By Mulengera Reporters
Until 2012, Edith Katende Nakitende Nabunya served as a high-flying manager at Standard Chartered Bank in Kampala. She was in the department of customer relations.
Her work was taking care of high profile clients who had billions on their accounts. Real estates tycoon Emmanuel Matovu Magoola, the Busiro East MP-elect, was one of them. Banks always value such big clients and you have to be an effective and prudent relationship manager or valued employee to be allocated such a client.
Edith Katende used to coordinate the movement of Magoola’s money into and out of the Bank. Towards the end of 2012, something controversial happened. Magoola had a big transaction of his cleared through the Bank and it turned out that some of the neccessary approvals had been skipped.
Edith Katende’s supervisors were furious because the transaction turned out to be very controversial, some people got arrested and Edith herself was fired as a result. Life was to subsequently become hard for her since no other bank would employ her again given the strictness with which Bank of Uganda supervises commercial banks.
The close family members easily forgave Magoola and didn’t hold much grudge against him because of his close friendship with Richard Ssemakula, one of Edith Katende’s bigger siblings. The two are so close that, at Magoola’s instigation, Richard Ssemakula left his Nakulabye home to go and live in Buloba where Magoola lives too so that they become neighbors.
Magoola, who hates poverty and has always been a man of means, lives in a palace-like manson in Buloba along Mityana Road out of which his former wife Suzan Nakawuki was acrimoniously evicted more than 10 years ago.
Back to Edith Katende: It was a long time female friend who helped her find alternative employment in the NGO (after the 2012 debacle) where she used to work at the time she met Alex Waisswa Mufumbiro in the late 2010s.
As a struggling DP deputy spokesman (then deputizing Kenneth Paul Kakande), Mufumbiro had as of that time moved to rent a small house in the neighorhood of Nakulabye’s Katende Zone where an increasingly distraught Edith was now staying.
“It was always her dream to scale heights and one day become a top executive in the banking sector. So, the circumstances under which she lost the Stan Chart job were very painful. She got so much frustrated and that pain never left her. She almost descended into depression as her entire world collapsed. She had been used to life in the fast lane since her days in high school and here she was all of a sudden having to adjust,” says a long time friend to the deceased.
She was naturally a jolly go-getter who always excelled at marketing jobs. She was also very beautiful (black beauty); the type that would never fail to close a sales deal. She was also naturally extroverted and very friendly too.
It’s these attributes which attracted old friends to keep connecting her to sales gigs every now and then as she agonized after losing her life-changing Stan Chart job. And that’s how she would be surviving besides the NGO job, whose salary required topping up to maintain the high-flying life she had been used to, as she worked at Stan Chart, for all those years since leaving campus initially at Nkozi University and later on Makerere where she did gender studies.
Mufumbiro came into her life after Edith had already tried out several other relationships which resulted into child birth, but not good enough to culminate into marriage.
“She had grown and was already in her late 30s and this was at a time she was regretting some of her past relationships in which she invested a lot yet not much came to fruition. She was a single mother who saw this as an opportunity to finally get someone to settle down with. Materially, Waisswa didn’t have much in terms of money but had some fame, having distinguished himself as a fierce defender of Bobi Wine under People Power. She took him in with open hands and she actually is the one who used to provide most of the things they needed though her capacity was no longer the way it used to be when working with Stan Chart,” says a mutual friend.
Edith would sometimes take up part time marketing gigs with Riham company in order to earn some money and keep the relationship going, besides the modest salary she was getting from the NGO job. Close friends and siblings who live abroad would also weign in once in a time.
Gratefully, the Mufumbiro relationship brought plenty of emotional relief and satisfcation to Edith because, unlike the past men in her life, the NUP publicist loved her whole-heartedly. At least that’s the impression she got and that’s why Edith, who already had children with other men before meeting Mufumbiro, didn’t have a problem introducing him to her family (they hail from Singo in Mityana’s Magala Sekanyonyi Sub County and both her parents died much earlier on), when he officially asked for her hand in marriage.
She introduced him to her survivimg paternal uncles and aunties (the Katendes) at Nakulabye’s Katende zone where she grew up from as a well behaved bubbly very beautiful young girl. It was from that home that Edith daily went to Old Kampala SS where she sat her S6 in the year 2002. After Old Kampala, she went to Nkozi University.
Earlier on, she had been at Mengo SS for O’level, which is within spitting distance from her parents’ home in Katende zone.
After getting married to Mufumbiro, during a glamarous reception event that was held at Bobi Wine’s One Love beach in Busabala in 2022, the two began to officially staying together.
At first they lived at Mufumbiro’s rented house near Namungona whereafter they relocated and moved to another rental in Mutungo Nakawa Division where they relocated (out of neccesity) after Bobi Wine directed his blue-eyed boy Mufumbiro to go and replace Ronald Balimwezo as area MP. The prospect of him becoming MP gave Edith hope that the financial situation was eventually going to get better.
God had other plans and that is not going to ever be. Its also true that Mufumbiro’s arrest and detention late last year greatly deteriorated Edith Katende’s already not very good health.
It came with a lot of stress and anxiety yet she had a young child they had birthed after their 2022 wedding. She had to be on very expensive medication and knew the breast cancer she had been diagnosed with four years prior to her death was a terminal condition with no cure.
She was unable to properly breastfeed her child with Mufumbiro for long because her left breast had been cut off in a surgical operation that was meant to slow down the spread of cancer, to save her life. All in all, she was very stressed and this naturally diminished her body’s natural immunity.
As Rev Canon Magala Musiwufu ranted and explained while delivering his homily inside Namirembe Cathedral (Edith’s Church since chipdhood), all this stress accelerated the deceased’s death. Otherwise she potentially could have lived longer.
