Ona: The trailblazer

An indomitable spirit combined with the duality of brilliance and luck illuminated for Ona a career path brighter than for most peers.

He catapulted to a legislator and presidential spokesman at a young age and resigned, rather than wait to be sacked and fizzle out, before plunging into executive corporate leadership.

The man proudly from Wera in Amuria District in the eastern Teso Sub-region harnessed the residual power and networks of various offices he had held, to buttress his usefulness in spaces where he arrived a doubted newcomer. 

He had stepped out of the newsroom and steeped into politics after years of nomadism at multiple privately-owned and often critical Ugandan newspapers – The Weekly Topic, The Monitor, The Crusader.

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Ona’s decidedly firebrand brand, or such perception, could potentially have undercut his favourable consideration for hire, particularly in government and reputation sensitive corporations.

Yet, Mother luck smiled on him twice the moment The Crusader he co-founded folded up. Firstly, President Museveni after the 1996 elections tapped Jeje Odongo, Ona’s area Member of Parliament, as army commander, freeing the Amuria seat for grabs.

Secondly, the Movement System, which was in power, had no preferred candidate in the byelections. With political parties in abeyance, Ona activated long-established journalistic ties with spymasters David Pulkol (ESO), Philip Idro (ISO) and Noble Mayombo (CMI).

With their blessings and modest individual cash contributions, he manoeuvred his way as the regime’s flag bearer.

Ona’s oratory skills were sufficient to charm and sway rural voters, despite his time studying in Kampala and the United States (as a Fulbright scholar) turning him a stranger among kins.

Thus, a clandestine support by intelligence chiefs came in handy to cushion the scribe-turned-politician, placing him in a pole position for the electoral battle.

Still, he remained unsure of his chances. For colleagues in the media fraternity, especially at The Crusader where his leadership birthed and collapsed the publication, leading to job losses, kept him at an arm’s length during the vote canvassing.

In a public notice he issued about the fate of the newspaper, Ona simply stated that they were suspending printing due to the unanticipated closure of their creditor, the Greenland Bank.

In reality, he knew it was game over for the acerbic title that future presidential press secretary Tamale Mirundi, who died in August, nonetheless would baptise as Uganda’s ever “best written” newspaper for its scoops and linguistic finesse.

Things had been rapidly going southwards for the print. Its circulation plummeted after the New Vision stopped printing it in colour and The Monitor, from which its founders decamped, changed from a weekly edition and introduced a Wednesday print to rival The Crusader.

Thus, Ona’s flight from the newsroom flames to elective politics, with the endorsement of Uganda’s three powerful spymasters, sketched a portrait of professional betrayal in which a captain crashes the ship on the high seas, picks the only life jacket onboard and hops onto a luxury yacht to dine and wine with opulent merrymakers.

Ona was alive to that discomfort and references it in his book titled, Tears and triumphs: My life with Yoweri Museveni & Others, in which he explains away The Crusader’s folding up as failure of business, not journalism.

The newspaper caused intense tremors in Uganda’s political and public life, but its heady journalism belied the clay commercial feet weakened by the business inexperience of its talented pool of writers and editors.

Nonetheless the team soldiered on under the tutelage of Ona, widely praised posthumously following his sudden demise last Friday, aged 58.

Dr Peter Mwesige, who was a couple of years behind him on the journalism course and later worked with him at both The Monitor and the Crusader, described Ona as an “avid reader, mentor and [a professional] passionate about journalism and public affairs”.

“He was a journalist-editor, brought the best out of those around him, led from the front and turned small stories into compelling reads,” he said.

According to colleagues, Ona loved community news – perhaps a lingering nostalgia of his experience growing up in the village – and liked hairy caricatures where notable features were dominant.

Social media was awash with tributes to him from relatives, friends and mentees – in-country and abroad – among them current Ugandan media leaders, scholars and trainers.

Ms Susan Nsibirwa, now the managing director of Nation Media group-Uganda, was his classmate on the undergraduate programme and she spoke of Ona as being “well informed and well read” while a student.

“I remember him for his passionate discussions in class …”, she said, “[He] was often times an outlier or disruptor against the norm.”

It needed such a restless spirit to cross with others from The Weekly Topic to The Monitor and break away a second time with a team to found The Crusader, all while courting trouble with incisive reportage and bold journalism.

Yet, until his passing on, there was scant written account on Ona’s outsized contribution to the foundational health and growth of particularly independent or private media in Uganda. He even skirted the subject in his own book launched in June 2023!

Part of the explanation could be found in former minister Mary Karooro Okurut’s words for this obituary; Ona was an “unassuming” human despite making it in life and orbiting in higher echelons of society.

He was at the time of his death the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Nile Breweries Ltd (NBL), having been kicked upstairs after 17 years of illustrious service as the company’s director for legal and corporate affairs.

