When Ronnie Malavu left his work to save a life

To be a savior takes sacrifice and being a witness takes love. Though he stands for a man who he saw battle accident injuries till his last breath, Ronnie Malavu Njumba was raised to act, not to be an onlooker whenever someone is in trouble. The virtues that his mother left him with are the values that he thinks society should teach every child to appreciate life and love enough to extend a helping hand to others.

Along came Malavu
Let us take a step back and peep into Malavu’s life.
He remembers 10 years ago when he pulled a three-year-old child from a flooded ditch as her playmates shouted for help. That was in Kibuli, a Kampala surbub. Malavu was a young bachelor photographer who was trying to make ends meet. The little girl he saved is now in Senior One, according to information he got from her father who frequently communicates to him after that incident. They became friends.
Like, they always say, life is a journey with mountains and valleys. Malavu, now 37-years-old, left his primary teaching job to ride boda boda for business. He says it is better paying.
The father of two says he is able to maintain a decent life with his family.
At his stage opposite Central Police Station (CPS) where he has been for 15 years, he leads about 20 other boda boda riders as the chairperson. His name alone draws questions of whether he is talking about ‘love’. He jokes about it every time he introduces himself with a beaming smile.
His colleagues and the women who sell fruits and other snacks at the stage leisurely crack jokes with him and others about almost anything life has offered or not to them. The women may not know about football but can easily chip in conversations on how men relate with women in daily lives.
By 7:30am, Malavu makes it a point to be at the stage to attend to whoever needs him. Morning and evening hours are money making moments and he keeps that as business peak hours till he returns to his family in Kagoma on Bombo Road by 8pm.

The fateful day
But January 8, evening found him witnessing the last days of healthy life of a father of four.
That evening, at 5:10pm. As most people snaked through taxis, harriers, Pajeros Prados, Mercedes and all manner of cars united at one small junction, a man stood waiting to cross to the other side of the road. There, CPS building seats in a strategic view, about 500metres away. On that fateful day, no traffic police officer was at the junction at that time.
In a split second, there was a big bang. A pedestrian in his late 50s flew off the road, hit the taxi rear mirror on the right side from CPS. The driver’s brakes had failed as he tried to swerve off from the wrong side of the one lane route to overtake others. It was a stream of motorists and pedestrians in the street as it always is during peak hour traffic near City Square.
There he lay, unconscious. The very nature of man in vulnerability. Two boda boda riders screamed their lungs out as the youthful driver panicked. He almost ran over the lifeless looking body.
“I can never forget how he flew up then knocked himself on the side mirror before falling down. It looked like a movie. Only that it was happening right in front of me. When the driver braked, the car was still moving and it was going to run over him,” Malavu was one of the boda boda riders present, narrates.
Timothy Musherure was the victim. Musherure would have turned 60 on April 5. One unique thing that his relatives told Malavu was that Musherure never boarded a boda boda all his life, though they would not explain why.
Musherure worked with Uganda Commercial Bank, Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of Health. He would rather walk than take a boda boda, according to Malavu. He said close family members told him Musherure either drove or walked.
By the time he was knocked by the taxi, he was at Buganda Road crossing from the CPS to City Square side.
Malavu got hold of the hand break that stood straight as though it was aware of the havoc it had caused.
The terrified driver got out of the car but did not know what to do.

Helping out
Malavu narrates that he knelt down and tried to talk to the accident victim. He was still and silent. He checked his pulse and noticed he was still breathing.
Other vehicles diverted and continued after a brief traffic jam holding vehicles coming from the one way road that divides the City Square.
Malavu remembers how he thought of a phone call to anyone and rushed to check his pockets. By good luck, there was a phone in one of his left pockets, an iPhone. Documents that had court details that Malavu did not bother to read had flown and spread on the road.
“By the time the accident happened, the traffic police officer was not there. Maybe he had gone back to the station or taken someone he had arrested, I do not know. I had parked at the stage and could see exactly what was happening on the road. Before the gentleman reached at that point near the electric pole, he was knocked. The other taxi was coming from a wrong side of the one way.” Malavu explains as he points to the spot where Musherure had his last walk in life.
His smaller phone had fallen by the side of the road.
“The car knocked him and lifted him up. He hit the head on the front mirror and fell down. When he fell down, he lost consciousness. He was just lying on his back in the middle of the road. People continued moving after a few minutes. Even cars continued moving, like the ones who were sloping down. Others branched off to Buganda Road. ” Malavu vividly recalls with a hand gesture of the victim’s position on his back indicating how the taxi driver also wanted to run away.
Other boda boda riders who had parked at the stage rushed to the middle of the road to come help him. One of them was 32-year-old Patrick Mvule who later held the victim on a safe boda as they rode to St Catherine Clinic, about 600 metres away.

