Nagenda and the loneliness of a brilliant mind

Author: Charles Onyango Obbo. PHOTO/FILE

What you need to know:

  • One time, he dedicated 12 straight columns to assailing me ruthlessly. If nothing else, one had to admire his singular focus. I never once did answer back, except once to wish him a quick recovery after he was taken ill. 

John Mwesigwa Robin Nagenda, writer, international cricket player, accomplished New Vision columnist, and President Yoweri Museveni media advisor (and his self-proclaimed “attack dog”) passed on March 4 at the age of 84.

Nagenda was a wordsmith a class apart. Of his generation, only Akena Adoko surpassed him. Coming to him as a “burn them all” staunch pro-Museveni columnist, most will not have been aware that he was one of the pioneer figures in East African literature.

A nod to his literary work notes that; “Nagenda lived in exile in the United Kingdom during the 1970s and 1980s, following the 1971 Ugandan coup d’état. He returned to the country in 1986 when Yoweri Museveni became president. In the same year, he published his first novel, The Seasons of Thomas Tebo, which involves “an idealistic man who becomes involved in politics only to be caught in the horror and violence of a corrupt polity”.

We will return to “The Seasons of Thomas Tebo” shortly. Anyone who read Nagenda’s columns for long knows that he was not a fan of The Monitor, especially between 1996 and 2003. For most of that period, he preserved his sharpest attacks for me as the paper’s editor and for my columns.

One time, he dedicated 12 straight columns to assailing me ruthlessly. If nothing else, one had to admire his singular focus. I never once did answer back, except once to wish him a quick recovery after he was taken ill. It was not cowardice (no one would ever accuse us of that) nor scorn (I took John seriously). It was down to two reasons. One, even when he was particularly vicious in his attacks on me, he would frequently slip in a line about my being a good writer. I didn’t take it as flattery but as a signal. I was curious to find out what.

Secondly, The Monitor was in a position that would be incomprehensible to most Ugandan editors today. Uganda was still in a “no-party”/one-party system. The Monitor was alone as the only legal public affairs entity that argued for a return to multipartyism, which was considered all but a crime. The first change happened in 1998 when CBS FM began to press for federalism softly.

Because of all the political and legal problems we used to have with the government, as long as Nagenda attacked The Monitor and me, we knew we hadn’t crossed into guns and swords territory. The government wasn’t about to resort to extrajudicial means to deal with its “Monitor headache”. Nagenda, then, was a bellwether for the red line. It wasn’t his attacks that worried us. It was his long silence. Fortunately, there was hardly any.

Additionally, we understood where it came from. The worst spell started in early 1996 when journalist and “Uganda Confidential” publisher Teddy Cheeye, who had helped the Monitor when it started and was a close associate, wrote a remarkably visceral article against Gertrude Byanyima, wife of Democratic Party luminary Boniface Byanyima.

Mrs Byanyima had thrown her backing with gusto behind Museveni challenger Paul Ssemogerere and messed up the narrative of him as a candidate with a narrow regional base. I rejected the article. The Monitor then went ahead and also refused to publish an inflammatory advert against Ssemogerere by supporters of the Museveni campaign that Cheeye had also brought. Nagenda took great exception, and it was downhill from there.

Finally, we got to meet face-to-face and talk privately. I had feared the first such encounter would be a colossal disaster. It was the total opposite. We hit it off. He was pleasant and thoughtful. He wasn’t naïve about the failures of the government and the problems Uganda was facing.

Where we disagreed was, ironically, it was because I was more willing to give the government leeway on the liberalisation of the economy. For Nagenda, however, criticising the government publicly weakened it and created counterproductive vulnerabilities.

In the period after, I got to know him better. He continued to hammer me, but gently. Nagenda was an intellectual snob, and he was more aristocratic than monarchist, although part of his filiality to Museveni was because he had restored the kingdoms.

The one person Nagenda liked and admired most was the late First Deputy Prime Minister Eriya Kategaya. He was his regular tennis – and whiskey – mate. However, Kategaya was a staunch republican, so how did that work? Well, he was tall, calm, regal, and always well-spoken – like an aristocrat. He liked former Prime Minister Ruhakana Ruganda for the same reason.

Nagenda was Thomas Tebo, “an idealistic man who becomes involved in politics only to be caught in the horror and violence of a corrupt polity”. In Museveni’s court, in the last years, his was the loneliness of a brilliant mind. Rest in Eternal Peace, John.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. 

Twitter: @cobbo3