Mr Nicholas Sengoba
Francis Drake Rammer Gureme a.k.a Jajja FDR. Gureme celebrates his birthday on the 19th day of September. He is now almost 100 years of age. Considering the turbulence that Uganda has been through since independence in 1962, that makes him a very lucky old man who still walks albeit with a walking stick.
It is compounded by the fact that Gureme didn’t take the option of exile and neither did he hang around and lie low like an envelope or turn into a sycophant.
Those who followed his writings in the media before age and health overwhelmed him, know so much about Gureme. For some it was too much. Former Daily Monitor columnist Kevin O’Connor once said that Gureme was never one of his favourite Ugandan journalists because his writings were full of himself. Said O’Conner in his Roving Eye Column, ‘when Mr. Gureme writes, conceit has no bounds.’ Truth is that Gureme had a very great and insightful style of writing in his Old Man About Town, column. He put himself in the context or how most of Uganda’s contemporary history evolved. You enjoyed it if you love history. I recall the story about the opening of the Owen Falls Dam and how his invitation arrived two weeks after the event. His interactions with Obote at the Uganda club and some of experiences serving as a permanent secretary and Minister of Tourism in the Idi Amin government. He once raised eyebrows on issues surrounding coitus among the Banyankore.
His journey from Kagango county in present day Sheema District reads like the history of Uganda. Gureme whose name was allegedly from the Kiganda name Gulemye given by the Katikiro of Buganda Sir Apollo Kaggwa Gulemye Kalibala who was a friend to Gureme’s Uncle Nuwa Mbaguta. Maguta was the prime minister of Ankole. The Banyankore modified it to Gureme the same way Tineyefuza came out of ‘sejusa.’
From Mbarara High School, to Kings College Budo to Makerere and then a life in the civil service through to retirement, Gureme saw most of it all.
Uganda like any other country or society has peculiar things that uniquely make it ‘that place.’
For instance, in the days before independence it was common for people to choose spouses from their ‘ethnic context.’ Gureme a Munyankore, Muhiima born into a family of three children, defied it. He made an honest woman of the late Christine Birabwa Nakalama whom he met in Gulu where she was pursuing a nursing course. Gureme was a District Commissioner. She was a Muganda of the Mpologoma (Lion) clan. Together they ran a grocery store and soft drinks dealership on Kimathi Avenue called Prudential Stores. It was a place where parents often left ‘packages’ for their children at Namasagali College during the days of Fr. Damien Grimes. They went on to have many children whom we shall not count as it frowned upon in Kiganda culture. But I know seven including Paul who was my classmate at Budo.
Gureme caped his public service career after serving as General Manager of the newly refurbished International Conference Center in the late 80s and early 90s.
In a country were corner cutting, corruption, misuse and outright theft of public resources is an obvious thing to do the old man retired unblemished thus defying ‘Ugandaness.’
He became known for writing a very popular no-holds-barred and successful column in the New Vision and later the Daily Monitor. The Old Man About Town, like Ear To The Ground of Charles Onyango-Obbo, and the daring writings of Timothy Kalyegira plus the late John Rwabungu and John Robin Mwesigwa Nagenda were a must read. Gureme would lay his teeth in the excesses of the government every so often. It is something considered very risky in Uganda. It may lead many to shun those who dare for fear of being targeted as anti-government. Many Ugandans did not ‘understand’ how a ‘westerner’ with some of his children and relatives working with government would be that critical. For the old man there was no compromise to his convictions, whatever the consequences.
When Kizza Besigye offered himself for the presidency it shook the government led by President Yoweri Museveni; his former patient during the bush war. Gureme and other columnists at the Vision like Robert Kabushenga fell into hot water for being deemed too critical of the government. They were suspended from writing and allegedly given conditions to tone down before being reinstated.
Gureme was having none of it and went to the Daily Monitor where he continued from where he left off.
The task to rein in Gureme was left to John Nagenda. Nagenda was the unforgiving self-appointed bulldog of the president and his family, guarding against his critics. (He often rang and called me ‘silly’ when he was not happy with what I wrote.) Being an elder from home in Namutamba, I would simply listen and not answer him back.
Not so with Gureme. He took Nagenda on for his ‘honeyed portrayals of a dire situation.’ Gureme matched and surpassed Nagenda in some of the most hilarious and intriguing contests of wit, witnessed in the media in the recent past. When Nagenda was overwhelmed, Hon. Janet Museveni picked her pen on December 17th, 2002, and counselled Gureme to ‘reflect on his life.’ She suggested that at 76 it would be smarter for Gureme to be ‘in the countryside keeping a sedentary eye on his cows, receiving the respect due to elders and making peace with his maker’ instead of being in town writing about alleged NRM and Museveni’s autocracy. Gureme compared these to the last days of Hitler when the later would not take advice from military experts.
Now that Museveni is 80 and warming up to stand for office after 40 years, one wonders if Janet Museveni would give him the same advice she gave Gureme over 20 years ago.
As for the old man about town, he gives us an enduring lesson. That it’s possible to live a long and fruitful life even without grovelling and partaking of the Ugandan kiyaye culture of skulduggery.
Mr. Sengoba is a commentator on political and social issues
