Prime
Prof Buga finds joy in educating others
Prof Geoffrey Buga at his Ntinda home during the interview. Photo by Rachel Mabala.
What you need to know:
- CHARITABLE. Geoffrey Buga, 66, is a Ugandan-born medical professor who joined a new five-year old medical school at the University of Transkei (now Walter Sisulu University), South Africa, in 1990 and played an eminent role in transforming it to a premier global institution for training doctors. He adopted and developed the innovative problem-based learning method for clinical training in which students teach each other using real patients as trigger, with the lecturer acting as a facilitator and tutor. At home in Uganda, 18 people he brought up and paid tuition for have graduated, five of them with Masters degrees, for their “upward mobility”. This success, he says, was all because of his wife Winifred, the former dean of students, Kyambogo University. TABU BUTAGIRA spoke to the couple.
The experience was both stunning and sobering. It predates Uganda’s independence. Augustino Aiama, and dozens other peers travelled by truck, ship and train in the early 1930s more than 500kilometres from the then West Nile District to southern Uganda to work as labourers on sugarcane plantations and the railways.
He was in an unaccustomed league on an unfamiliar territory encumbered by language barrier. During a stint in Kampala as an East African Railways Corporation employee, the sight of a white man taking instructions from a Ugandan supervisor confounded him. In his alternate world, as the leader of sugarcane cutters, Aiama was jolted by the experience of having to speak to his superior through a much younger interpreter. It was not long before he learnt Kiswahili, which was then the main mode of communication on the plantations.
Breaking barriers
His native Riki hamlet in Oluko Sub-county and its residents were derided as “primitive” and Aiama had never enrolled at school, although he later taught himself how to read and write.
Out of his self-pity and routine exposure to public odium was birthed a jewel: a steely resolve to transform his home village through education.
He found an answer to his thirst in his son, Geoffrey Buga, now a professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the Nelson Mandela Academic Hospital and Walter Sisulu University, Mthatha, in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa.
Prof Buga in March 1976, graduated top of his class at the then Makerere University Medical School. He did his internship at Mbale Regional Referral Hospital and was subsequently posted to Tororo Hospital and soon made a medical superintendent, and later district medical officer in charge of the then Bukedi District.
He left Tororo after the 1979 liberation war that ousted President Idi Amin, and was posted to Butabika National Referral Hospital, before joining Mulago National Referral Hospital in 1980 for specialisation in obstetrics and gynaecology.
After obtaining a Master’s degree in Obstetrics and Gynaecology in June 1983, he began working in the same department, initially as a medical officer, special grade, before his April 1984 appointment as a lecturer by Makerere University.
He snapped up a two-year European Development Fund Fellowship to Trinity College Dublin in late 1984 and, within a record 22 months, obtained a doctorate degree in Reproductive Endocrinology and he says he was the first East African to do so. “I had a gift of finding school work straight forward and a gift of being a fast reader [and learner],” he said, a modest reference to his “brilliance” former schoolmates and peers reference.
One such old boy and classmate is the current Gulu Archbishop John Baptist Odama. Both hail from the same village and between 1963 and 1966 studied at St Peter and Paul Pokea Seminary, Arua, before going different paths in pursuit of professional passion and vocational nirvana.
“He was a loving person, very intelligent and I remember he had a strong interest to become a doctor,” noted Archbishop Odama, adding: “He even wanted me to become a doctor, but I said, ‘no, I want to become a priest’.” And the man of God thundered out a croaky laugh during a conversation.
In pursuit of a dream
Prof Buga’s father one time went to Arua Hospital for treatment, but returned home a dejected man after being tossed up and down throughout the day, and lamented how he wished one of his children could become a doctor!
The cast of fate fell on Buga who, together with his childhood friend Archbishop Odama, have both become towering personalities with similar mission; one to save the body and life, the other the soul.
Inspired by the father’s passion for education, Prof Buga who trekked, and later cycled, 16km to and from school each day as a pupil, decided to invest his earnings to pay tuition to empower 18 relatives, five of whom have attained post-graduate qualifications. Knowledge now powers their future.
“When you are born in a poor, rural community, the only way for upward mobility is through education,” he said, referencing values imbibed from his father who passed on in 1999.
“My father was a very remarkable man; orphaned quite young; struggled to grow with an uncle who didn’t like him after his mother had remarried...he impressed the importance of education upon us. He had a very hard childhood but when he grew up, he literally brought all children under his household,” Prof Buga added.
Growing up in a large family prepared the professor to have a full house with comfort, even if filled not with his direct biological children only.
On Sunday, January 6,2017, those beneficiaries of his largesse --- led by Santus Aziku, who works with the United Nations Organisation for Humanitarian Activities in Iraq, Alex Matua, a banker and executive director, Nile Microfinance, Arua; Pontious Ezuma, the manager of Bwindi Conservation Area; and, Nile Microfinance manager, Arua Clare Draleru organised, a fête in Kampala’s Ntinda suburb to thank him, his wife and children for the sacrifice that gave them a better future.
