By Mulengera Reporters
For much of this week, social media has been awash with celebratory messages congratulating Dr. Hillary Musoke aka Dr. Kisanja, a State House operative who, at the beginning of the week, was proclaimed to have been elevated to the prestigious position of Senior Presidential Advisor (SPA) to President Yoweri Museveni in charge of agribusiness-related matters.
It’s a prestigious deployment because it has always been reserved for greats like ex-VPs Sekandi & Bukenya; Gen Salim Saleh, Gen Proscovia Nalweyiso, Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba and a few others. But even without this prestigious promotion, Dr. Kisanja (named so to depict his fanatic support for President Museveni) has been doing great things at the President’s court.
HIS PROFILE;
But who is he? And how did he find his way into Museveni’s book of most trusted assistants and errand boys? This is the story we intent to tell in this narration, having spoken to multiple sources knowledgeable about the same.
Even when he had been around doing great mobilisation work for the Ugandan ruling system incognito, Musoke’s biggest moment came in 2013. In May 2013, the then Intelligence Services Coordinator Gen David Sejusa (for whom he was personal assistant) fled to London after realising that his clandestine mobilisation aimed at upstaging his c-i-c had been infiltrated and his every move was being watched.
Through a group of assistants coordinated by Musoke, Gen Sejusa had managed to create structures from among disgruntled and potentially lethal groups across the country. These included UPDF veterans and Iraq returnees. Many of especially veterans were very disgruntled to see themselves choke on poverty and profound deprivation when political elites, who didn’t even fight in the bush, lived in extreme luxury and opulence.
You equally had children of fallen NRA veterans living in extreme destitution and had well founded grievances against Gen Museveni who was being castigated for using and dumping them. These were in hundreds of thousands spread across the country and had military training-especially Iraq returnees and surviving NRA veterans who clearly had nothing to live for. Through Musoke’s coordination, Gen Sejusa had established well-coordinated structures of such disgruntled actors in all corners of Uganda.
Gen Kale Kayihura, who was the IGP as of that time, got wind of all this and reported it to Gen Museveni, the c-i-c. He thereafter proceeded to unleash a team of dreaded Flying Squad operatives headed by Nixon Agasirwe to hunt down Musoke and bring him before him dead or alive. With Sejusa out of the country to London from where he kept spiting fire on BBC while accusing Gen Museveni of grooming his son, Kayihura’s boys focussed on a group of Sejusa coordinators under the leadership of Musoke.
He was immediately hunted down and harvested. As his men interrogated him inside a safe house, Gen KK met Museveni to say “we got him.” Museveni suggested the carrot approach first suggesting that the stick (which implied court martial) only be considered in case Musoke doesn’t cooperate. He demanded to meet Musoke for a private engagement during which a lot of Sejusa secrets were leaked.
Museveni was fascinated and liked the insights the young man shared with him regarding what needed to be done to mitigate Gen Sejusa’s subversive underground network. Museveni realised the young man knew everything and that it was better to engage and rehabilitate veterans whose concerns he was able to build adequate understanding about through the brief he got from Musoke.
He was able to know what had fermented all this resentment and it was in consultation with Musoke that interventions like Operation Wealth Creation (OWC) were designed and rolled out. OWC enabled Museveni amplify what NAADS had been doing for years and overcome the noted inefficiencies. But most importantly, OWC offered him an opportunity to leverage the hundreds of billions NAADS was getting under the budget, to recruit such poverty-stricken and neglected veterans into lucrative government employment. Good enough, OWC was destined to operate and impact agricultural production in the very rural parts of Uganda where those very veterans lived and knew everything about people’s suffering.
Many such veterans, a majority of them not formally educated, all of a sudden became OWC coordinators in rural sub counties and each became entitled to fat allowances, a good salary and government car. Hundreds of double cabin vehicles were procured and distributed to them, using the NAADS budget. This materially changed the veterans’ material lives within a short time and thereby making them denounce Sejusa and totally forget about him.
