Mayombo was not corrupt at all - Museveni
May 06, 2007
BRIG. Noble Mayombo was buried in fort Portal on Saturday. President <b>Yoweri Museveni </b>attended the ceremony and paid a glowing tribute to the soldier whom he said was on the hit list of ‘criminal elements’. Below is the full eulogy.
BRIG. Noble Mayombo was buried in fort Portal on Saturday. President Yoweri Museveni attended the ceremony and paid a glowing tribute to the soldier whom he said was on the hit list of ‘criminal elements’. Below is the full eulogy.
When somebody dies, it is polite, among Ugandans, to heap praises on him or her. Sometimes, these praises are not accurate; but they are made out of politeness and respect for the dead person. I strongly try to resist that temptation of dishing out praises for dead friends or acquaintances.
Therefore, the praises I am about to shower on the memory of Mayombo should not be treated as the type made out of politeness and sympathy for the memory of the dead Comrade.
Mayombo was very brilliant and clever. He could grasp points very quickly. He was very articulate. He was, ideologically, an African Nationalist and a Pan-Africanist.
He was a very hard and, fast worker. I would, for instance, require him to produce a paper on a political, legal or security matter. The paper would be on my desk within 12 hours. You did not have to correct Mayombo’s draft. It would be perfectly correct.
Mayombo was not corrupt at all. He was approached by two corrupting actors who proposed, separately, that each would build him a house for free. Mayombo asked them; “why should you build a house for me? What do you owe me?’ He immediately reported these corrupters to me. I know who they are and our systems are investigating where they get this money from. Further, on the question of corruption, Mayombo, while studying for his Masters Degree at Makerere, told me that, in writing his thesis, he had to write what the lecturers wanted him to write but not what he knew as being right. Amazing!!
Otherwise, they would fail him!! While on that issue of corruption in Academia, the other night, on my car radio, I heard a BCC programme Interviewing people in Kenya. They were talking of STGs (Sexually Transmitted Grades) referring to the practice of giving false grades in exchange for sexual favours. In the case of Mayombo, he was of talking of ITGs (Ideologically Transmitted Grades).
Mayombo also told me about people who were harassing him for money as a Permanent Secretary.
When the NRM captured power, we disbanded the old Army. That is why there is total harmony between the people of Uganda and the Army for all these years. However, much of the Civil Service that remained is of the old mentality. Those who are not corrupt are ideologically disoriented. This affects the tempo and depth of implementing the NRM programmes. I patiently nursed this problem until now ‘when NRM Cadres have matured to takeover permanent secretarial responsibilities.
One of the NRM-Revolution-Oriented -Permanent Secretaries has been Mayombo. The Ministry of Defence used to give me a lot of trouble with the inability to stick to priorities and scattering resources over non-essentials or failing to innovatively look for solutions using our scarce resources.
Take the issue of housing in the Army, for instance. Mayombo got a good solution. He pointed out that each year we budget for some money for housing. The money of each year is not enough to make the impact required on this problem of housing. Why not, he reasoned, get a contractor who builds the barracks and the Minister of Defence uses their annual allocations to pay him in phases? This was an obvious solution but no administrator in the Ministry had brought it forward before.
While in the past I used to crack my head on the Ministry of Defence looking for solutions, especially in weapons acquisitions, Mayombo had relieved me of that burden.
He had become the problem-solver and me a mere, occasional consultant on account of my long interaction with Defence issues. It is quite efficient to get a dedicated planner who arranges the options from which a senior person can choose rather than having the senior person think of the options in the first place. Well-arranged options stimulate the senior person to think of even fresh ones.
Otherwise, the Leader, if he must think of the options himself, becomes a planner instead of being a decision maker. Just as we developed the Petroleum Unit in the Ministry of Energy and reconstituted the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA), we shall slowly reform the Civil Service not to continue being discordant with the NRM Revolution.
The Police is, gradually, being reformed by Major General Kale Kayihura who is Mayombo-like. The compatibility between my thinking and Mayombo’s, for instance, eventually enabled us to have an Airforce and complete the training of our pilots. Nuisance diversions like lack of concentrating of resources on fuel for training were eliminated by Mayombo. Mayombo showed that when you are both an ideologue and an administrator, you are the best. Having an ideologue concentrating on the narrow field of Defence was making our capacity building in that area gallop.
Mayombo had made the Ministry of Defence as a self-propelled gun instead of being a towed howitzer like it had been most of the time. We cannot be despondent because we have lost Mayombo; we are continuing to propagate the Mayombo combination of education, ideology and soldiership. There is quite a crop of young people in the UPDF that, potentially, have that combination.
