|
How being a minister has changed with time
Abu Mayanja was somehow jolted. "Congratulations for being appointed a minister!"
![]() |
| BACK IN THE DAY: prof. Edward Rugumayo is sworn-in (top) at State House Entebbe in June 1971 as President Amin and Henry Kyemba look on. Below, he takes oath of office as Minister of Internal Affairs in 1999 (File photos). |
It was Mr Sula Kawere, a friend to Mayanja speaking to him. "It was on television. I did not have television," says Mayanja.
The year was 1971.
After a brief stint in detention in 1968, Mayanja was returning into the thick of politics.
His president was Idi Amin Dada who had just toppled Milton Obote in a military coup.
There was no particular principle that Idi Amin followed in appointing ministers - certainly it had nothing to do with regional balance or friendship. Either someone had the right qualification by him, or they were in the right place at the right time.
For Henry Kyemba, it was more of the latter. His lucky break came in September 1972.
An unhappy President Amin had just sent four ministers on forced leave for unsatisfactory performance.
Kyemba was Permanent Secretary when his Minister for Community Development, Mr Yekosophat Engur, was sent on leave along with the others.
On that September day, the minister was supposed to officiate at a function at Nsamizi Trading Centre, near Entebbe, and Kyemba was on his way there to wait for him.
"Then I heard on the news at 1.15 p.m. that I was supposed to take over," he recalls.
By this time, both Mayanja and Kyemba had some claim to fame. They had played a part in the 1960s politics - one working for a minister; the other giving ministers a hard time.
Both were well educated. Mayanja worked on the job for only 22 months. Kyemba would work for some three years.
Like many of their colleagues, they would ultimately flee into exile. President Amin has been credited with seeking out the educated to appoint as ministers.
But there is something else too; the crude way in which he was often seen dealing with them, and then ultimately discarding them.
"One day he sent ministers on leave. Then he directed us Permanent Secretaries to take over as acting ministers," says Mr Francis Gureme.
When it was realised that in their acting capacities, they could not be allowed into international conferences - an immediate one being a ministerial meeting in Kenya - President Amin found a quick solution.
Recalls Gureme: "He calls Godfrey Lule and says, 'Well, swear everybody, swear them in.'"
That was April 1973. Ministerial tradition came to Uganda with the British colonialists in 1955. The country's first ministers were named then.
They were Mr Zed Muyogonya (Land), Prof. Yusuf Lule (Community Development), and Mr Apollo Kironde (Works).
There were also Parliamentary Secretaries - a term used in Britain to refer to junior ministers - among them Mr William Rwetsiba, Mr Pascal Odur and Mr David J.K. Nabeta.
Kyemba believes that the package for such officials was "slightly higher" in those days.
Both Kyemba and Mayanja look back to the 1960s as the best time to be in this job.
Mayanja was one of the architects of the Uganda People's Congress/Kabaka Yekka Alliance of 1962.
Then, he was a Member of Parliament. Kyemba was the Principal Private Secretary to President Obote - a post that was later expanded to encompass Head of Civil Service/Secretary to Cabinet during Amin's regime.
Under Obote I, recalls Kyemba, "a minister had much more influence and power."
There were five-year development plans in which schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, and homes for civil servants had to be built.
"I have heard people say that ministers stole money. This is [not true]. Where is Mayanja Nkangi's wealth. Where is my wealth?"
Mayanja believes that ministers today have amassed far more wealth than during the early days.
"People like Henry Barlow they did not steal anything. There are no mansions. There are no foreign accounts."
Barlow became Permanent Secretary/Head of Civil Service during Obote II regime in 1980.
"We were living on our salaries," says Mayanja. "One could live on it comfortably."
In early 1971, a minister earned Shs 5,000 a month.
"The salaries did not change since 1962," Mayanja says. He built his current house in Lungujja, a suburb of Kampala, for Shs 8,000 on an acre of land that cost Shs 3,000.
Says Kyemba: "The minister had a higher pay. The permanent secretary in the office of the president was also paid as minister. This was the Secretary to Cabinet and also Head of Public Service."
Kyemba equates this salary package to 2,800 pounds.
When Gureme left in 1975, a minister earned the same amount of money. "We had night allowances and travelling allowances. If you stayed out late, you had your money refunded, excluding alcoholic drinks," he recalls.
