MP Nakimuli balances spikes and Parliament

It is a Sunday afternoon and COBAP have just lost 3-1 to KAVC under the scorching sun at Nkumba University. Helen Nakimuli is trying her best to console her teammates and highlight a few mistakes they must work on going forward.
Due to circumstances beyond her control, she arrived late for the game and ended up sitting it out and watching on from the side-lines.
She is clad in a white t-shirt and jeans and arrived in her Toyota Wish which is being washed by a Nkumba University casual worker. Nothing fancy and she fits in just fine.

These have been her colleagues and teammates for the past decade and it is not about to change.
At COBAP,  Nakimuli is just one of them and she leaves her titles behind to fit in just perfectly. She is the Woman Member of Parliament for Kalangala District but that will not eat into her time for the game she has played since she was a young girl in 1998.

Volleyball, she says, is her first love and leaving the sport after getting into parliament would be unfair and selfish of her.
She will wear the corporate suits to Parliament and represent her constituents but for as long as she can, she will pull her bikers and play volleyball, a sport that has been part of her entire adult life.
“Volleyball is my first love. It is one thing I will always fall back to,” Nakimuli said in an interview.
“You know you can always have friends but friends disappear. This game will never disappear unless you walk away from it,” she added.
  Nakimuli has patrolled the entire court by playing in every position apart from setting and that has seen her fill whatever gap she is asked to by her coaches at COBAP.

Early start
It is not easy to find someone who has been playing sport for 23 years but Nakimuli is one of the few in Uganda.
The moment she touched a volleyball at Hormisdallen Primary School, Kirinya in the 90’s set the ball rolling and she would only stop when she couldn’t push herself any further.
“I started playing the game in 98 and I really loved it. I came along with it my entire school time,” she says.
The legislator went to Our Lady of Good Counsel Gayaza for secondary school before joining Makerere University and at both institutions she did more than just excelling in academics.
“I have got a lot from the sport. Apart from maintaining my body shape, I am physically and mentally fit and health wise it helps avoid some diseases.”

Tough to balance
Volleyball is mainly composed of people with careers elsewhere and it is played by many as a pastime activity. This means there is just a few hours given to the game in a day mainly because it doesn’t put food on the tables of the various stakeholders.
As the National Unity Platform MP, she is entirely accountable to the people of Kalangala who showered her with votes to represent them in parliament.
The amateur state of Ugandan sport means that there is hardly return on investment. That she is the president of COBAP Volleyball Club also comes with its own load of responsibilities.
In Parliament, Nakimuli is not just an MP, she is the captain of the ladies’ volleyball team that is preparing for the East Africa Parliamentary Games scheduled for December 4-18th in Arusha, Tanzania and that means most of her days start and end with volleyball.

The team trains in the morning and she attends that before going to Parliament. She is then expected at Makerere Grounds in the evenings for practice with COBAP. 
“It (striking a balance) is one of the hardest things but because I love this sport, I do my best to balance. I have a big team with mature women in Parliament and as their leader I have to be available. It is big responsibility and I have to find a way of balancing Parliamentary work and volleyball,” she says. 

Big plans for volleyball
The 36-year-old is already establishing ways of growing the game in Uganda and she plans to start with those closer to her.  COBAP Volleyball Club and the people of Kalangala will be the biggest beneficiaries.
Lobbying for the game is top on her agenda and she is confident volleyball can attract sponsorships and partnerships if well packaged and marketed for outsiders with ability to provide funding.
“I want to build volleyball in Kalangala. For starters I want to take a mini tournament there so that the people witness the game at the top level.”
Among other things, Nakimuli has plans of attracting competitions like the National Clubs Championship to the islands as a way of showing off Uganda’s beauty but also creating more awareness of the game to the locals.

Having a competitive team from Kalangala is also one of the things she hopes to accomplish.
 “I’m planning to have a team registered in Serie C and that will be good for a start,” she says. 
Kalangala being an island also means that it would be a good destination for beach volleyball and the legislator believes the district has whatever it takes to host such events.
“Because of the love I have for the sport, I will try to make sure we host some of these events and that will help spread the sport beyond Kampala. We have the white sand where beach volleyball can be played and if the water volumes allow, we should be able to host,” she says. 

For COBAP, who are competing in Serie B at the moment, Nakimuli assures the team of attracting sponsorships during her term of office as MP but also president of the club.
“I will definitely find sponsorship for my team. That is a must,”  she assures. 
Sponsorships have been hard to come by for UVF and teams bear the biggest financial burden to ensure there is volleyball played.
That, ideally, keeps away teams with no financial muscle to last a full season and Nakimuli plans to lay a foundation for other teams using COBAP as an example.