What killed him so quickly? I am looking at two lines of investigation. One line is that our security services have been monitoring the activities of some criminally-minded individuals in this Region that have been talking of eliminating some strong NRM Cadres and Mayombo’s name was quite high on the list of those confused characters. There is quite a lot of material on the activities of that group. This material will be availed to the three persons investigation team that will comprise of Colonel Mugira (Lawyer with Masters Degree), Lt. Tagaswire Rusoke (A Bio-Chemist with Masters Degree in Toxicology), to be chaired by a Senior Doctor whom I have identified but not consulted yet. Mayombo and all the others that this criminally-minded group was targeting had been informed of this scheme on my express instructions. Criminal scheming, however, is not the same thing as succeeding. We are always good at taking protective measures against such schemers and, I am sure, Mayombo was. The point, however, is that nobody should be engaged in those schemes in the first place.
The second line of inquiry is based on the fact that Mayombo has had, for more than a decade now a certain health condition that, when managed to properly, is survivable for quite a long time. All along, I thought Mayombo was working on the problem with knowledgeable doctors. A few months ago he asked me for permission to go to Spain for a medical checkup. According to the initial medical reports, however, it seems that his health condition was not being managed well. That could be the cause of the Pancreatitis (the inflammation of the pancreas -kataago).
My experienced doctors say that wrong drugs or drugs wrongly administered, over a long period, could cause this inflammation and high lactic acid in the blood as well as other conditions that were found in Mayombo’s system at Kololo Hospital and Ian Clarke’s Hospital before being transferred to Nairobi. Could something else have accelerated that process? The Team will help us to reach definitive conclusions.
However, there is information I got after Mayombo had died that surprised me; that he used to take alcohol also! Given his health condition, that would have been reckless if it is true. I told my son Muhoozi that any reckless behaviour by NRM Cadres and fighters with their lives (alcohol, women, thirst for money, etc) is tantamount to “treason.â€
This is because those activities can cause you to be lost by the Movement by getting sick and being unable to defend the Revolution or dying and being permanently lost by the cause of the African people.
In the Bible, Matthew Chapter 7:6, it says: “Thou shall not put your Pearls before swine (pigs); lest they trample them under their feetâ€. Freedom fighters of the African cause are precious. They are pearls like Mayombo has been. They should not, therefore, put those Pearls before the pigs of alcohol, women, lust for money, etc.
Mayombo’s loss is a great one for the UPDF. The UPDF and NRM will look after Mayombo’s family. I announce the contribution of sh30m to the fund of Mayombo’s family.
I wish to express condolences to the Rabwoni family, the UPDF and all Ugandans.
May his soul rest in Eternal Peace.
When somebody dies, it is polite, among Ugandans, to heap praises on him or her. Sometimes, these praises are not accurate; but they are made out of politeness and respect for the dead person. I strongly try to resist that temptation of dishing out praises for dead friends or acquaintances.
Therefore, the praises I am about to shower on the memory of Mayombo should not be treated as the type made out of politeness and sympathy for the memory of the dead Comrade.
Mayombo was very brilliant and clever. He could grasp points very quickly. He was very articulate. He was, ideologically, an African Nationalist and a Pan-Africanist.
He was a very hard and, fast worker. I would, for instance, require him to produce a paper on a political, legal or security matter. The paper would be on my desk within 12 hours. You did not have to correct Mayombo’s draft. It would be perfectly correct.
Mayombo was not corrupt at all. He was approached by two corrupting actors who proposed, separately, that each would build him a house for free. Mayombo asked them; “why should you build a house for me? What do you owe me?’ He immediately reported these corrupters to me. I know who they are and our systems are investigating where they get this money from. Further, on the question of corruption, Mayombo, while studying for his Masters Degree at Makerere, told me that, in writing his thesis, he had to write what the lecturers wanted him to write but not what he knew as being right. Amazing!!
Otherwise, they would fail him!! While on that issue of corruption in Academia, the other night, on my car radio, I heard a BCC programme Interviewing people in Kenya. They were talking of STGs (Sexually Transmitted Grades) referring to the practice of giving false grades in exchange for sexual favours. In the case of Mayombo, he was of talking of ITGs (Ideologically Transmitted Grades).
Mayombo also told me about people who were harassing him for money as a Permanent Secretary.
When the NRM captured power, we disbanded the old Army. That is why there is total harmony between the people of Uganda and the Army for all these years. However, much of the Civil Service that remained is of the old mentality. Those who are not corrupt are ideologically disoriented. This affects the tempo and depth of implementing the NRM programmes. I patiently nursed this problem until now ‘when NRM Cadres have matured to takeover permanent secretarial responsibilities.