There was another motivation for Prof Buga, who credits his wife, Winifred, for the feats, to open his arms to house and educate his and his wife’s relatives. As he scaled up the academic ladder, he found a shortage of like-minded people within Riki village, in Arua, with whom he could relate. Their world views and thinking were different from his.
“My thinking was that,” he said, “If I had an insular approach to education, my children would have the same situation.”
However, his wife’s decision not to relocate with him, first to Nairobi in Kenya in 1989 where he worked for a year with AMREF, and later in 1990 to the University of Transkei in South Africa as an academic, helped the couple maintain a Ugandan home and foothold that became a pipeline to churn out graduates.
“It was easy to help them because the children were intelligent, hardworking and showed interest in education,” said Winifred, a former warden of Africa Hall from 1983 to 2000 and then Mary Stuart Hall till 2005 before becoming deputy dean of students at Makerere University. She took up the position of Dean of Students, Kyambogo University, in 2010 and retired at the end of 2015.
On keeping marriage
Prof Buga has never visited Uganda non-stop for longer than six weeks at a time within the last 25 years since he began living abroad.
So how has their marriage endured and blossomed? “Trust on both sides, nothing more. The temptations to stray are always there, probably more for the men than women, but if one is focused and knows what they want, that’s how it works,” the professor said to ready approval by the wife.
An alumna of Mt St Mary’s Namagunga, Winifred says “one of the things the nuns instilled in me [at school] was ‘no telling lies’”. If unsure, she would rather hush up.
“I hate telling lies,” she says, “I don’t like telling things to my husband that are not true or right.”
Theirs is a principled life together, one glued by love, mutual respect and appreciation. It is in the story of their falling in love that one spots traces of mischief, typical of university students.
Winifred’s former high-school boyfriend joined Makerere University and became Buga’s classmate at the medical school. She joined a year later. Their mutual friend fell ill, was admitted and the duo first met by his hospital bedside.
The chemistry worked and by the time their mutual friend, who presumed to be Winifred’s eternal boyfriend was discharged, the pair was orbiting in mutual adoration.
“If it was not for school,” noted Winifred, who hails from the eastern Serere District, “we would never have met, as both of us come from deep rural areas on opposite sides of the country.” It was an unintended reward of education.
They got married in a civil ceremony in May 1975 and 41 years later they are still going strong. One of their five children passed on due to sickle cell; first daughter Grace is a businesswoman in Arua; and, her follower, Harriet, is a lawyer working with the Human Rights Commission of South Africa. Their only son now, Edward, is a gynaecologist and super-specialising in Critical Care and last born Barbara is specialising in Paediatrics --- both in South Africa.
On his move to South Africa
Prof Buga’s relocation to South Africa followed Makerere University’s refusal to pay him salary while for doctoral studies in Ireland, and later, declining to appoint him a senior lecturer upon returning with a PhD degree.
Feeling less appreciated at home, he sought better opportunities abroad. “I couldn’t see myself earning peanuts and working hard...the basic problem is that talent isn’t generally appreciated [in Uganda]. When you have highly trained professionals, you should reward them on merit to keep them. I didn’t see any future prospects,” he says of his decision to move to South Africa, as have hundreds of other Ugandan doctors.
But his heart resides at home where he, together with wife and Matua, one of his protégées, have founded Nile Micro-Finance, which lends money to the less able at relatively low interest, helping borrowers carry out small businesses, educate their children and build permanent houses.
Prof Buga and Winifred have retired, but the former remains in contract service in South Africa. Now they plan to venture into hospitality business with Boutique hotel in Ntinda, Kampala, while involving in establishing community libraries and renovating health units as their additional gift to the communities that raised them.
His peers say
Prof Buga has, after a lull, resumed being an external examiner for graduate and doctoral students at Makererere University. His former student and accomplished academic, Prof Joshaphat Byamugisha, said Prof Buga is “an honest man [and] has Uganda and especially Makerere University at heart as picked from my discussions with him”.
“He is kind and has a pleasant personality. I must say that he still has the same smile that he has had from when I first met him in 1991. He has this excellent way of looking at life and I feel that this has made him achieve a lot,” Prof Byamugisha noted in an email reply.
In South Africa, Professor Buga is acclaimed by peers, among them Walter Sisulu University’s Medical Education head Professor Jehu Iputo, as an “outstanding academic”.
“He (Buga) is an outstanding academic, has a passion for medical education where he is a recognised authority on active learning methods in clinical training,” Prof Jehu noted in an email reply, adding: “He has authored seminal papers on problem-based learning, on competency-based medical education and on community based clinical training among others.”
