lack of shoes. I had one distinct woolen shirt which the well off Baganda boys kept teasing me.” After one year he decided to relocate to the nearby but equally demanding Ntare School. There he skipped a class to join Makerere University in the B.Com class of 1972.

“My class had the likes of Robert Rutagi once General Manager of National Medical Stores,” he told me, “and the former Minister Hon Sydia Bumba!” After graduating John would go on to have a remarkable career. He served as Chief Accountant for Agricultural Enterprises and Director of Finance at Uganda Red Cross.

John loved sharing knowledge and in 1984 he went to UK where he graduated with an MBA from the University of Leeds, two years later. He soon started teaching finance and accounting at the Faculty of Commerce, Makerere University before finally moving to UMI where he retired.

One reason that enabled John take what many thought was early retirement was because he had invested well in real estate. “In my first job I was housed in an apartment in in the suburb of Kololo,” once he shared with me while visiting in his office. “This is why I believe environment matters a lot. My eyes opened as I realized I too could start saving and build one of those mansions there.” He was a man of action and commenced to buy land in Naguru where he raised a mansion. He would go on to build on that a number of properties in town.

There are two most fitting description of John’s 71 years. He was a family man very devoted to his wife, six children and 11 grandchildren. He was also a committed Christian who diligently served his church. Before moving to St Luke’s church, Ntinda he was a member of All Saints church where he served on the Council and as a warden.

John’s spiritual journey had a curious beginning. Once during one of those never ending upheavals in Uganda he survived a grenade attack that was lobed at him. After that miraculous escape he committed his life to Jesus Christ as a personal savior.

On Wednesday, November 18th, John started the day by having breakfast with his family, as he normally did. He then drove to Mabirizi shopping plaza to purchase certain items. Earlier in the day, unknown to him, one of the political candidates in the on going Presidential election campaigns, Robert Kyagulanyi, had suddenly been arrested by security forces, sparking off riots. Just as he went quietly about his chores John was hit by a bullet from nowhere. Later in the day, about 3 pm, Lois, whom he married in 1976, received the most dreaded of calls. There was a stranger on John’s line. The caller without much wasting told her John’s body was in the Mulago hospital mortuary.

In 1894 the British cobbled together a nation and which with as much imagination threw in a name for her to be called Uganda. As was a project, half a century later, they handed it back to the natives to self-govern, in its haphazard nature and with all its grand set of odd characters and strange circumstances of birth. Since then she has been at it, plucking the lives of many of her innocent children, through incessant wars and riots. The list of those assassinated and murdered in never ceasing political wars could stretch as far as the Nile. Maybe one day she will settle down and peace will too shine here. But for now it is but a distant dream.

During our time together almost every Friday afternoon, I knew John to put on his cap, and drive quietly down to the place of his birth, where he had a farm. But on the Friday of November 20th it was the body of my friend prematurely driven down, in this running sad tale, of our nation, Uganda. Rest in peace brother John!

Early this year in April 2018, Dr. Musazi was called into chair interviews of a board he led where I was on the committee too. He got to the office ahead of everyone, sat quietly in the boardroom, as he normally did. But as we exchanged greetings I could see that the over six-foot-tall gentleman had lost much of his weight and was not as agile as in the past. I had known him to walk to almost to any meetings in parts of Kampala from Makerere University where he had worked in the Faculty of Technology since 1975 as a fresh graduate Tutorial Assistant. He now seemed in pain to do the thing he loved so much

When we broke off for lunch, standing in the line waiting to be served he waved gently to me: “Have you noticed we do not have a warmer that keeps our served matooke soft. We need to come up with one such food warmer!” I nodded. Then he went on. “How come also people here are still peeling matooke using knives- by now we should have an automated slicer that can peel a dozen in seconds!” At that point, he started demonstrating with his hands the kind of object he had in mind.

Always his mind was racing with ideas for new inventions. Some years back Dr. Musazi had noticed that many girls were dropping out of school rather prematurely. He discovered that a major driver was the lack of sanitary pads. As he shared with me once in his sparse office, littered with an investor’s toolbox and various artifacts “I found most of the pads on the market were not accessible to our girls due to cost.” He set to work. Soon he came up with MakaPads towels- 75% cheaper than those on the market and produced from abundant papyrus and 95% biodegradable!

Dr. Musazi’s innovations were mainly motivated to save the environment which he cared for deeply. An area that disturbed him was how we use so much waste in putting up buildings in Uganda. For instance, the cement bricks that take up a lot of lime and water are not infinite resources. So he came up with interlocking dirt bricks which use less water and rely much on our soil. They also do not need to be fired like those on the market where one has to cut down sparse trees, build a kiln, which bellows out smoke affecting builders and the environment. It was a work of a genius as he one day demonstrated to me how these dirt bricks could hold up any structure.