They became Museveni’s campaigners for 2016 as a reconciled Sejusa defied army law and openly campaigned for Kizza Besigye. He subsequently got arrested and humiliatingly prosecuted for breaching the army code. Museveni, who had lured Sejusa back to Uganda from London with guarantees from the international community that no harm would be done to him, realised how useful Musoke was and deployed him to work with Gen Salim Saleh to smoothly operationalise the OWC idea.
The same OWC was used to rehabilitate not just the disgruntled veterans but even children orphaned as a result of NRA war. After winning the 2016 elections, Museveni recommended Musoke to his son Gen MK to work with him at his special operations office in Bugolobi. At the same time he continued to work with Gen Salim Saleh too through an office he (Musoke) was facilitated to operate at a hideous place in Lweza, off Entebbe Road. This office, fully facilitated with staff and everything else, chiefly spearheaded mobilisation of the urban poor in the slums of the Kampala Metropolitan area.
During the same 2016 campaigns, Musoke closely worked with Gen Tumukunde who headed a special Museveni task force dedicated at neutralising Amama Mbabazi across the country. Tumukunde had first known Musoke in 2001 when as a young man living in Maganjo where he was famous for driving his very old Volkwagen with a loud speaker as he campaigned for Gen Museveni at the time this was very risky especially in that Kawempe neighborhood where majority where for Kizza Besigye. That’s when the young man first coiled the word Kisanja to depict Museveni’s eternal rule. And that’s where the monicker Dr. Kisanja derives from.
Gen Museveni realised that the demobilisation of the pro-Sejusa structures of resentful veterans and NRA war orphans had to be a process, not a one day event. And that is how it became neccessary to facilitate and empower Musoke to keep doing that work too beyond the 2016 election victory. That’s how Musoke closely worked with Gen Saleh to get jobs for hundreds of hitherto jobless youths at the Namunkekera Industrial Complex in Kapeeka, Nakaseke.
To cater for the jobless youths in the Jua Kali movement in especially peri-urban parts of Wakiso district, Musoke was supported by the President through then state house Comptroller Lucy Nakyobe to set up the youth innovation center & export market at Namulanda along Entebbe Road.
On the day day Museveni came to launch this Namulanda facility, Musoke selflessly introduced to him singer Catherine Kusasira whose vigorous stage performances caught the President’s eye-and the rest is history.
Kusasira, who ended up becoming a Presidential advisor, is just one of the many musicians who started getting the President’s direct audience as a result of the door Musoke selflessly opened for them ostensibly to boost political mobilisation while countering Bobi Wine who was beginning to emerge as a huge political threat in the ghettos.
At the instigation of Musoke, the Namulanda model was replicated by State House into other peri-urban parts of the country where cold room storage facilities and industrial production centers were established to impact the hitherto jobless youths and women. Wherever he went and addressed public rallies among the urban poor, Museveni publicly introduced Musoke while referencing him as his man in charge of value addition, youth development in agriculture and industrialisation. Museveni always praised Musoke for being his chief disciple on pillar number 5 of his 10 point program on sustainable socioeconomic transformation.
Along the way, Musoke and Nakyobe innovated and came up with something called the Presidential Initiative on Skilling the Girl Child which began in Kampala and later on got replicated in other parts of Uganda where tens of thousands have since graduated with plenty of vocational skills and supported to go into self-employment. The arrangement was later on expanded to include even males who were hitherto jobless and unemployable for want of formal skills.
Between 2014 and 2015 as he prepared for 2016 campaigns, Gen Museveni got concerned that fish was getting depleted in the lakes because of overfishing and inappropriate fishing methods. There was need for intervention which Musoke was appointed to coordinate as the President’s Assistant in charge of special duties.
He used this same special duties assignment to consolidate on the Sejusa-related demobilisation that had started earlier on. He used the same position to track pending presidential pledges besides doing some corruption fighting-related errands. It was through Musoke’s interventions that Gen Museveni was able to take note of inefficiencies associated with Prof Nyira who was his Fisheries Minister as of that time. In the end, he was ousted and later on replaced by someone else.