One of the NRM-Revolution-Oriented -Permanent Secretaries has been Mayombo. The Ministry of Defence used to give me a lot of trouble with the inability to stick to priorities and scattering resources over non-essentials or failing to innovatively look for solutions using our scarce resources.
Take the issue of housing in the Army, for instance. Mayombo got a good solution. He pointed out that each year we budget for some money for housing. The money of each year is not enough to make the impact required on this problem of housing. Why not, he reasoned, get a contractor who builds the barracks and the Minister of Defence uses their annual allocations to pay him in phases? This was an obvious solution but no administrator in the Ministry had brought it forward before.
While in the past I used to crack my head on the Ministry of Defence looking for solutions, especially in weapons acquisitions, Mayombo had relieved me of that burden.
He had become the problem-solver and me a mere, occasional consultant on account of my long interaction with Defence issues. It is quite efficient to get a dedicated planner who arranges the options from which a senior person can choose rather than having the senior person think of the options in the first place. Well-arranged options stimulate the senior person to think of even fresh ones.
Otherwise, the Leader, if he must think of the options himself, becomes a planner instead of being a decision maker. Just as we developed the Petroleum Unit in the Ministry of Energy and reconstituted the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA), we shall slowly reform the Civil Service not to continue being discordant with the NRM Revolution.
The Police is, gradually, being reformed by Major General Kale Kayihura who is Mayombo-like. The compatibility between my thinking and Mayombo’s, for instance, eventually enabled us to have an Airforce and complete the training of our pilots. Nuisance diversions like lack of concentrating of resources on fuel for training were eliminated by Mayombo. Mayombo showed that when you are both an ideologue and an administrator, you are the best. Having an ideologue concentrating on the narrow field of Defence was making our capacity building in that area gallop.
Mayombo had made the Ministry of Defence as a self-propelled gun instead of being a towed howitzer like it had been most of the time. We cannot be despondent because we have lost Mayombo; we are continuing to propagate the Mayombo combination of education, ideology and soldiership. There is quite a crop of young people in the UPDF that, potentially, have that combination.
What killed him so quickly? I am looking at two lines of investigation. One line is that our security services have been monitoring the activities of some criminally-minded individuals in this Region that have been talking of eliminating some strong NRM Cadres and Mayombo’s name was quite high on the list of those confused characters. There is quite a lot of material on the activities of that group. This material will be availed to the three persons investigation team that will comprise of Colonel Mugira (Lawyer with Masters Degree), Lt. Tagaswire Rusoke (A Bio-Chemist with Masters Degree in Toxicology), to be chaired by a Senior Doctor whom I have identified but not consulted yet. Mayombo and all the others that this criminally-minded group was targeting had been informed of this scheme on my express instructions. Criminal scheming, however, is not the same thing as succeeding. We are always good at taking protective measures against such schemers and, I am sure, Mayombo was. The point, however, is that nobody should be engaged in those schemes in the first place.
The second line of inquiry is based on the fact that Mayombo has had, for more than a decade now a certain health condition that, when managed to properly, is survivable for quite a long time. All along, I thought Mayombo was working on the problem with knowledgeable doctors. A few months ago he asked me for permission to go to Spain for a medical checkup. According to the initial medical reports, however, it seems that his health condition was not being managed well. That could be the cause of the Pancreatitis (the inflammation of the pancreas -kataago).
My experienced doctors say that wrong drugs or drugs wrongly administered, over a long period, could cause this inflammation and high lactic acid in the blood as well as other conditions that were found in Mayombo’s system at Kololo Hospital and Ian Clarke’s Hospital before being transferred to Nairobi. Could something else have accelerated that process? The Team will help us to reach definitive conclusions.
However, there is information I got after Mayombo had died that surprised me; that he used to take alcohol also! Given his health condition, that would have been reckless if it is true. I told my son Muhoozi that any reckless behaviour by NRM Cadres and fighters with their lives (alcohol, women, thirst for money, etc) is tantamount to “treason.â€
This is because those activities can cause you to be lost by the Movement by getting sick and being unable to defend the Revolution or dying and being permanently lost by the cause of the African people.
In the Bible, Matthew Chapter 7:6, it says: “Thou shall not put your Pearls before swine (pigs); lest they trample them under their feetâ€. Freedom fighters of the African cause are precious. They are pearls like Mayombo has been. They should not, therefore, put those Pearls before the pigs of alcohol, women, lust for money, etc.
Mayombo’s loss is a great one for the UPDF. The UPDF and NRM will look after Mayombo’s family. I announce the contribution of sh30m to the fund of Mayombo’s family.
I wish to express condolences to the Rabwoni family, the UPDF and all Ugandans.
May his soul rest in Eternal Peace.