 We need more funding
For all the eleven years Nakimuli has played for COBAP, there has been no remuneration for the players and coaches simply because teams can’t afford to pay.
 It is just a few teams in the sport that can regularly pay players. Some offer incentives like rent and transport allowances but with no proper salary payment arrangements.

The university sides mainly offer scholarships while other teams offer job connections to players and require them to perform both at the workplace where they earn a living as well as on court.
She believes that with more money coming into sports from the government and through federations, different disciplines would be able to tap into that and put in place structures that would attract more money into the sector.
“We have a good number of youths who are jobless but talented and yet there is little money allocated to sports. Thanks to our Deputy Speaker of Parliament (Anita Among), we had a motion for sports to be given priority, increasing funding for sports and constructing stadiums. The different federations should be given more money to invest in our people,” she says. 

“The people we watch on television like those in the Premier League, Spanish La Liga are paid handsomely and that’s what we should be looking at. Sports nowadays is a business. It is not just for leisure. People earn a living out of football, netball, volleyball.”
All hope is not lost for sport, though, as Nakimuli expects to have something good for sport coming out of the current parliament.
“With the coming of the new deputy speaker, she is a sports woman and allowed us to debate and said sports should be given priority. She actually worked along with FUFA to give all members balls to take to their constituencies to encourage our people to get into sports.”

Sports is big enough
Many stakeholders in sports believe the sector is short-changed by being combined with education and that it is big enough to run on its own with an independent ministry.
The Legislator is one of those and she believes getting sports out of the education shadow will go a long way in helping the sector grow.
“We are encouraging the government to at least make the sports ministry independent from that of education. Education covers up sports. If given its own ministry, that would solve a lot of problems we have in the sector,” she says. 
Sports and education might be under the same ministry but the difference in funding of the two sectors leaves a lot to be desired. Sports’ biggest ever allocation in a financial year was 26 billion in 2019/2020.

I can be President
Nakimuli tried to be UVF Second Vice President in this year’s elections but lost by 12 votes to Salma Kairungi.
She believes the results would have been different had she had the time to reach all voters and sell to them her agenda for the sport.

“I went into this when I was still running my campaigns for Member of Parliament and I came in late,” she says
“When I won the MP seat, I then focussed on the UVF elections but it was too late.
“Some of the people who came to vote didn’t know that the sport had gotten an MP because it was going to be good for the sport to have someone in such a position,”
Quitting is not for her though and she says time will come for her to lead.

“I am not one that quits and if given chance by the volleyball fraternity I will come in and stand to give a hand to volleyball,”
With Hadijja Nammanda opening the doors as the first female president for UVF,  Nakimuli believes she has what it takes to occupy the top seat of the federation.
“For me I can even be the president of this country. I aim very high. I can be president of this federation if given the chance. For now, I am not into it and I want to contribute the sport from where I am,” she says. 
 For the love of volleyball, Nakimuli says she doesn’t even have to be in leadership to contribute in whatever way she can to see the game grow.

 What others say

Simon P.  Muhumuza 
COBAP Volleyball Club manager 
 “Helen is an all-round lady. She gives time to what she loves. Volleyball is part of her and irrespective of her busy schedule, she will find time for the game.
“She plans her schedules and on a daily basis she won’t miss volleyball and her club.
“Mature player, oldest player of the team, President of the COBAP- Uganda volleyball club. These can tell you what it means to the team when she’s around. 
She will build confidence in the team, lift the players’ spirits and a good player with good game reading of opponents. She can guide on how to approach any opponent and is a great motivation to the young players.”

 Jalia Nabadda 
COBAP Volleyball Club captain 
 “First of all, she (Helen) is an inspiration to most of us because she has been a leader in the club ever since I joined.
“Her legislation work has kept her busy these days but she still fixes time and joins us during our training sessions and games.”

 Godwin Ssenyondo 
UVF General Secretary 
 “It means a lot (Helen playing volleyball) to UVF because it confirms the fact that Volleyball is a game played by mainly the elite. We have members from schools, universities, the National Forces and other corporations.
“We now have a voice in parliament that can speak about the game of Volleyball and sports generally from an informed point of view. 
“Hon. Nakimuli has seen it all right from being a player in High School to Club level. 
She always took part in Beach Volleyball and as a Federation we are already in talks with her to take Beach Volleyball to Kalangala in a bid to popularize the game.”