Nuwa Kagolo: From businessman to successful healthcare investor

Hajj Nuwa Kagolo and his wife Jalia Nandawula in their home in Kalisizo. PHOTO | MICHAEL J. SSALI

What you need to know:

  • Starting afresh. When the war between Uganda and Tanzania broke out in 1978 Kagolo and his wife Jalia Nandawula fled from Kalisizo.  Upon their return at the end of the war all their stores had been looted. Even the bank building in Masaka Town (Uganda Commercial Bank Ltd ) where they kept their money was razed to the ground. Yet they did not have any banking records.
  • “So with the  little money I had left I bought a eucalyptus forest cut down the trees and sold to the local residents as firewood. I did make some money and it’s what I used to re-establish my present hardware shop,” says Kagolo.

Nuwa Kagolo Nsibambi, the proprietor of Bukoto Natete Dispensary in Kalisizo Town, Kyotera District, is a soft spoken old man with an interesting story.  

The Mayor of Kalisizo Town, Sunday Ntambaazi, describes him as the ‘living encyclopedia’ in the area; ‘the custodian of knowledge and information about the history of Kalisizo Town and Uganda in general.’

“We actually depend on him all the time for information regarding the history of our town. He has a wonderful memory and he remembers clearly who lived where even before the Asians were still shopkeepers and the main businessmen in our town. He is also the man we consult for guidance to solve issues, particularly matters related to land,” says Ntambaazi.

Treasure trove

While in his living room, Hajj Kagolo, as he is popularly known,  explains  that although the place in which the interview was being conducted is known to be in Kalisizo Town, some hundred years ago the correct name of the place was ‘Matale Village’.

“The entire administrative unit may today be referred to as Kalisizo Town which is why even this area where my house is can be said to be part of Kalisizo, but when we were growing up we knew this place to be Matale Village,” he explains.  

“Back then Kalisizo was just that areain which the main hospital was later built. In the Luganda language any area where animals are pastured is known as kalisizo. So our grandparents would take their goats, sheep, and cattle to that area for pasturing because its grass was known to be good fodder. Around the beginning of the last century the place became a camping site for white men that were surveying the land in the entire country, which resulted in the so called nine hundred square miles and eight hundred square miles in Buganda.   

The camp soon became a bee-hive of activities as people from far and near reported there over land matters or to seek work as potters. A few Indians later came and set up shops quite near the surveyors’ camp from which most of the people that got paid their wages would buy items such as clothes and salt. The surveyors’ camp relocated after some years, but the Indians did not leave and instead continued as shopkeepers and traders in the place which later became officially known as Kalisizo Town,” he relates. 

Linguistically  gifted

A devout Muslim, Kagolo has some understanding of the Arabic language, and he fluently speaks Kiswahili and English, besides his native Luganda. He says his father, the late Hajj Zakalia Nsibambi spoke a variety of languages including Luo, Kiswahili, Indian, some English and a variety of local Ugandan languages. 

As Kagolo testifies, it was because of Nsibambi’s gift for languages that the white surveyors liked him and appointed him to serve as their interpreter wherever they went in Uganda. 

Family fortune

“At the end of his contract, my father was paid 120 rupees which around 1906 was a lot of money. There were no banks in the country easily accessible to Africans and he had a hard time keeping the money safely and when he took up another job as a canteen attendant at Kings African Rifles (KAR) -Bombo his employers offered to keep the money for him, promising to give it to him back at the end of his employment. 

After a period of some six years, Mzee Nsibambi decided to retire and to go into self employment. His employers gave his savings back to him (120 rupees) to which he added more money that he had saved as a canteen attendant and went back to Kalisizo where he opened up a wholesale shop that competed fairly well with those owned by Indians,” Kagolo shares about his background.

Kagolo who was born in 1940 and went to school in Bombo (Primary School) and Kabonge Junior Secondary School ,but he had to end his academic career suddenly in1957 on the orders of his father who wanted him to assist him  in the operations of the wholesale shop.  “He was getting on in years and there was a lot of work in the shop. He told me that he wanted at least one of his children to take up the business and develop it further in case he suddenly died. My elder brothers had gone off to live their own lives as businessmen. So I came over to join him. But there were so many challenges for me. My dad was such a good mathematician that he could do all the calculations mentally without any need for pen and paper. Even after the arrival of calculators if you used it and still came up with the wrong result he would point it out to you,” Kagolo says.  

The young Kagolo soon realised that they were dealing with so many suppliers and customers yet he did not know anything about accounts and things such as bookkeeping, salesmanship, invoice, delivery note etc. So he decided to register for a correspondence course in business education with the Union College South Africa as he worked at the shop and successfully completed the course in 1963.  

He remembers a period when a movement known as Bataka Party  or Bataka BU  was started by Ignatius Kangave Musasizi and Uganda National Movement of  Augustine Kamya who rallied Africans to stop  buying from shops owned by Indians. 

“The main complaint was that Indians were suspected of racism and being unfair in their dealings with African traders,” Kagolo explained. 

“The boycott of Asian shops by black people was of course illegal and probably unjustified, but in a way it boosted our sales. In 1968 we decided to buy a building that was closer to the then Mutukula Road (Plot 23) where we established a larger shop although we still preserved  this building where we are now seated as our main store,” he shares. 

Losing it all

The family business’ luck ran out, however, in few years after the expulsion of Indians from Uganda in 1972. “There was less and less sugar coming out of Lugazi and Kakira. Most other products began to dwindle including iron bars from Jinja and cement for which we were agents,” says Kagolo.

He also noticed that soon after the war there was a big shortage of medical services and medical drugs despite the presence of Kalisizo Dispensary, now Kalisizo General Hospital  “I had no medical training at all ,but I thought there was something I could do to resolve the problem. I discussed the idea of setting up a private medical facility with a lawyer who advised me to set it up as an unlimited company without share capital and employ qualified medical workers to run it. 

He prepared for me all the necessary documents and that’s how Bukoto Nateete Dispensary came into existence right in his own building and next to his hardware shop in Kalisizo Town,” says.  Mayor Ntambaazi, describes the dispensary as “the place that has delivered quality health care service throughout the periods of  hardships such as during the period when the National Resistance Army was battling the Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) government that was in power between 1981 and 1986. To this day, as residents of this town and the neighbouring communities, we continue to value the services of that old man’s dispensary.”

That dispensary has earned him special recognition from the East African Polytechnic College, Kyambogo which granted him a honorary fellow award of East African Polytechnic College Kyambogo in recognition of his outstanding, significant, contribution in human care in hospital. The special recognition took place during the eighth graduation ceremony on March 25, 2017.