AND THEN THERE WAS ONE

With the passing of the speaker Jacob Oulanyah earlier this week one cannot but help feeling that we are seeing the evening of an era.

For context one has to go back to the 1990 Makerere University guild presidential campaigns when Norbert Mao beat the young NRA officer Noble Mayombo in a hotly contested campaign, the likes of which have not been seen since.

The University, then with a student body of less than 10,000, was undergoing fundamental changes, chief of which was that government was in the process of phasing out “Boom” . These student allowances were a hangover from a time when the economy was in good shape and there were fewer students at Makerere.

"In better times all students used to get allowances for being on campus, but by 1990 this had been whittled down to getting reams of paper and textbooks, which often ended up in stationary shops of nearby Wandegeya. There was also a transport allowance, given to the students at the end of term to go to their home districts...

However, the NRM had inherited an economy on its knees and some of these “luxuries” they could no longer afford. Scrapping them was a way to lower public expenditure, a requirement to benefit from badly needed donor monies.

It was in this context that the 1990 guild presidential campaigns were staged. That Mayomdo, who by default was the establishment candidate, took the race to the wire was credit to him, as the mood on campus was for an anti-establishment figure who would fight for the students’ “rights”.

Oulanyah also contested that election but stepped down to back Mao, while his campaign manager Adolf Mwesigye (Now the clerk to parliament), backed Mayombo. Oulanyah then became the speaker of the guild.

A student of agricultural economics, his oratory and command of the proceedings made it difficult not to see a bright future for the man from Omoro.

The same could be said for his boss Mao and for Mayombo.

Oulanya returned to university to study law, while Mao and Mayombo went on to public service.

Mao’s attempt to represent Gulu Municipality in Constituent Assembly in 1994 was thwarted by DP heavyweight Andrew Adimola. He eventually came to parliament after another acrimonious campaign against Betty Bigombe, who previously come painfully close to a peace settlement with the LRA.

Mayombo rose to the office of the permanent secretary in the defence ministry. He made it to the constituent assembly as an army representative after which he became President Yoweri Museveni’s ADC and then director of military intelligence. Unfortunately, his promise was cut short when he died at 42 in 2007.

Oulanya was the late bloomer. After law school he opened his own law firm before making it to parliament as the MP for Omoro county in 2001 as a Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) cardholder. He did this despite supporting Aggrey Awori’s doomed presidential bid. At the time northern Uganda was an anti-NRM stronghold, the people there aggrieved by the long drawn out Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) insurgency...

The return of multi-party elections in 2006 came with the emergence of the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) led by Kizza Besigye . Oulanya lost his seat to FDC’s Simon Toolit, which must have caused him much soul searching because he flipped his allegiance to the ruling NRM and retook his seat in the 2011 polls, the first time the ruling party had made an impression in northern Uganda.

After Mayombo’s passing on, Mao had previously stepped down from parliament to become Gulu district chairman in 2006, eventually Democratic Party boss.  Oulanya became deputy speaker I n 2011 and achieved his long held dream to become speaker of parliament in 2021.

These three men were the leaders of their generation. All three were gifted speakers. All three had commanding presences. All three were ambitious men, some said too ambitious for their own good.

We are wiser in hindsight but it should have been obvious in 1990 that these three young men would play key roles in the future of Uganda.  One feels they would have fed off each other’s personal ambitions – knowingly or unknowingly, to lift themselves higher up the political ladder.

With the demise of two of the trio one has to think we have been deprived of an epic finale to their story.