Walking against climate change

Geoffrey Walker Ayeni, 42, looks at me with a lazy eye as he flips through his mobile phone.
It about 5pm but the heat is still menacingly high. Outside Monitor Publication Limited offices in Namuwongo, Kampala is Ayeni with assortments of paintings.
“I am here to raise funds,” he says as cuts beats of sweat rolling off his forehead and parts of cheeks.
Ayeni has staged a mini exhibition of his works that include brush water and oil paintings of different styles and characters.
He is here to seek funds for a walk that he intends to carry out to sensitise Ugandans on the effects of climate change.
“I am seeking funding from corporate companies to conduct a climate change sensitisation walk,” he tells me before we agree to link up the next day at his work station.
In Luzira we link up again at Ayeni’s home that tells of a true artist that he is.
Ayeni, together with his assistant, Eric Obonyo, work from home that is within the St Benedict Health Centre compound in Luzira.
They both have separate functions. Ayeni is the brain behind the concepts while Obonyo puts the concepts on the canvas.
Paintings of different personalities such as Tanzanian president John Pombe Magufuli, Bill Gates and Aga Khan, among others are lined up on his veranda along others of corporate and global companies such as Facebook, Coca-Cola, Daily Monitor, NTV and The East African.
Ayeni uses art and ornaments to walk for charity so as to attract attention of different personalities and corporate companies to support initiative that impact society.
“Ten years ago, I developed an idea to walk for health and charity under ‘Charity Walkers Club’ but it failed. But I never gave up and I am in the process of organising a charity walk to create awareness about the effects of climate change,” Ayeni says as he points out the impact of climate change in Uganda.
The impact, he says, inspires him and he needs to combine efforts with other people and companies to make a contribution. Ayeni was born in 1975 in Lira District to the late Rose Abong Ilwor and Daniel Obote, a brother to former president Apollo Milton Obote.
At three years, his mother mysteriously disappeared and she was reported to have been killed because of her relationship with the Obote family.

what others say
Uganda is largely an agronomic country and, therefore, the effects of climate change, according to Onesimus Muhwezi, a team leader at United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), have had an adverse impact on not only agriculture but the economy as a whole.

Tit bits

Walking for charity
Previously, Ayeni has walked in support of Aisha Nabukeera who had been shown on the defunct WBS TV after she was allegedly burnt by her stepmother in 2006.
This, he says, was a good opportunity through which he used his walking abilities to raise awareness about child abuse.
He also claims to have walked 800 kilometres from Busia to Katuna in 2007 in support of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Uganda.

Walk to Tanzania 2017
In an outline of how he plans to walk this time round, Ayeni says, he intends to raise awareness about climate change in the ‘Walk Tanzania 2017’, a two-hour challenge walk that will start and end in Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania.

Experiencing a long drought
Climate change, he says, has been manifesting itself in small ways having been part of the population that experienced a long drought and famine way back when he was four years in the 1970s.
His family, he says, was forced to flee the famine and political turmoil at the time into Kenya.

Working a casual labourer
In Kenya, Ayeni worked as a casual labourer on an Irish Potato farm that belonged to a man who had offered to house him and other family members with whom he had fled with.
However, he returned in Uganda in 1979 and settled in a village in Abako before moving to Luzira in Kampala to do art.

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