Winnie Byanyima: A life riddled with controversy

SUNDAY VISION

As a little girl, Winnie Byanyima was the loudest among her siblings. She argued about everything, from school work, to the house work. Come playtime, she climbed trees and sometimes went along with herdsmen to graze and milk the cattle.

“She was very intelligent and had a strong character,” says a close friend.

And when she joined Mt. St. Mary’s Namagunga in the early 1970s, everyone thought this would silence the little girl from Ruti village. But to everyone’s surprise, she became even more assertive.

The rural people thought education was making her big-headed. But she, on the other hand, did not see anything wrong with speaking out her mind.

By the time she joined university, she was the talk of the town. Some of the conservative villagers saw her as a snobbish girl who did not want to listen to her elders.

“Everyone was saying her father had spoilt her, but that was simply Winnie,” says a close family friend.

Taking the lone path

Born on January 1, 1957 to Boniface and Gertrude Byanyima, Winnie has five other siblings Edith, Anthony, Martha, Abraham and Olivia. She attended St. Hellen’s Primary School before joining Mt. St. Mary’s Namagunga for her O’level.

She later proceeded to King’s College Budo for A’level, before joining the University of Manchester for a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering.

With a first class degree, she became the first female Ugandan to become an aeronautical engineer.

On why she chose a difficult area of study not often associated with women, she said this in an interview: “I enrolled for this programme in Great Britain, where I was in exile because of the military dictatorship. I was raised in a way that I would accept challenges. My parents always encouraged me to do things that weren’t allowed for women. This is why I chose this path. But also, I wouldn’t be able to study this at a university in Uganda, because Uganda does not have advanced technology.”

She also won a Zonta International’s Amelia Earhart Fellowship. But coming from a family with a strong political background, Byanyima later abandoned her aeronautics career to join the liberation struggle.

Though soft-spoken, Byanyima is a woman of strong character. From being elected a member of the Constituent Assembly in 1994, Byanyima went on to win the Mbarara Municipality parliamentary seat twice, including against Ngoma Ngime, the then official National Resistance Movement (NRM) candidate in 2001.

Although she quit local politics in 2004 to join the African Union (AU) and later the UN, those familiar with her know that her time in Ugandan politics is not yet over.

Joining the NRA struggle

Like many of the people who joined the National Resistance Army (NRA), Byanyima met President Yoweri Museveni at a younger age. The two had grown up together at Byanyima’s parents’ home.

After her course, she joined Museveni in London at the time he was building the political movement that would lead to the NRA liberation struggle. She ignored her father’s warning and joined the liberation war. Together with other exiles, they mobilised funds that would later finance the struggle.

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Dr. Kizza Besigye, their son Anselm and Winnie Byanyima attend prayers recently.

Byanyima actively participated in the struggle, stayed in the jungles with the men. Defending her decision to join the bush, she said:

“Soon after Idi Amin had been removed, a civilian dictator (Milton Obote) came to power. The current president became a guerilla to fight against this dictator and many of us joined him. It was a time of war and everybody was part of it, men and women. This is why I was also part of the fight.”

After the liberation war, she went on to pursue a master’s degree in mechanical engineering in energy conservation at Cranfield University in the UK.

Later, she returned to pursue a career in politics — her life’s dream. She competed for the Mbarara Municipality Constituent Assembly seat in 1994 and beat several men. She put to good use her debating skills. During the Constitution making process, she fought for women’s rights and became an ardent crusader of good governance.

Controversies

Her marriage to Dr. Warren Kizza Besigye attracted criticism from the political elite. Besigye had fallen out with President Yoweri Museveni in 1999.

As a Member of Parliament, Byanyima was instrumental in the fight against corruption and her crusade in the late 1990s. She saw nothing wrong with censuring of two prominent ministers, Sam Kutesa and Jim Muhwezi, who were fellow NRM members over allegations of corruption and abuse of office.

Muhwezi was a key historical member of the NRM while Kutesa was an in-law to President Museveni.

For this, she was fired from the Movement Secretariat, where she was the director of information.

Byanyima joined the Capital FM’s Capital Gang, one of the pioneer radio talk shows in Kampala that discussed issues that affected the country.

After her marriage to Besigye, Byanyima, who had fallen out with the regime she had helped put in power, campaigned for Besigye and his Reform Agenda in the 2001 elections against Museveni. As her husband traversed the country in search of votes, she stood in Mbarara County and faced off with state-sponsored Ngime, who had served as Mbarara resident district commissioner. She won the hotly contested elections with 9,980 votes against Ngime’s 9,816 votes.

Soon after the elections, Besigye fled the country, but Byanyima stayed behind as the face of the opposition, running the affairs of Reform Agenda.

Stepping onto world stage

Her term was characterised by long absences in Parliament that had fellow legislators worried. Then in 2004, she unexpectedly resigned from Parliament to join the AU. She was appointed head of the Directorate of Women, Gender and Development at the AU.

She had cut a niche as a woman activist who had fought for gender and women’s rights, helped found Forum for Women in Democracy (FOWODE).

When Besigye was arrested and charged with treason and rape in October 2005, she stood firm by her husband. She continued campaigning for him even when he was nominated to contest for the 2006 presidency while in prison.

She later joined the United Nations Development Programme in 2006 and served as the director of the gender team in the Bureau for Development Policy. When Besigye stood for president again in 2011, Byanyima showed up by his side.

She endured the strain of seeing her husband arrested repeatedly for most of 2012 as he participated in the walk-to-work protests. Living out of the country most of the time, Ugandans have missed the fiery side of Winnie Byanyima.

Early this year, Byanyima was appointed to the position of director of Oxfam - a position she takes up this week.