What I fail to understand is that the day Patrick had an accident which turned him disabled, he had written a very critical article. I wish the New vision could reproduce that article. May be, someone could have schemed the accident!
MAY HIS SOUL REST IN ETERNAL PEACE.
IN
MEMORY OF THE LATE HON PATRICK KIGGUNDU
Tuesday,
10 April 2012 21:53
What
prompted this visit among other things is the speculation about former Kyotera
county legislator, Patrick Kiggundu, some of which even suggested that he
was long dead.
Kiggundu, now 55, suffered a major
setback when in 1998 he sustained head injuries in an accident at Lwera, near
Lukaya on the Kampala - Masaka highway. The accident left him comatose for
three months. After operations, numerous hospital trips and therapies, Kiggundu
is slowly getting better and lives with his younger brother Dr James Sekitoleko
in Masaka municipality.
Kiggundu, remembered by many as the
sharp dresser, intelligent and vibrant MP, who among other things popularized
the term “federo”, lives a quiet life, but closely follows events in the country
by reading newspapers and listening to radio, the former taking most of his
time.
“I follow Ugandan political events toe
by toe because I read all newspapers day by day, and for that I am so grateful
to Dr Sekitoleko,” Kiggundu says.
Throughout our talk, Kiggundu speaks
with enthusiasm, and he prefers to discuss mainly his education, political past
and current political events and not much about his being in a wheelchair for
14 years.
“I am fine, except I can’t walk,” is
all he says when I ask about how he manages to live the opposite of the life he
led before the accident.
Flashing his signature smile, Kiggundu
is still passionate about Parliament, an institution he served with energy,
rendering him one of the legislators remembered for their intelligent debates
and straightforwardness.
“This Parliament has a lot of young
people; they are aggressive, but some seem like they just want to be known,” he
says of the ninth Parliament. “I fear that with time they will calm down when
that steam cools off. Soon they will be thinking about re-election, and many
will go silent.”
Kiggundu, one-time Corporation
Secretary of the New Vision Printing and Publishing Corporation and columnist
in the same paper, says this has been the first NRM (National Resistance Movement)
group in Parliament to be so active and bubbly, but it is sad that it also has
the strongest autocracy.
Kiggundu, a lawyer who graduated from
Nairobi University in 1980, was among the youth that left Makerere University
prematurely in 1976, when then president Idi Amin arrested a group of them and
locked them up in Makindye military barracks for participating in student
demos. He was then a first-year law student at the university.
“While we were incarcerated in
Makindye, Amin went on a money begging spree and his vice president, Gen
Mustafah Adrisi dramatically set us free. Knowing how murderous Amin was,
we opted to run out of the country. We were with David Tinyefuza, among other
people,” he says.
“When I was a student at the Kenya
School of Law, (equivalent of LDC), I attempted to come back and the morning
after I had arrived, a gang of UPC T-shirt-clad men stormed my father’s home in
Namunsi in Mbale, and yelled: ‘We have heard that there is a guerrilla that has
just arrived from Kenya, where is he?’” Kiggundu tells of one of the many
brushes he has had with death.
“I stepped out, introduced myself, and
they warned me to never step out of my father’s home or else I would be
killed.”
The next day at 5am he sneaked back
into Kenya where he worked as legal officer at the City Council of Nairobi.
“In Nairobi I was to meet my former
roommate at Makerere, Brigadier Jim Muhwezi, and while there I closely followed
the coordination and sometimes helped many Ugandans, some who were headed for
the bush to rebel against the regime in Kampala then. So as you can see, I am
not insane; write that,” he says.
Although confined to a wheelchair,
Kiggundu is not one to wallow in self-pity. When I suggest that someone needs
to tell his many friends not to ignore him, but come and break the lonely
spells he has to put up with, he smiles again, and says, “I like it here where
I live my life quietly. Abantu balowooza
naggwamu (People think I am not useful anymore) but I am so much alive and
well. In future I may compile a book on the political history of Uganda.”
The highly-schooled and
widely-travelled Kiggundu wants to talk and talk some more. Probably because he
spends most of his time with attendants whom he does not think can hold
intelligent conversations, he does not get to talk much with them. At one point
I thought we had talked too much, but he was not done.
“But I think if people saw me, they
would not recognize me, because I have grayed and I am looking really old,” he
says.
And your family?
“They are fine; the children are in
universities outside Uganda. And that is about all I can say,” he says,
choosing to leave them out of our chat. “My mother occasionally visits me here
although she still lives in Namunsi.”
Kiggundu, a holder of a Masters degree
in Law from Cardiff University among many qualifications, loves writing and his
brother provides 32-page exercise books and pens which he fills with opinions
about mainly current events, although his handwriting is not quite legible
following the accident. For that he really has not many options because even
before the accident he did not know how to type on a computer or typewriter.
At some point I hand him two books,
Bernie Madoff: The man who stole $65bn by Erin Arvidlund and Confessions of an
Economic Hitman by John Perkins gifts from The Observer. He enthusiastically
grabs them, flashes a smile, promising to read them starting that night.
“Thank you for these. Who told you I
like reading?” he offers, puts them aside and continues to talk mainly
politics.
Kiggundu, who says he is NRM, wonders
why his party, despite all its achievements still fails to put up proper
competition at the top.
“I am a believer in the free market
system of economic management. That is one of the reasons why I subscribe to
the NRM. The party has been internally democratic except for the one office
where people don’t want to contest against: the incumbent,” he says.
But many people think you are DP
(Democratic Party)?
“I was DP by birth. My father the late
Augustine Ntaate was one of the founder members of DP. I also once subscribed
to the party but in 1996, when I heard that they had made an alliance with UPC,
I quit,” he says.
Kiggundu lives with the hope of one day
returning to a normal life and contributing to his country once again. In fact
the commonest phrase in his vocabulary is “if I ever make it again.”
Apart from books, Kiggundu loves to
have a soda – any soda – which is slowly turning into another of his
addictions. I joke about buying him a bottle and he says, “Make that a crate, I
could drink it in such a short time.”
ikiiza@observer.ug
