Jennifer Musisi: Was she pushed or did she jump?

It has been a season of resignations. First Nikki Haley, yes, the formidable lady who has been the face of the United States in the United Nations. She visited president Donald Trump and declared that she intended to resign by the end of this year. The reasons for her resignation have been a matter of public speculation, ranging from loss of power following the appointment of a new Secretary of State, to financial considerations given the allure of better pay and perks in the private sector.

Now Jennifer Musisi, who has straddled our capital city like a colossus, has also announced that before the end of this year she will give her last salute to Kampala Capital City Authority - an institution she has served with commendable devotion, passion and integrity. There are always two reasons why people do things. The real reason, and the one that sounds good.

When the lady fondly known as Jennifer was appointed as the first executive director of KCCA, I commented in the media that I hoped that those who appointed her understand the person they have placed in that position because if they make it hard for her to perform she will throw the job back at them.

I first met Jennifer at Makerere. She was a staff of the university working as the legal advisor. I was guild president and thus entitled to sit in the university council. Obviously, given our protests against the structural adjustment programmes that led to the reduction of funding to higher institutions of learning and health sectors, we were at loggerheads with the government and the university authorities. In Jennifer, who was only a few years older than us, we found someone who understood us and who also had the ear of the vice chancellor, Prof Senteza Kajubi.

Her classmates at King’s College Budo recall that she was the first ever female elected to the post of head boy. I heard that she insisted on calling herself head boy! To make matters worse, the official residence of the head boy was in the boys section of dormitories. Her election was a big challenge to the culture of patriarchy and must have scandalised the male dominated establishment. By rising to that position she broke a major glass ceiling.

By all accounts she is as tough as nails. She is not easy to provoke. I tend to think she treated the political noise makers around her the way a heart surgeon views a blood clot. She simply saw them as obstructions to normal blood flow threatening to paralyse other organs that depend on the heart. Her approach was to do a bypass and ignore the blood clots. Bypass surgery is a procedure to restore normal blood flow to an obstructed coronary artery. A normal coronary artery transports blood to and from the heart muscle itself, not through the main circulatory system. Bypasses also work to deal with traffic jam. Vehicles go around congested urban hubs by taking routes that bypass the traffic jams.

So if there is any offence Jennifer has committed against the political chattering class, it is that she has run rings around them and thus compelled them to dance to her tunes instead of crafting a creative response which would make her aggressive leadership style irrelevant. In my engagements with some of the political leaders in the city, my message was simple: You cannot stop your opponent from throwing a dagger at you but you can choose whether to grab the dagger by the handle or the blade. That can make a very big difference. Unfortunately most of those who duelled with Jennifer chose to grab the daggers by the blade with disastrous consequences.

Not all the barbs thrown at Jennifer are unearned. In her bid to achieve the lofty goals she set, she adopted an abrasive approach that alienated many would be allies. But the truth is she leaves Kampala a much better place than she found it.

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