The seamless career transitions spoke to his acuity.

Ms Karooro taught the “A-lister” student at Makerere University and he later became her understudy as deputy presidential press secretary before succeeding her.

“He was sober, balanced and a fine gentleman with a versatile brain that could engage and speak to many fields of life,” she noted, “He’d no attitude, no superiority complex.”

Those skills moved Ona from tumultuous newsrooms to the swagger of Parliament and executive airs at State House onwards to debonair corporate and boardroom executive roles.

His public-facing jobs and lanky portrait made him recognisable across different strata of Uganda’s society and beyond, and being a regular talk show panellist on television and radio, including KFM, added to his popularity. 

The teetotaller was a hard haggler on behalf of the alcohol industry, which he led at a time, often taking the frontline in engaging parliamentarians to shoot down proposed new taxes or restrictive laws on alcoholic beverage.

He had served in the House, understood its strengths and flaws and used that knowledge, alongside enduring links with senior bureaucrats, to lobby with first-rate success.

The benefits of his brains spread. The sorghum project the employer implemented under his watch as new raw material pipeline for beer brewing injected cash in the pockets of rural farmers.

He pioneered the company’s Equality Scholarship, which lifted 72 rural children to study through secondary at elite schools, according to information on Nile Breweries Limited (NBL) website, offering the beneficiaries firm feet in chasing their dreams.

Thirty of the alumni have since graduated from university. A number turned up in gowns and gifted Ona, who was retiring from legal and corporate affairs director position into livestock and poultry keeping and agroforestry, goats and chicken at a glamourous farewell party.

The clean water corporate social responsibility project he launched afforded fifteen water-distressed districts in northern and eastern Uganda nearly two-dozen new boreholes so that sorghum and barley-growing communities could no longer fret over water-borne diseases.

In addition, establishing groups such as Oduk Investment Limited in his native Teso Sub-region empowered farmers, most notably women as contracted growers, and turned Ona into a household name. Whether he still held political ambitions remained whispers, leaving it a fodder between fable and fact.

However, Ona’s love for his sub-region welled from his childhood. As a teenager, he promised to run for MP to end the plunder of cattle by National Resistance Army (now UPDF) soldiers and Karimojong raiders, which he painfully argued choked livelihoods for natives and broke the pride and back of the Itesot, both as a people and community. 

This hurt him. Deeply.

He, however, didn’t bring the baggage to work where he recruited many more female staffers from across the country.

Ms Flora Aduk was one of them, and she said it was fun and endless learning serving under Ona as a communications manager, a position she has since left.

“I was fascinated by his ability to come up with the simplest solutions and make complex challenges look very easy. Ona did not have a panic button! He approached every situation with calm[ness]. This is a very critical lesson I learnt from him,” she said.

Because he was supportive and trusted his subordinates whom he mentored and defended with passion, supervisees feared to disappoint or let him down and each worked their best, making the teams bond and succeed together.

In a short public tribute announcing his demise, Nile Breweries Ltd simply eulogised the departed Board chairman as a “visionary leader”.

A humour king and a man averse to bureaucracy, Ona brought flair and class to parties. For instance, he demanded that copies of his book be dropped by drone at launch to mesmerise guests.

In another showbiz, he and wife at their lakeside marriage anniversary in January, this year, emerged on a boat to thunderous cheers and a cacophony of simultaneous performance by a traditional dance troupe, playlist by a Deejay and a band blasting away.

This was typical Ona, the one who built a humongous house in the village and piped the water, with urbane lighting to boot, to make a statement and set the standards a notch higher.

Despite these shenanigans, he largely remained a man of humility at home, a father to his children, a husband to his wife and a patriarch to siblings he regularly hosted for get-togethers.

“[He] was a very loving person, loving without boundaries, he was very social, a very responsible man,” said his sister Dinah Acanit Onapito.

Beyond pain, the brother’s demise has left the sister whom he inspired into politics “terrified”.

Why? Because he was a “unifying factor” for the siblings, checking on them as he could, and Ms Acanit voiced uncertainty how things would unfold with him gone to the land of no return.

“As siblings, we shall miss Ona. He has been a father figure for the larger Onapito family. He [told] us every now and then that it was better to leave a good name on earth than riches. I think that has been him…,” she added in a WhatsApp voice note sent to this writer. 

He knew the value of great reputation when his father’s good name became the magnet to galvanise supporters for his eventual parliamentary poll victory in 1998. 

Ona at the time was little known in the constituency, after a considerable time away studying. But his father John Onapito, after whom both Ona and his eldest brother were named, had rotated the district and excelled in his various postings as medical assistant that locals reverently christened him doctor or healer.

On the campaign trail, voters said they would support Ona Junior because of the good deeds of his father who was “100 percent” certain the son would, as he did, defeat veteran politician and former minister Ben Etonu alongside John Emunyu.

