Jennifer Musisi: An experiment that failed

An illustration of out-going KCCA executive director Jennifer Musisi. ILLUSTRATION BY IVAN SENYONJO

What you need to know:

  • Mission. When Ms Jennifer Musisi was appointed first executive director of KCCA in April 2011, she came in with a mindset of the Alpha and Omega of Kampala who would, with the President’s backing, kick to the side whatever it was that dragged the city behind, and move on.

For the more than 32 years President Museveni has been in charge of Uganda, it is difficult to count 10 people to whom he has lent as much power as he lent to Jennifer Semakula Musisi as executive director of Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA).
Ms Musisi, who graduated from Makerere University’s School of Law in 1986, the same year Mr Museveni shot his way to power, was the one the President tapped to steer the changeover from Kampala City Council (KCC) to KCCA.

KCC had before that been led by executive mayors, the last two of whom came from the Democratic Party (DP), which Mr Museveni’s NRM seemed incapable of defeating in elections in Kampala. These mayors wielded political and administrative powers, with the councils making the executive decisions for the town clerk and the technocrats under her to implement.

For example, during his time as the second-to-last mayor under this arrangement, John Ssebaana Kizito’s council dished out to private individuals swaths of land in the city, leased markets to private companies (particularly companies owned by Mr Hassan Basajjabalaba), and resolved to let a company owned by Mr Basajjabalaba to build a shopping mall at the Constitutional Square and on top of it replant the grass and trees to recreate the Square. This last decision was vetoed by Mr Jaberi Bidandi Ssali, who was the minister of Local Government at the time.

The city councils were from time to time accused of engaging in corruption and being bribed to vote for certain decisions. The technical people at KCC were also accused of being corrupt and amassing immense wealth. Most garbage in the city remained uncollected and potholes ate up most of the city roads as the city literally ground to a halt under the weight of corruption, incompetence and underfunding.

In the last year of KCC (financial year 2010/11), for instance, the total budget for running the city was hardly Shs50b. KCCA’s budget would grow exponentially under Ms Musisi and nearly hit Shs600b at its peak, although Ms Musisi spotlighted inadequate funding as one of the reasons she will resign her job on December 15.

Seizing the opportunity
The ruling party capitalised on the mistakes and failures of those who led KCC to push through a changeover to KCCA, where the position and power of mayor would be downgraded as the administrative functions of the city were to be transferred to an appointee of the President, the executive director.

Politics had been blamed for the stagnation that Kampala experienced then, with the Opposition mayors habitually quarrelling with the President and the Executive in turn starving them of resources to run the city.
The stated aim of the changeover to KCCA was to de-politicise and improve the administration of the city, although it was also at the back of many people’s minds that the ruling party aimed to clip the wings of DP and the Opposition in Kampala.

So when Ms Musisi was appointed first executive director of KCCA in April 2011, she came in with a mindset of the Alpha and Omega of Kampala who would, with the President’s backing, kick to the side whatever it was that dragged the city behind, and move on.
To her mind, Kampala would have a Lord Mayor elected through adult suffrage, but this Lord Mayor would only help to receive guests and attend parties – be ceremonial as it was widely said.

Lukwago’s defiance
But the man who the people of Kampala elected as first Lord Mayor was Erias Lukwago, an ambitious up-and-coming Opposition politician who had by then only done five years as MP for Kampala Central. Before announcing that he would abandon the Kampala Central seat to dive into the Lord Mayor race in 2011, Mr Lukwago had hesitated as he first watched developments on the changeover from KCC to KCCA.

He had participated in the enactment of the KCCA Act and he went all over the city telling voters that contrary to what was being said that the Lord Mayor would be ceremonial, the new law vested immense powers in the position of Lord Mayor, designating the office holder as the head of the Authority (council of councillors), which designs policies to be implemented by the executive director and has oversight powers over the technocrats.

By the time Mr Lukwago challenged for the Lord Mayor seat, he was already an estranged DP member, having accused the Ssebaana and Nasser Sebaggala-led teams at KCC of corruption. He, therefore, ran as a DP-leaning Independent. He said during his campaigns that he had come to clean up the city, which to his mind had been largely messed up by his fellow DP members. Similarly, Ms Musisi was appointed ostensibly to clean up the city, too. In this regard, the objectives of the two lawyers seemed to coincide, suggesting that they should not have any problems running Kampala.

So, to start with, the duo found common ground in forcing Gen David Sejusa out of a house that belongs to KCCA that he had occupied and refused to vacate. The house is located on Mabua Road in Kampala. The duo also, after initial disagreements on whether the former taxi operator Utoda had a valid contract, eventually agreed to throw it out of the taxi business in Kampala. But that is about where the honeymoon, if ever there was any, started and ended.

Musisi asserts self
Ms Musisi then plunged into a dogfight with Mr Lukwago over turf, with Mr Lukwago saving time to appeal to the courts to clarify who does what between Lord Mayor and executive director. The courts eventually proved unable to resolve the political impasse at City Hall, and it continued.

So Mr Lukwago would call Authority meetings and the executive director would sometimes veto them. When she did not veto them, she mostly found no reason to personally attend, with Mr Lukwago saying on Tuesday that she last attended a KCCA meeting one-and-a-half years ago.

Ms Musisi most of the time saw no need for the Authority because she was sufficiently empowered to initiate projects, be they for road construction or anything, and implement them without the input of the Authority. When Mr Lukwago or the Authority councillors asked questions about accountability for the funds spent, she never felt obliged to respond to them.

