Diana Mutasingwa: The youngest minister talks lifestyle, politics

Diana Mutasingwa Kagyenyi had just turned 29 when she was appointed minister in August 2021. She found out on the 9pm news. Her husband woke her up to watch news where they were announcing the new ministers. He felt that since she was in Parliament, this segment could interest Mutasingwa.  She had spent much of that day on the phone with her constituents in Buikwe like she often does, until around 8pm. Begrudgingly, she obliged.

“I agreed to watch the news because I particularly wanted to see who the new vice president was. Meanwhile, my phone was ringing off the hook, but I had had enough of the phone that day, so ignored it. Then, a news segment on the list of ministers, I saw my name and I was like what! It dawned on me why my phone was ringing constantly,” Mutasingwa says.

“I had not seen it coming. People say you always know, but I didn’t know until I watched the news.”  

Her appointment as Minister of State in the Office of the Vice President took her by surprise. Mutasingwa had been in Parliament for a few months. She could not imagine an appointment as minister at her age. The post was not even in her aspirations as she was still revelling in winning a hotly-contested Buikwe Woman MP election.

“I was the youngest minister on the list. I still am. I am so thankful to the President for recognising a youth like me and believing that I have what it takes to deliver services to our people at age 29,” Mutasingwa says.

Mutasingwa and her husband could not sleep due to sheer excitement. The phone calls did not stop. People from Buikwe, especially called in to congratulate her.

 She would later find out that the President may have tried to call her during the day but her phone was constantly engaged. Her father too had tried to call her in vain.

Ushered into national politics

Three years prior to that night  in 2018, Mutasingwa had been visiting her father when a call came through. The man on the other end of the line told Mutasingwa’s father that a new municipality had just been created in Buikwe and that a mayoral position was open to be filled. The man had wanted Charles Mutasingwa to contest but he turned down the proposal.  

“My father turned to me and asked if I would be interested. I said I was,” Mutasingwa recounts.

A week later, Mutasingwa would travel to Buikwe with her father, ready to become a countryside mayor.  

For a person raised in Kampala who attended top-tier schools before jetting off to Europe for her undergraduate studies to take on the challenge in the countryside is startling. But, her father knew this. A nudge from him instantly encouraged her to step in with both feet.

“The gentleman wanted my father to support one of the candidates that were standing for the mayoral position as a mutaka of the village. My father was born in Buikwe and grandfather too in Kiryoowa Village, Njeru South. So he is a mutaka. My father cut him short and asked if his daughter [me] could contest. The man said ‘it was okay. Just introduce her to the people and we see’,” Mutasingwa relates.  That is how 26-year-old Mutasingwa  was ushered into elective politics. She would go through a crash course on how to speak proper Luganda and how to move crowds with words.

“I met a group of women chaired by Judith Kiwanuka, she introduced me to them. They had two concerns: that the mayoral position was more masculine, and that I was too young,” she says.

“They suggested that I come as a woman representative. I told them I would love to first be mayor so they could see how good I was before sending me to parliament.”

She campaigned in Luganda, a language that she was not fluid with, seeing as she grew up in suburban Kampala and attended upmarket schools where Luganda is barely used. Yet she was able to connect with them so much that her rallies were teeming with people from all walks of life.

Poison fears

The campaigns would be more gruelling than she imagined. She was on the road for three months nonstop. She went without food for hours for the job to be done. She caught pneumonia because of night campaigns. That was not the worst.

“I got really hungry one time and ate rolex from a roadside vendor. The next day was total disaster. I had stomach complications, was taken to nearby hospital in Jinja and put on oxygen. I was there for a week before I was  transferred to IHK where I deteriorated. So, I was airlifted to Agha Khan Hospital, Nairobi. There were fears that I had been poisoned, but it must have been a bad case of food poisoning,” she recounts.

During her absence, her campaign team did not sit still. They went door to door and continued canvassing for votes to make up for her absence.

“We were seven contestants and I was the only woman. People liked my message of skilling women and empowering children through education. But also, there is something about being a youth in politics. People can see that you are too young to be so audacious. That alone makes them want to hear what you have to say. I came in second,” Mutasingwa says.

