Prime
Arnold Mugisha buried amid backlash over social media comments
The casket containing remains of the late Anold Ainebyona Mugisha at his ancestral home in Kaina, Ntungamo District during the burial ceremony on July 12, 2019 . PHOTOS BY PEREZ RUMANZI
What you need to know:
- Speaking as the chief mourner, the deputy Attorney General who is also the Rushenyi county Member of Parliament Mr Mwesigwa Rukutana blamed poverty on the increasing anger and hopelessness in the country arguing for prayer.
Hundreds of mourners graced the function to see the final send off for the slain young businessman Mr Anold Ainebyona Mugisha at Kyoruhega village, Kaina Ward Rwentobo/ Rwahi town council.
Apart from the elderly people, his family and relatives, business partners, and generals who escorted his Uncle Maj. Gen Ambrose Musinguzi, the function was also attended by a younger group of people who clearly showed a difference between two generations by the way they dressed and spoke.
The saddest part of the burial service was the moment when speeches were made by several family members.
“I don’t know what to say, but people are inhuman; to somebody who has lost a person, you can’t write such [on social media]. Although we are getting this we are not annoyed, we are just praying for our country and we are saying, ‘God what is portrayed in the media is just inhuman. We can’t forgive you but go to your God and say I repent’,” Ms Rossete Kembabazi a paternal aunt to the deceased said.
Speaker after speaker decried the hate speech, tribal and ethnic talk that followed the July 9 shooting of the Hickory Bar and Restaurant proprietor at a Supermarket following a brawl with a security guard.
“I said it in church, we have that thing of anger in Kampala, tribes against others. Arnold was not a Munyankole he didn’t even speak Runyankole. He is not related to Kanyamunyu,” his father Mr Plan Mugisha said.
His mother Ms Beatrice Mugisha condemned the degree of tribalism in the country equating the days to the 1980s.
“When my children finished studying I asked them not to join government because of conflicts in it. In 1980 when Movement was going to the bush these are the things that were happening, those who had pain went to the bush. I remembered I saw the war; it also came at our home in Fort Portal our parents died in the war but no one went to the war, the world went to prayer. This Movement came because of prayer. Don’t say peace was brought by Movement, the people who had their sons in the bush, those who had gone there over the situation went on the knees and prayed,” Ms Mugisha said.
A country that needs prayer
Speaking as the chief mourner, the deputy Attorney General who is also the Rushenyi county Member of Parliament Mr Mwesigwa Rukutana blamed poverty on the increasing anger and hopelessness in the country arguing for prayer.
“It’s true people there are angry. Tribalism comes in but the most important is poverty, a person sleeps on an angry stomach. When you give him a gun, his level of reasoning even if he is trained would be at the lowest. We need to pray for ourselves as a nation, especially the issue of social media because there are nations that have collapsed over social media,” Mr Rukutana said.
He dismissed the idea of banning private security firms in the country as key propagators of insecurity and shooting, suggested by Maj Gen Musinguzi. He argued that many of such cases have occurred even with the most trained of soldiers and police because of several other factors and not training itself. He rooted for the death sentence for persons convicted of premeditated murder and high level defilement saying Uganda should not resort to world human rights activism to push out of the law death sentences.
Mr Dan Kidega former speaker of the East African Legislative Assembly who spoke on behalf of Pecos Fellowship, a group of friends of the Mugisha family, said increasing hypocrisy is breeding hatred in the country. He added that envy and malice have generated issues that may result into a long conflict if the nation does not go back to the drawing board. He said people should not look at tribalism as what is troubling the country but rather, the increasingly rotten society whose moral fibre has broken.
Preaching at the burial service, the South Ankole Diocese Bishop Rt Rev. Nathan Ahimbisibwe asked politicians and Christians for mutual repentance and not to be burdened by anger and revenge but rather learn to forgive that many would copy from them to live better lives.
Who was Arnold Mugisha?
Born on March 9, 1993 in Masindi District, Ainebyona went to Lohana Academy; Kibuli Secondary School; Kings College Budo; Oxford Brooks University where he got a degree in Real Estate Management; and a Masters degree in the same course at University of Reading. After his studies he started Hickory Bar and Restaurant in upscale Kololo area in Kampala. Ainebyona was 26 years old at the time of his death.
On that fateful day, he had gone to Quality Supermarket in Naalya with his two siblings Andrew Atuheire and Aaron Agaba to buy bottled water on his way from the gym, something that was part of of his daily morning routine, because there was no clean water connection at their home.
He was described by many as a young man who liked to enjoy life to the fullest, was well-travelled and adventurous, enterprising, honest and smart in his ways.
