Musisi: From a star performer to attracting the President’s ire
In seven short years, Ms Jennifer Musisi has plunged from heroine to villain. Most of those seven years (2011-2018) were spent at City Hall presiding over the corporatisation of the former Kampala City Council and sinking billions of World Bank funds into infrastructure.
Kampala’s notoriously creaky infrastructure had overwhelmed the brains, capacity and imagination of its elected officials, because even where they tried, they would end up with a Nigerian-style road. This is because vested interests associated with the rulers would make it impossible for compensation, razing the stuff that makes the city glow at night like a Christmas tree, but is mostly an eye-sore during the day, transmitting tonnes of diseases, causing accidents, etc.
In boda bodas and street vendors, Ms Musisi met her match as her “evangelising work” to promote licence holders who paid hefty licence fees to KCCA ran into political reality. The President wary of noisy Opposition politicians, who extracted a heavy price from him, now wanted them out of office completely and the last thing he wanted were two separate armies of city residents, transporters and final stop distributors (a broad term that covers vendors, street markets, hawkers) making the city ungovernable.
Boda-boda finance contrary to what people think, is a highly sophisticated financing system that yields its benefactors upwards of 100 per cent or more in financing charges. People will be surprised that behind boda bodas are not local banks, but muzungu financing houses with a very effective collective enforcement system. Some loans go to “groups”.
Everyone in the city is organised into a group that makes it easier for them to be transported to political rallies, etc. Bigger groups like teachers, Kacita, etc, enjoy ringside access to the President and fallen figures like Kale Kayihura and Abdallah Kitatta understood their importance to burnish the President’s image, especially between 2011 and 2016 when the economy came to its knees.
So what did Ms Musisi who last year left to go to Harvard on a fellowship do? These are a dime a dozen as Harvard and other Ivies has entered into a grassroots effort to build a network of contacts and parallel intellectual resources. KCCA has been struggling so to speak, to pay its bills. KCCA pays its salaries but more at the expense of other statutory bills.
Early this year, NSSF found KCCA and BoU in default of remittance of worker contributions and declined to issue a clearance allowing their lawyers to apply for practicing certificates a legal requirement to appear in court.
Basically, KCCA’s lawlessness was struck with an even bigger act of lawlessness by NSSF punishing innocent employees and depriving the public of their services. KCCA has just 24 lawyers for a city that should have a legal arm of at least 100 just to cover its seven divisions, technical, and strategic services. In 2019, eight years after the Authority first sat in Chambers, KCCA finally passed its first legislation (ordinances that go to the AG for approval).
The President seems angry at failing to get value for money. But he forgets that the adhoc system implemented at KCCA has created three tribes of workers - about one third are employed by Public Service, and the rest are either temporary or casual workers. But as he rightly pointed out, PSC and their chairperson Justice Ralph Ocan, has said as much, hiring people on the whim is a major breakdown of organisational discipline. If you fell afoul of Ms Musisi’s evangelising mission you were toast, as the internal human resources department would simply roast you for a late lunch and forget about you.
But Ms Musisi’s biggest offence was the failure of her work to yield political results. Beautiful city is one thing, but armies of dissenters is another. So long as she allied with ruthless tear gas, she ensured the tireless band of the opposition remained alive, eleven MPs all from the Opposition are a disastrous, but permanent change to the city’s landscape.
Mr Ssemogerere is an Attorney-at-Law
and an Advocate. [email protected]
