Know Your Envoy
The Many Hats of Ugandan n 1981, government soldiers arrived at the home of Kweronda Ruhemba in a bid to capture him. The good news was that he had been informed of the raid and managed to flee to Jinja. The bad news was that his brother was killed in the debacle. Given the obvious danger, Ruhemba fled to Kenya with his family where he spent five years in Nairobi as a teacher at the Aga Khan Academy before returning to Uganda to head the political school of the National Resistance Movement. Prior to these events, Ruhemba had studied economics at Makerere University and worked for the planning ministry. He contested the Kajara parliamentary seat while his party leader, current Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni ran for presidency. They both lost. “The elections were badly flawed which caused Museveni to go into the bush to fight the regime of Milton Obote. Soon after capturing the government in 1986, Museveni appointed me the Deputy Minister for Cooperatives. In 1990, he gave me the responsibility of traversing the globe to convince those Ugandans that had left the country during the troubled times of the 1970’s and 1980’s to come back,” Ruhemba recalls. We are seated on the brown leather seats in his office off Church Street in Pretoria as he continues to explain that the exercise of wooing people back to the country was unsuccessful prompting him to recommend its abandonment in 1996. He won a parliamentary seat in the elections a year later and was appointed to the cabinet.
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EXPATRIATE
“I served in several ministries including acting as a full minister in the Office of the President responsible for the Economy. In 2001, I lost my parliamentary seat due to election violence and was later appointed to represent Uganda as a permanent representative to the UN in Geneva and Ugandan ambassador to Bern in Switzerland. In 2003, I was made High Commissioner to South Africa” Ruhemba says that while it was good to be a minister influencing country affairs and policy development, he stills finds excitement as a diplomat in spite of this role being ‘the receiving end’ of government policies. “It is thrilling when visitors flock here for visas to our country or when we encourage investors to go back to Uganda to help build the nation. We also send back useful information about countries like South Africa such as how well they have adopted the prime movers of any economy; infrastructure, energy, telecommunication, air connectivity and human capital development,” Ruhemba says, speaking slowly with the clarity of a man who has spent several years as an instructor. When asked to describe Ugandans in South Africa, Ruhemba had this to say. “There are many professionals. I met a good number of them during my repatriation efforts in the nineties. Recently there has also been an influx of students, for example Port Elizabeth has about 130 Ugandan Students. There are also the casual labourers. Some uncouth
people traffic Ugandans into SA with the promise of easy money here then dump them at the border points. These ones get deported and end up distributing flyers or pretending to be traditional healers.” Other than SA, Ruhemba is representative for Uganda in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland and Lesotho. He says that he understands that it is difficult for Ugandans who have settled in these countries to go back home. “They have families here to take care of. They also fear that they will not be able to get the same good incomes in Uganda that they are receiving here. Unfortunately, we are going to lose their children who have become South African. But what I advise is that they don’t have to go and work in Uganda. They can still invest there as there are very many good opportunities in East Africa.” With my hour almost up, I enquire as to Ruhemba the man and his plans for the future. “Well I have family scattered all over the world, some are in the UK, some are in Australia and some are in Uganda. They have all finished studying so I am just here saving for my retirement,” he laughs, “On Saturdays I play golf, just for the exercise. Three days in the week I exercise at the gym and on one day I take a walk. I am an outdoor person and so I also occasionally go hunting with a friend. I try to maintain a healthy lifestyle and don’t eat red meat. I am more of a reader than a writer and enjoy reading publications based on history. A book set in South