Once in the August House, Ona joined the rabble-rousers that made the steely spine of the Sixth Parliament that President Museveni loathed.

In an unlikely political duet, he tabled a Private Member’s Bill seconded by former Army Commander Muntu Mugisha (at the time a UPDF Representative) to amend the Constitution to make ministers strictly ex-officios.

The import: ministers had to be appointed from outside the House or any lawmaker named to the Executive resign their parliamentary seat.

The duo hoped this arrangement would bolster the separation of power envisaged under the country’s supreme law between the Executive and the Legislature, but colleagues voted down the blueprint.

Undeterred, Ona went and fought for re-election, which he lost, having been co-opted into the Lt Gen Henry Tumukunde-led informal but powerful inner-circle Nyekundire campaign taskforce crack unit for presidential candidate Museveni.

Thus, the Amuria representative had limited time to market himself while serving half of the 5-year parliamentary tenure meant he had done little to report to voter to earn their trust and a fresh mandate in 2001.

Word reached Mr Museveni about Ona’s sacrifice and predicament after the ballot loss and, within months, the ex-legislator got a telephone call from the Movement Secretariat conveying to him an offer of the job of deputy presidential spokesman.

It didn’t pay that much, but breezed on the man from Teso the air of palace clout. He became the substantive job holder when Ms Karooro left to join elective politics.

During the four-year stint, Ona at close-range observed President Museveni, with whom he enviably occasionally took the same helicopter ride, as a strategic thinker and actor whom he suspects raised and readied First Son Muhoozi Kainerugaba as a dauphin.

“In addition to imbuing Muhoozi with military prowess, Museveni also ensured that his son understood statecraft and knew Uganda well. In fact, no one else is perhaps more prepared for the Ugandan presidency; as shaped by Museveni for nearly four decades, than his son Muhoozi,” he writes on page 206 of his book.

Ex-staffers hardly discuss an inkling of working at State House. That Ona secured clearance to print his experiences, including a surgical take on the taboo subject of Museveni succession, is telling of his acumen and respected role at the intersection of journalism, politics and executive leadership.

Now the Chief of Defence Forces, Gen Muhoozi has over the past couple of years transmitted confusing signals regarding his presidential ambition, first proclaiming that he would bid in 2026, before backtracking a few weeks ago because the Lord Almighty has instructed him otherwise.

In his book, Ona notes that when the father was away, Muhoozi would summon him to his office not to discuss media relations, but granular details of Teso politics, suggesting his eagle eye over the country.

Relations he built at State House unexpectedly came in handy to give Ona a larger-than-life vitality at Nile Breweries Ltd, opening his world of work to wonders.

In 2010, Graham Mackay, the chief executive SABMiller, the parent company of the brewery, flew in on a whirlwind regional tour. Such a rare visit was a do-or-die career business for hosts that Ona was detailed to secure VIP clearance for the guest, which he did.

To ensure everything progressed with clinical precision, the other company chiefs dashed to present-day Jinja City, where NBL factory is located, to await with bated breath for the big man. Then the unexpected happened.

President Museveni was expected in Jinja, the airspace was closed and Eagle Air communicated it could not fly Mackay to Jinja on the chartered plane. Panic seized and shook everyone and NBL bosses scrambled to ministers to bail them out, but they were unsuccessful.

Out of choices, they made a last-minute plea to Ona, who was with Mackay at the VIP Section of Entebbe International Airport, to intervene.

Ona worked out the telephone lines with Maj Gen Muzeyi Sabiiti, then the second-in-command of Presidential Guard Brigade, and before long Eagle Air got the all-clear signal to deliver the SABMiller chief executive to Kakira.

The relief was wild, Ona instantly gained a saintly reverence and anything and all that he asked at the company was met with affirmation.

His work budget, perks and power increased and his voice gained currency.

However, these feats were undercut at home by tragedies – back-to-back deaths of family members and other relatives, some suspicious, and marriage stresses and separation that Ona writes about in his book.

His personal life was challenged in ways mirroring his tough field experience while a presidential spokesman, including when he returned to Kampala with a bullet in his hand after surviving a Lord’s Resistance Army rebel ambush in which an improvised explosive device blew apart a car next to the one carrying Ona in a return convoy.

In another incident of work blues, he was one night summoned to a court before President Museveni, who was in a vest, and asked to account for why the candidate was not getting proper re-election campaign coverage by the Presidential Press Unit.

It was a signal his career was careering dangerously into a cul-de-sac, prompting him to resign after prior notification to the President through a switchboard telephone conversation.

For a man with luck and courage, Ona had bounced back from every failing to bigger things, making triumph a mockery of his travails. Only for the cruel hand of death to unexpectedly snatch him on Friday. Adieus! 

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