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.