From the times of Galileo, innovators have always been met with skepticism. Dr. Musazi’s inventions were not spared. Since his specialty was electrical engineering he shared with me how one accusation was over how could he come up with something, not in his field. “There was one professor from civil engineering who one day stormed here and started knocking hard my bricks with a hammer because he could not believe they could hold!” I wish you saw the look of mixed disgust and amusement on his calm face.

Yet behind his calm and soft-spoken personality was the steel resolve of the Wright brothers who came up with an airplane. He noticed that dairy farmers were losing a lot due to the poor preservation of milk and he came up with a more efficient pasteurization coolant. Seeing how we waste water here he went on to invent rainwater harvesting tanks and solar water heaters. One of his most remarkable inventions was an incinerator that turns Medical waste into ash, produce steam for electricity and sterile water. In his late sixties, he was young at heart and it seemed often like he was just starting out.

Initially ignored at last the world came to know and recognize this unassuming man whom you could easily pass as he walked about Kampala to various construction sites. For over three decades he lived in a simple townhouse on Makerere hill where he raised his five children with his wife Sarah. Finally, he received numerous local and Global awards like the President’s support to Scientists of $350,000. Most of those proceeds were poured back into his company Technology for the Future.

Yet Dr Musazi was more than a scientist. He was too a deeply civic-minded person and his steady presence was always felt on many boards of parastatals where he sat. Somewhere around 1995, he came into contact with an organization that had been founded to advocate against torture. Uganda was coming out of a ghastly period of gross human rights abuse and many were those who had been tortured for their political views. It irked him the things humans could do to each other to suppress those who do not share the same views. But then this organization had run into problems arising from mismanagement. International funding had been suspended. Dr. Musaazi was approached and asked by a Dutch funder to help rebuild Africa Center for Torture Victims ( ACTV). And so he did. At no point under his leadership was this organization ever queried on account of being mismanaged. Today it is one of the most prominent voices against torture in Uganda.

I must here add that on the board he chaired was also another spirited civic-minded lady. Dr. Margaret Mungerera, the psychiatrist. They were quite an act to see them artfully carry out their voluntary work. Unfortunately, both have fallen at the peak of their lives due to cruel cancer.

Now, aside from his family, if there was a thing that moved Dr. Musazi most, it was the school that he attended as a young man and shaped much of his values- Kings College Budo. In fact, Dr. Musazi never left Budo. Born to a bus driver and mother who passed on early in his infancy he had come to Budo, not from a privileged family. The story is told about how he traveled on a bicycle from Masaka with school fees for just one term. In the end, he could not afford to travel back home. As luck would have it one of the teachers adopted him to stay behind as a shamba boy. This is how he came to complete his education culminating with a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Imperial College, UK.

In appreciation of what Budo did for him, Dr. Musaazi would pay the school fees of many hard-up kids right from S1 to S6. (At one point he was supporting over a dozen kids in his neighborhood with school fees.) He also served on the Old Budonian Association representing his years and at the last Annual General Meeting as always, though now a bit frail, he attended and jovially sat through all the proceedings chatting with different generations of Budonians.

Because most of his innovations were radical and run against better-established outfits like Procter and Gamble they did not get as much traction. The MakPads would have died if UNHCR had not spotted their ingenuity and bankrolled them. The interlocking dirt bricks have never received as much attention as they deserve. It would now be a far greater loss that he has gone to see all his ideas are left to die. I, therefore, pray that in honoring this great man and his service some of his inventions are taken up by the government of Uganda or Makerere University and rolled out for posterity.

A family man, husband, father to a nation of children, philanthropist, teacher, mentor, environmentalist, entrepreneur, the inventor has left at an hour you wished he could still have lingered and given us more. When he started feeling unwell he walked up and down Kampala clinics and hospitals to discover what was wrong. The initial diagnosis could not point to the cause of his rapidly declining health. In fact, as once he shared with me the doctor’s first thought he had TB. By the time it was discerned it was lung cancer, the bloody monster had wickedly spread. But as with him, he took the news stoically and with a gracious optimistic smile. He even wanted to go for radical treatment in the US till it was decided against that option for no much could be done then.

I chatted with him about a month ago and there was not a shade of self-pity. His spirits remained buoyed, his fertile mind exploring ideas to better the earth. He will be buried today September 20th, 2018 not far from where his parents who left him young are resting.

There has gone a simple man whose contribution to his old nation of Buganda, the troubled country of Uganda, and the world he graced would long outlive him. He truly lived the Budo motto which he carried with him wherever he went shining on his minivan: “Gakyali Mabala! “So little done! So much to do.” Now RIP!