It was also at the instigation of Musoke that Museveni funded the establishment of the Presidential Jua Kali facility in Najjera Kira which had the effect of diminishing on the opposition support in that part of Wakiso until when Bobi Wine came onto the political scene and re-energised it. Similar Najjera-like interventions were replicated to support the jua kali workers in other surburbs like Mulago Ku Biri, Maganjo, Kawempe, Nsangi etc. Nakyobe was heavily involved in rolling out this while closely working with Musoke.
Besides Musoke, there was another young mobiliser called Faridah Mayanja who the President liked very much. Gen Museveni was always publicly praising Ms Mayanja for being a good mobiliser of his in Kampala, something that angered Mafia actors who started badmouthing her. In the end, things became so complicated and Ms Mayanja fled to exile in Canada. Faith Katana was also equally supportive of the President’s pro-poor interventions of that time.
Jane Barekye, who hadn’t yet become the Comptroller, also enabled many such interventions as an employee under the state house F&A department. The other was Princess Nassolo who worked with all these cadres to ensure that ideas like the President’s demonstration farms initiative became a reality in places like Kawumu in Luwero, Barirege, Mayuge etc. The group also did a lot of popularize the President’s SACCOs in Kampala way before the Emyooga idea was conceptualized.
There are also other influential and effective Presidential aides like Henry Wabyona and Mohammed Bagonza who closely worked with Musoke to deliver the President’s errands especially those related to the Diaspora mobilisation.
Closely working with embassies abroad, the trio has been active and visible at many pro-Museveni Diaspora Conventions in Europe, North America, UK and other parts of the globe. This diaspora unit continues to thrive from inside state house and Minister Muruuli Mukasa is like the trio’s patron of some sort regarding the execution of Museveni’s diaspora-related errands.
HUGE SETBACK:
Then in the runner up to the 2021 elections, Catherine Kusasira, Pastor Mugisha Mondo and a one pastor Siraje were implicated by Col Edith Nakalema, then heading SHACU, to have involved themselves in some fraudulent syndicate which saw them collect and solicit for billions of shillings from unsuspecting pastors from upcountry in the name of state house. Detractors saw this as an opportunity to implicate and get rid of Musoke once and for all.
But before they could go very far, Museveni got wind of it and carried out his own clandestine investigations. In the end, the President personally exonerated Musoke and thereby leaving haters with an egg on their face. This exoneration caused many peers at state house to begin a rumor and sarcasm of some sort that the President’s value addition and agri-business maestro was a witch of some sort since he hails from Bukunja in Buikwe district where his elder brother Paul Kafeero hailed from too, and was buried almost 18 years ago.
MENTORED BY THE BEST;
Some of the more senior NRM cadres and mentors through whose hands Musoke has gone over the years include Amama Mbabazi, ex-CDF Gen Aronda Nyakayirima, Gen Henry Tumukunde, former Minister Ronald Kibule, David Sejusa, Gen Salim Saleh, head public service Lucy Nakyobe and others. He has also had the previledge of working very closely with current CDF Gen MK.
As SPA, Musoke (who is also Museveni’s key points man on pacifying public markets, taxis and public transport-related chaos in Kampala besides harmonising with KACITA at whose Kololo Presidential Baraza he famously emceed late last year) could end up being allocated an office at Kingdom Kampala were other great SPAs like Edward Sekandi, Gilbert Bukenya, Amelia Kyambadde and many other former senior executive members operate from.
Besides being the President’s points man and key contact with arcades owners and tenants and informal sector operations in Kampala, Musoke (at whose instigation Gen Museveni toured Kikuubo and other Kampala business centers a few years ago) is also weekly featured on Buganda Kingdom-owned BBS TV Terefayina to break down for Kabaka’s people complicated subjects like Efris.
The academic PhD-carrying Musoke is an intellectual with great sophistication. Museveni is fond of him partly because of his versatility and being able to easily mingle with all sorts of people-including the ordinary person in the ghetto and intellectuals who tend to be aloof and very sophisticated.
Musoke did his first degree at Nkumba University before becoming a teaching assistant at the same institution in 2009, the same year he enrolled for a Masters degree which he completed in 2012. As he carried on with teaching and mentoring young ones at Nkumba, Musoke enrolled for his PhD which he completed in 2019, according to information available online. Not much could readily be established about his personal life; regarding things like marital status and children. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
