I used NSSF benefits to restore my son’s life, says Wamoto

Impact. Mr Noah Mukhwana shares his recovery story and how he benefitted from his father’s National Social Security Fund savings. PHOTO BY Eronie Kamukama

What you need to know:

  • Important. Mr Wamoto says without NSSF, there would not have been a possibility of saving his son.

Kampala.

On November 20, 2006, as the sun found its bed in the West, Noah Mukhwana searched for a payphone outside his secondary school.
An hour earlier, the senior six student in his early 20s had completed his last Uganda Advanced Certificate Examination (UACE) and all he wanted in that moment was to ask his father, Mr Nabende Wamoto to pick him and his twin brother from school.
While he made that call on a public payphone in Mbuya, a Kampala suburb, a vehicle rammed into him.
“I fell in a ditch, I was unconscious and was taken to Mulago Hospital by the military ambulance of Mbuya barracks where I spent nine months,” Mr Mukhwana recalls.
His father recalls that awful evening too.
“He landed in a trench on the side of the road. The person driving the vehicle got out and left the car on top of my son and the people who saw believed it was a dead body. Three quarters of the body were in the trench while the car sat on the remaining parts of his body,” Mr Wamoto narrates how his son’s spinal cord was compressed.
His body lay beneath a vehicle, just 200 metres away from Mbuya Army Barracks.
Luckily, as the army ambulance drove to Mbuya Hospital, Mr Mukhwana’s accident attracted the occupants’ attention.
Once he was salvaged from the ditch, he was rushed to Mbuya Hospital but doctors delivered sad news.
His condition could not be managed and his father was advised to take him to Mulago National Referral Hospital where he gained consciousness three days later.
Having sustained a closed head injury with a concussion and a complete spinal cord injury, Mr Mukhwana needed a neurosurgeon and an orthopaedic surgeon for an operation to stabilise his spinal cord.
After understanding the gravity of his son’s condition, Mr Wamoto figured he needed money to treat him.
Of the three needs, he only had Mr Mallon Nyati, a senior orthopaedic surgeon.

Hotel career
Before the accident, Mr Wamoto, a retired hotel manager, had set up a restaurant that served four star generals from Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and countries as far as China had completed his contract at Uganda Senior Command and Staff College in Jinja.
He was still waiting for President Museveni to affirm his recommendation from the late Noble Mayombo as Resident District Commissioner. His financial resources were very limited so he could hardly afford his son’s treatment.
“I did not have money in the house,” he says. The army generals he had served during his contract wanted to fundraise for his son’s treatment but Mr Wamoto’s plan was to withdraw his National Social Security Fund (NSSF) age benefit.
“I told the generals that I have my unpaid benefits with NSSF and they were excited because some of the money was collected through their school,” he says.
As the generals started their fundraiser from that point, family friends who heard his son’s story sent him cash as condolences flew in.
Without an idea of how much money he had saved on his NSSF account, Mr Wamoto applied for his benefits.
In less than 50 days, on September 25, 2007, he received the savings.
“My money was slightly less than Shs4m but it was big money at that time and it helped me a lot. My friends who got Shs4m bought taxis and I bought my son’s life,” Mr Wamoto says.
In the absence of a neurosurgeon, Mr Nyati carried out a risky operation.
However, in his conclusive tests, Mr Nyati declared that Mr Mukhwana would recover in a wheel chair.
“He is not expected to recover neurological function. His disability is 100 per cent,” Mr Nyati’s medical report dated April 16th 2007 delivered the news.
According to Mr Mukhwana, this meant that he had no chance to walk and function like he used to.
Early January 2007, he was discharged not because he was better but because his hope for a new life lay in rehabilitation in a wheel chair.
“I became partially paralysed from the lower limb and I could not sit. They talked to me to accept the new condition I was in, I was trained on how to move myself from one position to another to avoid sores and was trained to control urine using urine bags and live with it as it,” Mr Mukhwana explains.

NSSF on the rescue
Mr Wamoto says without NSSF, there would not have been a possibility of saving his son.
It is NSSF’s push enabled him to get assistive devices such as a wheelchair besides his treatment. But even with this, the trauma was hardly over.
“He cried throughout the nights sometimes. If I was asleep, he would cry the whole night,” Mr Wamoto says.
“Sometimes, he would burst into laughter with tears and I would say you are lucky because some people gave me money to bury you and if you have ability to cry, you are lucky.”
Months later, an accident in Mukono changed Mr Mukhwana’s attitude towards life.
His father reminded him that unlike the Member of Parliament who had met his creator, he was still alive.
In 2008, with a more positive attitude towards life, Mr Mukhwana was admitted to Kyambogo University on government sponsorship.
Today, Mr Mukhwana, 34 years, has four bolts in his back.
He is now a procurement officer and a human rights defender for persons with disability.
He graduated in 2013 and has gone back to society to discover how he can use his empowerment to the benefit of other vulnerable people.
He has registered a basketball club for persons with disabilities for people to live positively.
He has also rallied about 800 people who have been disabled by road accidents to share ideas on how to engage in income generating activities.
“You can make all the money but if you do not have a savings culture and if you are not going to invest for the future, your life will be just be there and if we do not encourage our people to save, their future will be no more,” he says drawing lessons from his father’s experience.
On the other hand, Mr Wamoto now wants NSSF to cast a bigger net to convince all Ugandans including public servants to save money voluntarily.
“My son is the biggest investment I put my money in. I also made some house project in Mbale which I thought would be good for him since I have accepted his condition,” he says.
Mr Wamoto wants to complete the house and send Mr Mukhwana there to do social work.

To vote for Nabende Wamoto in the NSSF Friends with Benefits competition, dial *254# or go to www.nssfug.org.