Getting him to safety
The phone was recovered as Malavu figured out how to get the pass word to the iphone so that he could call a relative or whichever last dialed number.
“I lifted his left thumb and placed it on the screen and the phone luckily opened. I checked and the last dialed number was for someone called Arthur. He did not pick my calls immediately so I called four other people who did not answer fast. But Arthur called again as I tried to dial another number. When I narrated to him what had happened, he told us to take Musherure to the nearest hospital.”
After about 20 minutes, Musherure lifted his right hand and felt the back of his head. It was full of blood. But he could not talk. Only his eyes rolled.
There was nothing to stop the bleeding at that time. His rescuers were happy thinking it was a minor injury that could easily be treated.
Malavu was lucky that after putting the victim on a Safe Boda who they paid Shs5, 000 for a seven to 10 minutes ride, they were at St. Catherine Clinic.
Little did he know that the medics required a letter from police before they could treat the patient.
“They were asking us where he was knocked from, who knocked him, who are you. What I realised is that when you are taking someone who has had an accident to the hospital, you must have a letter from the police or if you are the one who has knocked, you must have answers for the doctor or anyone who may ask,” Says Malavu.
When Arthur arrived with four other colleagues in a car in about seven minutes of driving through the one lane at Lumumba Avenue, the victim was examined but the clinic advised them to take the patient to Case Clinic in Nakasero for better management of his condition.
“There, we gave each and everything that we had found on him to the relatives. He had a wallet, two iphones, many papers, a diary and a cap. We gave them all to Arthur. When we gave it, he looked at us, he did not know why we had kept all those things and were giving them to him.” Malavu says with a smile on his face.
To him and his colleague, Mvule, they had done their part and the patient at Case Clinic Intensive Care Unit was in safer hands.
The two boda men returned to their homes and continued with their daily routines but checked on the patient through the relatives on phone.

Unfortunately..
After eight days, Malavu received a phone call from the relatives that Musherura had passed on. The doctors at Case Clinic had performed a surgery on his broken skull.
“They said the blood was flowing in his brain and the brain had started swelling. Arthur told us that they had removed the top part of his head and operated on him.”
The memories flashed in Malavu’s mind. He took a deep breath before telling Daily Monitor how he prayed the patient would survive.
He said the surgeons tried to work on the clotting in the brain but he later got an infection from the ICU and did not make it.
The family later called him for the vigil and asked him and Mvule to explain to the family what happened before their own died.
This he said he did with such pain as though he had known the late accident victim for long. For the eight days of his last days on earth, Malavu had become a family friend to a man he knew not.
Because he stood together with the family through to burial in the village in Mbarara, Malavu was taken by the family to the Ministry of Ethics and Integrity to recognize him and the colleague as honest citizens who never took advantage of their loved one at his most vulnerable time.
Malavu became a key witness in a case of murder that is still on going in court and the suspect remanded to Luzira Prison.

Honesty symbol
While addressing the media recently, Minister of Ethics and Integrity, Fr. Simon Lukodo said the two returned Shs7.4million plus all valuable documents of the deceased without asking for anything in return.

“One time I lost my documents and I had to pay Shs1m to get them back. If these two men were morally tainted, they would have finished that man and taken all his things.” Said Fr. Lukodo as he addressed the press on the ministry and Church of Uganda preparations to mark the 43rd Anniversary of St. Janani Luwum.

The minister was happy that in a society that has thrown morals to the dogs, honest people that value strangers still exist.

He asked all boda bodas to respect their job and use it to serve humanity. He observed that whereas the boda boda business is infiltrated by bad elements in society, they are our sons and daughters who hold values that Janani Luwum held dear, to sacrifice and love others without discrimination.

Honesty can take you places
Honesty is going to take you places in life that you never could have dreamed and it’s the easiest thing you can practice in order to be happy, successful and fulfilled. Honesty is part of the foundation of my core values and principles. Honesty cuts through deception and knifes its way through deceit and lies. Honesty leads to a fulfilling, free life.

Honesty is not just about telling the truth. It’s about being real with yourself and others about who you are, what you want and what you need to live your most authentic life. Honesty promotes openness, empowers us and enables us to develop consistency in how we present the facts. Honesty sharpens our perception and allows us to observe everything around us with clarity.

Honesty and seeking the truth is always the way to go. Honesty engenders confidence, faith, empowers our willpower and represents us in the best way for others to see and witness our example.

Honesty improves our vitality. In an honesty experiment conducted by two University of Notre Dame professors, results showed that telling the truth is good for our health:
Telling the truth when tempted to lie can significantly improve a person’s mental and physical health.