Prof Ogwang: From messiah to defendant

Prof. Patrick Ogwang. 

What you need to know:

  • Henry Edison Okurut Kedi says: Imagine the recourse by these learned plaintiffs to such diversionary legalese to spoil the professor’s party!

Uganda is a country of many brutal but interesting contradictions. For example, you do not need to be politically astute to become a celebrated politician here. All what may be required is for you to be benevolently greedy, poignantly wordy, expertly corrupt and uncompromisingly hawkish against your rivals.  

Nor do you need to be a truly anointed pastor to excel in your evangelical career. Just learn to be deceptively pious, comically oratorical and opportunistically charitable. As for our gallant accounting officers, adeptness in reconciling the irreconcilable figures for accountability purposes is enough to catapult one into socio-economic stardom, almost overnight!

And, in the case of taxi touts, shouting loud sounding nothings can put a copiously rich meal on your table. Which is why the age old dictum that emphasizes the “survival for the fittest” idea no longer makes any sense in our Pearl of Africa. It is more like survival for the weakest! 

Nobody now understands this cruel reality better than our own innovational Associate Professor Patrick Ogwang of Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST). He was recently thrust into the limelight after he lead a team of selflessly inspired researchers in a groundbreaking birthing of “Covidex” – the wonder herbal drug that has proved efficacious in supportive management of the ravaging coronavirus. 

However, if initially the good old professor thought he was going to be fabulously rewarded, exalted and accorded a hero’s welcome for this glorious achievement, he was dead wrong. Not in our banana republic! In fact, rather than have the lanky don festooned with accolades; or invited to State House for a rare photo opportunity with the President (perhaps complete with an aristocratic meal organised in his honor); or better still, have him hosted in Parliament in recognition of his spectacular life-saving discovery, the tested academic is instead being dragged to court! Reason?  He is being faulted for exclusively arrogating himself patent rights for the invention. His critics contend that, he is a civil servant and an employee of MUST who, in collaboration with his other colleagues, used government funds to jointly develop Covidex! 

Accordingly, the petitioners, Mr George William Alenyo (himself a lawyer), acting in concert with the Christian Chamber of Commerce, Agriculture, Industry Trade and Tourism want court to issue:
1.    A declaration that the Covitex drug is a proprietary patent for the government of Uganda, having been developed on Ugandan funds, premises and laboratories and by government public servants paid from the Consolidated Fund;
2.    An order of permanent injunction against the 1st defendant (Prof Ogwang) from claiming patent or Intellectual Property (IP) over the Covidex drug.

Imagine the recourse by these learned plaintiffs to such diversionary legalese to spoil the professor’s party! I thought we should have been celebrating the momentous scientific accomplishment of our home boy. The population is getting decimated by a diabolic virus and we still have the luxury and audacity to indulge in costly semantics and legalistic arguments against a scientist who has already given many Covid-19 victims a second chance! Kyoka these “sharp” `Ugandans! Come on! Give our messianic professor a break.     

Henry Edison Okurut Kedi,   [email protected]