Kyemba says: "Situations have changed very dramatically." He recalls that the shilling was stronger at the time. And while salaries were lower in public service than in the private sector, people preferred to work for government because there was security of tenure.
Government would pay actual bills incurred by ministers who by then lived in places like Nakasero and Kololo.
Gureme recalls that only Mr Yusuf Lule, Minister for Community Development in 1955, stayed in his private home in Kasenge, Nateete.
Back then the economy was fairly vibrant and the population low. "There were 17 ministers. Now we have about 60. We can ill afford this," says Kyemba.
Both Kyemba and Mayanja have also worked as ministers in President Yoweri Museveni's government in the early days.
From the moment they were appointed, it was clear that this was a different cup of tea from the one they had drank in earlier regimes.
By the time Mayanja was dropped in 1994, he was earning Shs 80,000 per month. The exchange rate at the time was Shs 700 to the dollar.
A minister received fuel, a driver and a house. Mayanja lived in his own house.
"I don't know how other people managed. There was no money; there was a devastated country."
His first official car as Minister of Information was a Nissan Laurel. "I remember one day I was going for a function and the tyre burst. The cars were rotten. The tyres were rotten."
Before his fall from grace, he had been a deputy Prime Minister in 1988 and Justice and Constitutional Affairs minister in 1991/2.
The way Mayanja saw it then they were sacrificing for their country that had been devastated by a civil war.
He had worked on the External Wing of the National Resistance Movement with the likes of Mr Amama Mbabazi and Dr Sulaiman Kiggundu and being a minister under these conditions was part of a continuing struggle.
And for Mayanja, this is how it had been from the beginning when Idi Amin first appointed him. A struggle.
"I was one of the people with a Cambridge education. There were no educated people," he says.
His peers back then were the likes of Mr Apollo Kironde, Prof. Banage, Mr Justus Byagagaire, Mr Wanume Kibedi, Mr Nkambwe Mugerwa - names that would probably not mean much to your regular S.6. but were immensely important then.
"I can say that the first Amin cabinet was the best with highly educated people and I am proud," says Mayanja.
Yet these educated men and women accepted to work under an uneducated dictator believing that theirs was not just a job to eat from but a role to move the country forward.
Mayanja had himself been caught up in the nationalist activism of the early fifties that saw him removed from Makerere and taken to Cambridge, UK.
Yet despite the low pay, there was some prestige to the job of being a minister in the 1960s and early 1970s - before it became bloody.
What Gureme remembers most are the shimmering black Mercedes Benzes. "Huge," he says, gesturing widely. "They had a yellow M at the front. They also had a flag. If you met a minister's car without the flag, then the minister was not there."
On a Sunday the car would take the minister to church and return him home.
Unlike today, there were strict conditions to using government cars.
"If your driver was not there, you would not drive a government car," Gureme recalls.
Gradually, the regime that began with a crop of intellectuals as ministers in its first year in power soon shed its superior airs and began to appoint often-crude soldiers into these positions.
With time some appointees like Juma Oris, then a Minister for Labour, seemed to become a law unto themselves.
It is said that Mr Peter Oketch, Labour Permanent Secretary suffered at the hands of Oris for using a new Mercedes Benz that had just been secured for his ministry.
Oris's spies had told him that Oketch sat in his car and "put some juju in it."
Oris dismissed Oketch.
But what happened to Oketch was merely a sign of the times. Gureme was one of those who read the signs.
In 1975, he had been taken ill for three months. By then ministers had started disappearing.
Gureme was 49 then. "After the three months of sick leave, I continued to be a minister. I had a car, driver, two personal servants," he says.
But he was worried.
It was not unlike President Amin to pinpoint anyone who had not been working and demand that they refund all the money they had been earning during their absence.
At the time, only three years since their en masse appointment, most ministers had either been dismissed, retired, returned to their former jobs or 'disappeared'.
Even as a minister the power you wielded depended very much on whether one was a soldier or was from West Nile region.
This is something that would be duplicated under President Obote II, 1980 - 85, albeit with different tribes at play and varying levels of excesses.
Under President Museveni, regional balance became the buzzword. But then, unlike with the Obote regime earlier on, Museveni's ministers were changed often - too often for a good PLE candidate, let alone a journalist, to keep track.
After half a century since it was introduced, it is no exaggeration to say that being a minister has lost its spark in the eyes of the population. But so has being a public servant - when there is no money to pay them. | 
