The legacy of Jennifer Musisi-Ssemakula

I do not know of any public official over the last 28 years who has stepped on so many toes and done so from day one and consistently, as the Executive Director of the Kampala City Council Authority, Ms Jennifer Musisi Ssemakula.

In some decisions, action has been taken without adequate preparation for the consequences or the aftermath. The intentions and plans are good, but the fallout is not well thought through.

Groups of people who had illegally settled on public land or KCCA property are forcefully evicted but we never get to hear that an alternative place was found for their businesses or residence.
There was information two years ago about alternative places for market vendors displaced from their stalls and they resisted them.
Also, KCCA has been a little mean-spirited to the Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago. The Executive Director’s office has been furnished well since 2011 while the Mayor’s office somewhat neglected.

Those are details, important as they are. What I’m interested in for now is the overall picture of the stepping on of toes by the KCCA Executive Director and how she showed it is possible to annoy so many people but still get your job done.
When the NRM government first came to power in January 1986, there was great relief in the southern half of Uganda, at least, that what seemed like unending political turmoil might finally have come to an end.

When the victorious rebel leader Yoweri Museveni, in his first address to the nation as head of state described this latest change of government as a “fundamental change in the politics of our country”, many really believed him.
Gradually, though, first surprise, then bewilderment, then the first feelings of disappointment, then growing anger and finally all-out national frustration with Museveni took root in Uganda.

The one thing many Ugandans could not understand at first was how this powerful and resolute military leader and former guerrilla seemed unable to deal with the increasing reports of abuse of office and embezzlement of public funds by officials under him.

The first theory was that perhaps he did not know about these allegations, as power sometimes cuts a leader off from reality. Later, the view became that he the head of state who reads widely did know about the rising corruption, but he could not act simply on the basis of allegations and needed hard evidence.

In the 1990s came a third explanation, which was that the President was a man of goodwill but “the problem is those around him.”
The reports, with documented evidence, continued to come to the public’s attention and once again, President Museveni seemed unresponsive.
By the late 1990s, a large number of Ugandans had now become convinced that the problem was simple: it was not that the president did not know what was going on, or was still investigating, or did not have enough evidence to order prosecution or arrest.

It was, in the public’s mind, that the president was part of the corruption, directing it, right in the middle of it, and because of that, he was a compromised man.
It was at this point that some formerly committed NRM officials like Col Kizza Besigye decided that the contradictions had become glaring enough for the damage they were causing to be irreparable. Besigye and after him several more NRM members broke off apparently to restore Uganda to the ideals for which they had first joined the NRM after 1981.

Today, of course, the public genuinely gets shocked when a corrupt government official is arrested.
Ugandans have become so used to Museveni’s casual attitude toward theft of public resources and when these officials are arrested, the suspicion is that they are “small fish” who have been victimized to cover the tracks of the real culprits high above in the government.

If Musisi-Ssemakula, a woman without a political background and without a political base, can take up her office and systematically start to enforce the law and it does not matter how many people she annoys in the process and how many vested interests she breaks up, naturally our thoughts go back to Museveni.

Where would Uganda be today if Museveni had from day one in office worked with the same resolve as the KCCA executive head?
Problems that seemed endemic and for which there seemed no solution at all, such as vendors selling vegetables along the streets in the evenings, vendors selling their ware along the railway line in the city, green spaces we had given up on and a city without street lights we had resigned ourselves to – overnight, something has started to change in these areas.

There have been some clumsy efforts at decorating Kampala, like the water pool along Kampala Road near Watoto (KPC) Church and the water pool near the Clock Tower, as well as the awkward October Street Festival, an idea transplanted from European cities but without much planning for a proper Kampala version.

Nevertheless, Kampala city dwellers and visitors can see concrete results in place and most importantly, a concrete, consistent effort. If there is any public official who deserves a hefty salary (not sure about her driver deserving the sum he reportedly earns), it is the Executive Director.
Yoweri Museveni had so much more executive power, military strength and international support in 1986 to single-handedly do so much for Uganda. But he squandered all that by his indecision.

The former president Milton Obote warned in a paper in 1990 that Museveni was a “very poor administrator”, an observation that many dismissed as the predictable ranting of a bitter former head of state, but Uganda has since discovered what an understatement Obote’s comment had been only four years into Museveni’s rule.

Fortunately, there is hope. Jennifer Musisi-Ssemakula -- whose leadership style is much like Idi Amin’s decisive approach, of simply getting the job done without regard to public opinion and weighing all sorts of political forces and implications – shows what is possible after the NRM government is gone from power eventually.

Just as a Musisi-Ssemakula came out of the blue at a point when Kampala city had started to lose hope of ever being a normal city again, a leader will come one day appear on the Ugandan scene exhibiting the same Musisi-Ssemakula, Idi Amin traits in public administration: just do it.

[email protected]/timkalyegira