Musaazi: A brilliant Ugandan inventor departs with his genius

OBITUARY: Dr MOSES KIZZA MUSAAZI  (1950- 2018)

In April this year, Dr Moses K. Musaazi was called in to chair interviews of a board he led. I was on the committee as well. He got to office ahead of everyone, sat quietly in the boardroom, as he normally did.

But as we exchanged greetings I could see that the gentleman, normally imposing at over six foot tall, had lost much of his weight and was not as agile as in the past. I had known him to walk from Makerere University to almost any meeting in Kampala. He now seemed at pain to do the thing he loved so much. Walk.

When we broke off for lunch, standing in the line waiting to be served he waved gently to me: "Have you noticed we do not have a warmer that keeps our served matooke soft? We need to come up with one such food warmer!" I nodded.

He went on. "How come also people here are still peeling matooke using knives - by now we should have an automated slicer that can peel a dozen in seconds!" At that point the genius, who where he had worked in the Faculty of Technology since 1975 as a fresh graduate tutorial assistant, started demonstrating with his hands the kind of device he had in mind.

His mind was always racing with ideas for new inventions. Some years back, Dr Musaazi had noticed that many girls were dropping out of school rather prematurely. He discovered that a major driver was the lack of sanitary pads.

As he shared with me once in his Spartan office, littered with an inventor's toolbox and various artifacts, "I found most of the pads on the market were not accessible to our girls due to cost." Musaazi set to work. Soon he came up with MakaPads towels - 75% cheaper than those on the market and produced from abundant papyrus and 95% biodegradable!

Dr Musaazi's inventions were mainly motivated to save the environment which he cared for deeply.

An area that bothered him was how much wastage goes into construction of buildings in Uganda. For instance, the cement bricks take up a lot of lime and water which are not infinite resources.

So he came up with interlocking dirt bricks which use less water and rely much on our soil. They also do not need being fired like those on the market; where one has to cut down sparse trees, build a kiln, which bellows out smoke affecting builders and the environment. It was a work of a genius as he one day demonstrated to me how these dirt bricks could hold up any structure.

From times of Galileo innovators have always been met with skepticism. Dr Musaazi's inventions were not spared.

Since his specialty was electrical engineering, he shared with me how one accusation was over how could he come up with something not in his field. "There was one professor from Civil Engineering who one day stormed here and started knocking hard my bricks with a hammer because he could not believe they could hold!"

 You should have seen the look of disgust and amusement on his otherwise calm face.

Yet behind his calm and soft spoken personality was the steely resolve of the Wright brothers who invented the airplane.

Musaazi noticed that dairy farmers were losing a lot due to poor preservation of milk and he came up with a more efficient pasteurisation coolant. Seeing how we waste water in Uganda he went on to invent rain water harvesting tanks and solar water heaters.

One of his most remarkable inventions was an incinerator that turns medical waste into ash, produce steam for electricity and sterile water. In his late sixties, he was young at heart and it seemed often like he was just starting out.

Initially ignored at last the world came to know and recognise this unassuming man whom you could easily pass as he walked about Kampala to various construction sites. For over three decades, he lived in a simple town house on Makerere Hill, where he raised his five children with his wife Sarah.

Finally he received numerous local and global awards like the President's support to Scientists of $350,000. Most of those proceeds were poured back into his company, Technology for Tomorrow.

Yet Dr Musaazi was more than a scientist. He was too a deeply civic minded person and his steady presence was always felt on many boards of parastatals where he sat. Somewhere around 1995, he came into contact with an organisation that had been founded to advocate against torture.

Uganda was coming out of a ghastly period of gross human rights abuse and many were those who had been tortured for their political views.

It irked him the things humans could do to each other to suppress those who do not share same views. But then this organisation had run into problems arising from mismanagement.

International funding had been suspended. Dr Musaazi was approached and asked by a Dutch funder to help rebuild Africa Center for Torture Victims (ACTV). And so he did. At no point under his leadership was this organisation ever queried on account of being mismanaged. Today it is one of the most prominent voices against torture in Uganda.

On the board he chaired was also another spirited civic minded lady, Dr Margaret Mungherera, the psychiatrist. They were quite an act to see them artfully carry out their voluntary work. Unfortunately both have fallen at the peak of their lives due to cruel cancer.

Now, aside from his family, if there was a thing that moved Dr Musaazi most, it was the school that he attended as a young man and shaped much of his values - Kings College Budo. In fact Dr Musaazi never left Budo.

Born to a bus driver and mother, who passed on early in his infancy, he had come to Budo not from a privileged family. The story is told how he traveled on a bicycle from Masaka with school fees for just one term.

At the end he could not afford to travel back home. As luck would have it, one of the teachers adopted him to stay behind as a shamba boy. This is how he came to complete his education culminating with a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Imperial College, UK.

In appreciation of what Budo did for him, Dr Musaazi would pay school fees of many hard up kids right from S1 to S6. (At one point he was supporting over a dozen kids in his neighbourhood with school fees).

He also served on the Old Budonians Association representing his years and at the last Annual General Meeting as always, though now a bit frail, he attended and jovially sat through all the proceedings, chatting with different generations of Budonians.

Because most of his innovations were radical and run against better established outfits like Procter and Gamble, they did not get as much traction as they deserved. The MakPads would have died, if UNHCR had not spotted their ingenuity and bankrolled them.

The interlocking dirt bricks have never received as much attention as they deserve. It would now be a far greater loss that he has gone to see all his ideas are left to die. I, therefore, pray that in honouring this great man and his service some of his inventions are taken up by the Government or Makerere University and rolled out for posterity.

A family man, husband, father to a nation of children, philanthropist, teacher, mentor, environmentalist, entrepreneur and inventor has left at an hour you wished he could still have lingered on and given us more.

When he started feeling unwell, he walked up and down Kampala clinics and hospitals to discover what was wrong. The initial diagnosis could not point to the cause of his rapidly declining health. In fact as once he shared with me the doctors first thought he had TB.

By the time it was discerned, it was lung cancer; the bloody monster had wickedly spread. But as with him he took the news stoically and with a gracious optimistic smile. He even wanted to go for radical treatment in the US till it was decided against that option for no much could be done then.

I chatted with him about a month ago and there was not a shade of self-pity. His spirits remained buoyant, his fertile mind exploring ideas to better the earth. Musaazi was buried September 20, 2018 not far from where his parents, who left him young, are resting.

There has gone a simple man whose contribution to his old nation of Buganda, the troubled country of Uganda and the world he graced would long outlive him. He truly lived the Budo motto which he carried with him wherever he went shining on his minivan: "Gakyali Mabala! "So little done! So much to do." Now RIP!

Dr Martin M. Lwanga is the Dean, School of Business, Uganda Christian University mlwang2001@gmail.com