She adopted a no-nonsense approach to dealing with problems in city, particularly when it came to asserting what she called trade order. In this she didn’t only have the backing of the President and the police; she also earned the admiration of a number of commentators who said Mr Lukwago was just playing politics and that to make the omelette that is Kampala, some eggs had to be broken.

Ms Musisi habitually complained against public procurement rules, which she said provided for time-consuming procedures that needed to be done away with to speed up the transformation of Kampala.

During much of the initial period of her reign, Ms Musisi enjoyed the President’s full support as the urban authority moved to get city roads paved, garbage collected and vendors thrown off the streets, often ruthlessly. The money flowed from the central government and Mr Lukwago and KCCA councillors had no ability to question how it was spent or block it.

Ms Musisi, for instance, initiated a culture of holding annual city carnivals, where she would host city dwellers to a colourful ceremony in the streets of Kampala. She would show off her noteworthy dancing skills, dressed in tight-fitting outfits that complimented her shapely figure.

The Lord Mayor and a number of councillors would skip the events and shout themselves hoarse over where the money to organise the carnivals came from and how much it was. Ms Musisi, if she felt like responding to a journalist over the matter, would only say that the money came from sponsors in the business community.

This year, however, the carnival did not happen, with the authorities at City Hall coming out late to say that the money that would have been committed to it would be redirected to improving the city. That was another low in Ms Musisi’s career at City Hall.

As the roadworks progressed and garbage got collected, Ms Musisi would in the initial years conduct the President around the city by night. He would speak approvingly of her work, at one point remarking that all Uganda needed to transform was 2000 Musisis to man the vital services. Some presidential appointees are said to find difficulty accessing the President, but the Musisi of those years seemed to have unfettered access to the appointing authority.

Before going to KCCA, she had worked as commissioner of Legal Services and Board Affairs at Uganda Revenue Authority (URA), after which she had broken off for a moment to concentrate on making cakes for a living. Whenever the heat rose at KCCA, Ms Musisi said she would easily go back to her cake business; that she was only sacrificing her time to manage KCCA. This is despite her being paid a monthly salary of Shs36m, which placed her in an exclusive club of highest paid public workers.

When she took over at KCCA, she had the wherewithal to send home more than 1,000 employees of the former KCC, who she deemed corrupt and unfit to continue in the new outfit. She, in the places of many of them, contracted people she had formerly worked with at URA, many of whom got paid salaries that became the talk of town.

When Mr Lukwago was controversially impeached in November 2013 and the High Court gave him temporary reprieve, ordering him back into office until the case he had filed against his impeachment would be disposed of, Ms Musisi, without citing any law, announced on November 28, 2013, at 6.30pm that she had shut down the operations of KCCA “until further notice”.

The following day, then Internal Affairs minister, the late Gen Aronda Nyakairima, led a team to KCCA to assure Ms Musisi that she would be protected against the masses she said Mr Lukwago was mobilising to invade KCCA, and urged her to reopen the operations of KCCA. Ms Musisi’s power had hit its pinnacle.

Other battles
Whereas Ms Musisi most notably fought with Mr Lukwago (the outsider to the system), she also had a number of battles with different ministers for Kampala – Ms Kabakumba Masiko, Mr Frank Tumwebaze, and most notably current minister Ms Beti Kamya – over who calls the shots at City Hall.

In the particular case of Ms Kamya, she met a Kampala politician who is eager to pull her weight and perhaps enhance her electability in Rubaga North, Kampala District. As Ms Kamya’s star as Kampala Affairs minister seemed to rise in the city following her appointment in 2016, Ms Musisi’s deemed as she recoiled from public view and sunk into her frustrations.

The emergence of Ms Kamya and her fight for a place in the sun, at most only made Ms Musisi more frustrated. Originally pampered by the President and used to having her way as the only way, it must have felt like a spear in the heart when after Mr Museveni and the ruling NRM suffered their heaviest ever electoral defeat in Kampala in the 2016 election, the President blamed the loss on Ms Musisi’s actions.

Ms Musisi had, among other things, ordered the eviction of people from the railway corridor in Nakawa Division, had evicted vendors from streets and hawkers on streets were hunted down like wild animals in the 18th Century.
So intense was the onslaught on the urban poor that Mr Kalundi Serumaga, writing in The EastAfrican on August 9, 2014, remarked that “Uganda’s elites want to modernise by abolishing the poor”.

One interpretation that was put up to explain why the government adopted the Musisi approach was that by clamping down on the poor, many would perhaps leave the city and return to the villages.
This, the theory went, would serve the double objective of ridding the city of masses of poor people who are more likely to vote the Opposition on the one hand, and lure the middle class and well-to-do to support the government based on the improvements in the city.

If this was the thinking behind the support that Mr Museveni accorded to the Musisi approach, it did not work for 2016. Some may argue that the experiment needed more time, but politicians don’t have too much time to experiment.

Shortly after the 2016 vote experience, Mr Museveni embarked on a new approach and is reaching out to the poor of Kampala through donations of equipment and cash to informal groups, an approach in which Ms Musisi is not an actor. With this in view, we can say that Ms Musisi was an experiment that failed.

Perhaps realising that and feeling let down, Ms Musisi saw no need to wait out her current three-year contract which was set to run out on April 14, 2020.