Easter service and chance meeting with a former VP

Easter is, admittedly, a season of lively regeneration, even for those of us who would like to pretend that we have seen it all. This is so especially when the long-awaited rains have restored to the earth the exuberant greenery for which our land is famous. The fields, the woods and the grasslands seem to be dancing and smiling with a youthful insouciance.

When the “halleluiahs” of the Resurrection begin to ring from the cathedrals, churches and chapels, the heart cannot but wax optimistic and enthusiastic again. Hope, desire and new energy seem to rise with the one who defeated the tomb. We begin to look with wonder and faith upon the infinite possibilities of life.

So, it was in such a mood that I ambled to my old Gayaza neighbourhood church for the Easter morning worship. The church is a 110 years old, but it looks quite impressive, especially when it is spruced up and tastefully decorated as it was this morning. The service, too, did not disappoint, complete with a well-rendered Handel’s “Halleluiah Chorus”, neither howled nor screeched, as it rather frequently tends to be.

But the real treat for me came at the end of the service, when it was announced that there was a guest worshipper in the congregation and she would like to wish us a happy Easter. The worshipper turned out to be Dr Speciosa Naigaga Wandira Kazibwe. Does the name ring a bell? Anyway, you know about Ugandans’ love for weighty names which sound like lines of verse.

FEMALE EMPOWERMENT

On a serious note, Dr Kazibwe, a medical practitioner, was the second person to serve as national Vice-President under Yoweri Museveni, holding the number two office for nearly a decade, up to 2003. She was the first woman on the African continent to serve as vice-president when she replaced the late Dr Samson Kisekka in 1994. Curiously, Dr Kisekka was the medic who delivered my mother of me at the Masaka General Hospital in 1944.

But back to Dr Kazibwe, I first met her up close in 1992 when, as Education Minister, she opened a conference that some academics and representatives of the US Information Services were holding in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ landing in America. The scholarly palaver was held at the Lake Victoria Hotel in Entebbe (Henry Barlow’s “Lake Vic” in his poem, ‘Building the Nation’).

My contribution to the deliberations was a paper in which I tried to distinguish between “oracy” and what the Americans call “orality”. The point is that for us Africans (and for all intelligent human beings), oracy is a necessary language skill, the competent use of the spoken word that facilitates all our operations in society.

Indeed, it was Dr Kazibwe’s oracy, both in her opening address at the conference and in her informal interactions with us afterwards, that particularly struck me about her. She was quite young then (well below 40), but her articulateness, her relaxed fluency and, especially, her attentive and close listening ability, marked her out as a natural leader.

Maybe not many of us expected that she would be elevated to the high office of VP barely two years after our conference, but a lot of us were genuinely delighted at her appointment. Indeed, Dr Kazibwe’s Vice-Presidency was one of the high-water marks of the female empowerment wave ushered in by the National Resistance era in the mid-1980s.

Some of the women, like Winnie Byanyima, the aeronautical engineer and OXFAM boss, and her sister Edith, had earned their own positions through their participation in the liberation struggle. Indeed, the Ugandan gender-equity mainstreaming started in recognition of the contribution of such women and their sisters to the emancipation of the country from ignorant and dictatorial bondage.

Kazibwe and her generation of technocrats, like Speaker Rebecca Kadaga and my friend and fellow writer, Maria Karooro Okurut, currently the Minister for Internal Security, came in as both beneficiaries and the main implementers of the policy.

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since my first encounter with Dr Kazibwe, and there was a striking note of humility and spirituality in her voice as she addressed us at the Easter church gathering. This is probably the result of the many ups and downs through which she has been over the years.

EVERY WOMAN

The country still remembers, for example, her uniquely courageous exposure of the domestic violence to which she claims she was subjected by her late husband, the late Engineer Charles Kazibwe, even while she was Vice-President. This encouraged many women, and men, to bring the ugly monster of domestic violence out of the closet. Only earlier this week, the Baganda Kabaka (king) launched a formal campaign for gender equity and against domestic violence in his central Uganda kingdom.

Anyway, Dr Kazibwe remains inspiringly energetic and high profile on the national and international scene. She has been, among other things, United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. Last year, she was fronted by Uganda as a possible Eastern African candidate to replace Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma as African Union Secretary General.

I did not follow closely the process through which she was dropped from the contest. I must admit though that, for reasons into which I cannot go here, I would have been happier if our eventual candidate, Ms Amina Mohamed, had been elected to the post.

In any case, the disappointment that followed the inability of either of our sisters to ascend to the Addis Ababa seat should be mitigated by an awareness of the subtle factors at work in such contests.

There is, for example, a silent agreement that the Union chair would alternate between the Francophone and Anglophone blocks. An Anglophone Secretary General after Zuma, would have been a noticeable departure from this convention. Moreover, South Africa is regarded, by most West Africans, just as Eastern as Uganda or Kenya. It was the West’s turn. Maybe even the alternation between male and female played a part!

Incidentally, do you know that Dr Kazibwe was succeeded as Vice-President by my clansman and namesake, Professor Gilber Bukenya, for whom I am sometimes mistaken?