By Mulengera Reporters
In her 278 page book “My Father & I: The Power of Intentional Fatherhood,” which will be launched and officially next week, Col Edith Nakalema narrates a dramatic incident in the year 2004 when she had just completed military training and started working PPU. One evening, Jimmy E Asizua, a fellow soldier with whom they undergone rigorous ‘Basic Military Training, rang her requesting to come over to her place of abode in Entebbe to say hi to her.
In their platoon III during the rigorous military training, only two trainees (herself and another) were girls. Because Asizua had been very friendly and supportive to especially Nakalema during training, she had no problem permitting him to come and visit. He would help her carry bags full of sand which was part of the very rigorous training members of this specially-chosen BMT intake were subjected to at Kaweweta.
All along, Asizua, who hails from Arua in West Nile, had been crushing on Nakalema but was fearful to declare his intentions to her. That evening, he was determined to make his intentions known and considered this the most appropriate time.
They had finished the training and got employed in government-himself at URA where he worked under Special Revenue Protection Services (SRPS), through which President Museveni sought to militarize anti-smuggling operations. Nakalema had also become employed in the audit/finance department of Presidential Protection Unit (PPU) which later became Presidential Guard Brigade (PGB), which subsequently evolved into SFC (Special Forces Command). Like their predecessor PPU, these were charged with protecting the President, First Family members, sensitive government installations and visiting heads of state and government.
Asizua, currently a Lt Colonel carried two gifts namely a brand new (mapesa) mobile phone and a fan. Smart phones hadn’t yet become widely available in Uganda and buying a fan for a babe was luxurious and amounted to a lot. As of that time, the young Nakalema didn’t have feelings for the opposite sex as yet and the only people she loved and had feelings for where her parents Rev Eliasaph Sserwadda (a Muganda blacksmith from Kooki in Masaka), her mother Midresi Ndungi and her four young siblings (two brothers & two sisters).
She had always been cautious and deliberate to avoid such intimate feelings because of the strong Christian background and out of the desire not to embarrass the two Church of Uganda clerics who had recommended her to be part of that particular UPDF intake whose carefully selected recruits the President insisted had to be full of young people who are morally upright and not perverted.
As a young soldier hosting an old friend, who she had never suspected of harboring any hidden intentions about her, Nakalema readied a meal which they shared with her Guest-Jimmy Asizua. After finishing the meal, Asizua turned to intently face her, cleared his throat and told her he wanted to have an intimate relationship with her. Naturally, this meant getting serious, becoming boyfriend and girlfriend; have sex intimacy which would culminate into marriage.
Nakalema was so bewildered because she believed Asizua had been chosen from his home region of West Nile to be part of her intake on the strength of being a Mulokole, deeply spiritual and morally very upright as it was in her case. Nakalema felt insulted and vigorously pushed back.
She considered it abominable to have a relationship with Asizua for a number of reasons including the fact that he was a Lubgara from West Nile who she was very sure her family members would despise and not accept. She also felt betrayed that someone she all along thought was a genuine friend who always helped her out as a sister and because he was a naturally good person, had opted to take that path—to morally compromise her.
She raised her voice, started quarreling at him and forcefully threw out the phone and fan, while ordering him to immediately get out of her abode. She felt so insulted about someone proposing to her stuff she considered to be morally repugnant for a Reverend’s daughter. She considered it too early, even though she was already in her 20s, and had finished training and joined the working world.
Nakalema told off Asizua asking him never to dare come to her abode again. She also asked him never to ring her phone and made it clear her love wasn’t for sale. She asserted that she didn’t need to be loved by anyone else because the love of her parents and siblings was sufficient for her. She insisted that he takes away his phone and fan.
She screamed at him for roughly 30 minutes and even castigated him for all along pretending to be a good friend helping out a sister during the military training yet all along he had other intentions. “I don’t know what I didn’t accuse him of as I yelled at him to leave the premises,” she reminisces on page 100 of per book whose very revealing foreword was written by President Museveni and his wife Janet Kataha.
Nakalema was always very close to her dad Rev Sserwadda (a Muganda from Kooki in Masaka) who died in February 2025 and was buried in Bubare Kashari in Mbarara district. Being a dad’s girl, she immediately rang the dad (after Asizua walked out of her home full of shame, though he left the fan and phone on her veranda). She told the dad everything but to her surprise, he told her she had done wrong screaming at the man the way she had done. “For the first time, I [felt] Taata [dad] was siding with another person against me,” Nakalema writes in her book, which partly was written to preserve Rev Sserwadda’s legacy while documenting his great accomplishments.
The old man (who died at 76 years) told her there was nothing wrong Asizua had done proposing to have an intimate relationship with her and that there was nothing wrong with a Lubgara taking out a girl from Western Uganda, who was mothered and nurtured by a Muganda dad and a Muhima mother.
Saying they are all God’s people, Rev Sserwadda made reference to Nakalema’s own parents-himself was a Muganda from Kooki who only migrated to Mbarara for work and her mother being a Muhima woman from Mbarara Kashari in Ankole. Yet that never stopped them from having love and going on to produce and appropriately raise their five children of whom Nakalema herself was the oldest.
“I realized I was a grown up person but living in denial. The whole idea of getting close and intimate with a person was [initially] like poison to me,” Nakalema writes about the calming effect, her dad’s words of wisdom had on her regarding the Jimmy Asizua proposal for intimacy. She realized it was unchristian for her write off Asizua simply because of his ethnicity and where he comes from (Arua).
The following morning, her dad, who spent the entire night praying upon God to prevail and guide his young daughter well, rang and asked her to give Asizua’s proposal for intimacy serious thought and consideration.
Reflecting on the fact that Rev Sserwadda, her very loving dad, had never been wrong on anything in her entire life in as far as she was concerned, a converted Nakalema picked the phone and rang Mr. Asizua (who she had screamed at, humiliated and pushed out of her homes only hours earlier) informing him she was on board. She told him about her dad’s positivity about the whole thing and required him to man up and prove he isn’t a joker by immediately beginning to prepare for an introduction so that parents get the opportunity to be involved in the whole thing from the very inception.
The Kuhingira (give away ceremony) took place at her parents’ Bubare home in Kashari Mbarara district on the Valentine’s Day 2004. Everything moved well and rapidly which is why the weekend after they said their vows in Kampala at whose Emin Pasha hotel they resided for their honeymoon.
Today 22 years later, Nakalema, who is 52 years, says she doesn’t regret accepting to become Asizua’s wife and going onto have three children with him thus far. Its apparent from the book, she would marry him again if the opportunity ever presented itself. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