After that election, people told her that her message was good and they asked her to return as a woman representative.

In 2021, Mutasingwa strategised and stood again as woman MP and won. She replaced Judith Babirye. They were 10 contestants and she garnered over 43,000 votes.

A few months after winning that election, Mutasingwa was appointed minister.

Juggling  responsibilities

Mutasingwa is not just a minister. She is a member of Parliament, a student, a wife and mother of three, one of whom is six months old. She has had to learn to balance the time she spends on each of the roles.

“I have to prepare myself for the day, the night before or else things unravel. I have to work with my personal assistant to keep me up-to-date with my schedules. I utilise my Monday meetings here at the ministry to streamline my work, to know what needs to be done this week, to know what was accomplished the previous week, what wasn’t and why. I work more like a businesswoman because I am also in business,” she says.

Mutasingwa rises by 5am every day to prepare her children for school. Was she always a morning person?

“I was never a morning person until I realised something had to change. If you do not wake up early enough, you will fail,” she says.

By 6.30am she is out of the house and at office or any other meetings by 8am. Official time to leave office is 5pm on a normal day, but many a day, 7pm finds Mutasingwa at her desk.

Keeping in touch

On top of her busy schedule, Mutasingwa must keep tabs with her voters. She discovered early on that the biggest voter complaint against MPs is that they do not answer calls.

“In reality, you cannot pick all calls because you have a whole district. So, I have put together a team of political assistants who inform me of any issues that need sorting out. I always pick every call from these coordinators. Most of the other callers are rerouted to someone on my team who then notes down the issues. I can get like 100 calls a day. At around 7pm daily, I return their calls. If the issue can be handled by my coordinators, I ask them to call that person,” she says.

Mutasingwa travels to her constituency three to four times a week for the same reason.

On politics

As a relatively new entrant into politics, one would want to know what she thinks of it. Mutasingwa says as a politician, she has seen things she never imagined she would see.

“Your business becomes the human condition. You get to know things that you would never have known away from leadership. For instance, there is a time I was called as an MP to tell me they had a witch doctor in the village and told me that he was killing their children. How do you get the wisdom to solve a matter like that?” she asks rhetorically.

She is a firm believer that leadership is from God because how else would you explain a situation where 60-year-olds come to a 30-year-old for wisdom?

“Politics makes you grow beyond your age. Because the problems and situations you find yourself in make you grow. The things they call us to solve are beyond us as MPs,” says the mother of three.

On the President

As a minister, Mutasingwa knows the president from a relatively closer range. She says one of the ‘super powers’ President Museveni has is he never forgets people’s names.

“If you have ever introduced yourself to him, it doesn’t matter when, he will see you from afar in a crowd and call you by full name. I don’t know anyone else like that,” Mutasingwa says.

On the day the ministers were being sworn-in, President Museveni singled her out and called her by name.

“He said, ‘Mutasingwa’, and when I approached, he said , ‘Kampala Parents’?  I replied ‘yes Your Excellency’. I was left in awe that he could care about that.”

Mutasingwa  wonders why people always yearn to talk to the President face-to-face when a letter can do a better job. The President reads  letters  to him and responds.

Mutasingwa got married to Kagyenyi at the age of 23 in 2015 and has three children.

Leadership history 

She has always had it in her to lead. At Kampala Parents, she was a head prefect for her house and deputy head girl for the whole school. At Green Hill Academy, she was head of sanitation in O-Level, sports prefect in A-Level and chairperson Scripture Union. At University of Hertfordshire she was the chairperson of the East African students. She never imagined taking a national leadership position. She didn’t think that her generation had a chance at national leadership in Museveni’s government. However, President Museveni is pulling in younger people lately. Take one step at time, the journey takes you to unexpected places. 

Quick notes
Favourite social media platform: Instagram
Favourite book: The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
Favourite gadget: My phone because I use it a lot.
Pastime: I watch a lot of movies on Netflix, spend time with my family, especially my children and I pray a lot.