By Mulengera Reporters
On Wednesday, Deputy IGG Ann Muhairwe drove to Entebbe Road-based Elite High School where she spent the entire afternoon interacting with hundreds of students who joined their teachers and school management to receive her at their main hall.
She was here to launch the school’s Integrity Ambassadors Club, a new intervention which the Inspectorate of Government is these days using to recruit emissaries to create awareness and amplify messaging against corruption while recruiting good will ambassadors whose responsibility it is to promote integrity and responsible living among fellow students.
Barely a month ago, Muhairwe was at Nabisunsa Girls School where she presided over the launching of the same club. And this is an ongoing endeavor by the Inspectorate across the country.
Like she did at Nabisunsa, Muhairwe asked students to give feedback regarding their understanding of corruption, areas they think need improvement to amplify the fight against corruption and the service delivery changes they generally would like to see in their country and more so in their school surroundings. The full video of her address can be accessed and viewed via this YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn-YRvXfa2E&t=78s.
She also dispelled the thinking that to get a job one has to hail from a powerful family, be born to well-connected parents and also come from a certain part of the country. Muhairwe said this is all false and she illustrated how and why having integrity, excelling in studies, being a well-behaved person and being disciplined was more important than anything else when one finishes school and is out there looking for a job.
She advised them to despise nepotism and tribalism which she contended can only destroy the country while impeding its progress. She assured them how any of them can rise from obscurity to career success in today’s Uganda provided they are competent, disciplined and are persons of integrity. She added that the governance system in Uganda is well functioning enough to the extent that the President can identify and become aware of someone who is qualified, well-behaved and deploy them in powerful assignments so as to accord them a platform to contribute to nation building.
One of the many chits which students wrote giving feedback and asking questions was one where a student demanded that the IGG intervenes and directs the school to stop over pumping them with learning. Asking anonymously through the written chits, the student asserted that it amounted to lack of integrity for their school administration to direct teachers to teach them even on Saturday up to 4.40pm. That some teachers sometimes even go beyond that.
The questioner asked the IGG to use her mandate, which Muhairwe had elaborated upon, and order the school to create more time for co-curricular activities like sports so that there is a balance since a healthy mind lives in a healthy body, instead of pumping them with too much academic work. Some of the students expressed discomfort with their school relying too much on social media to publicize itself amongst Ugandans operating online and asked the OIGG to engage the administration on this too. The student never explained why this leveraging of social media was a bad thing. In their chits, some students complained about their parents being too busy and not engaging with them enough, for guidance and mentorship.
In her response, Muhairwe arrayed students’ fears and encouraged them to be proud of belonging to a school which gives priority to learning. She said, whereas sports and other co-curricular activities are important, academic training and learning is the primary reason why their parents sent them to school.
She told them the world today is very competitive to the extent that only those ready and prepared to endure the hard work can succeed and, career-wise, achieve big things in future. Muhairwe told them she went to a very strict Catholic school where there was a lot of learning and she believes that the endurance and hard work that was inculcated in her is what enabled her to be successful in her adult life to the extent that today she holds the position of Deputy Inspector General of Government.
The Deputy IGG also explained that learning is a lifetime engagement which is why even herself is currently doing a PhD (so that she becomes a doctor in a few years from now) even when she already has her LLB (law degree) from Makerere University, the bar course qualification from the LDC and three masters’ degrees. She told them even when she is an adult with many other roles to balance, including being a spouse, a parent and having to be at work every morning, she daily wakes up at 3am to read as part of her PhD.
Besides telling them that many of their peers in other schools sleep for 6 hours daily on average, Ann Muhairwe also told the students about some primary schools where children as young as P5 have to daily be picked from school at 7pm. While promising to engage the school to understand the situation better, the Deputy IGG encouraged the Elite High School students to get used to hard work because true success can only come or be attained through endurance.
She made reference to a few big people in the country and made it clear they wouldn’t be who they are today without deliberately choosing integrity, discipline, endurance and hard work. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com). 
