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Family and hospital sources confirmed Mzee
Kaguta’s failing health, but declined to discuss specifics of the
ailment. Dr Diana Atwine, the family’s physician, said he was taken to
hospital for “observation” after complaining of “abdominal pains”.
“He is steadily recovering,” she said. Another
source told this newspaper Mzee Kaguta had a problem with his head, and
gave no detail. President Museveni reportedly visited his ailing father
on Friday afternoon and returned to the medical facility mid-morning
yesterday.
Micheal Muhame, the doctor treating Mzee Kaguta,
said professional ethics bar him from publicly divulging conditions of
patients under his care – unless authorised by relatives.
“I am not at liberty to give you any information; a
patient’s detail is confidential,” he said by telephone. State House
officials said Mzee Kaguta’s hospitalisation, reportedly on Thursday,
was a family matter and they would not comment on it. Age is reported to
exacerbate the frailty of a man the President, 69, extols in his 1997
book, Sowing the Mustard Seed, as an enduring character and
disciplinarian.
In it, Mr Museveni recounts the father’s struggles
to bring them up in a rural and cattle-herding community with modest
resources, embracing Western education and imparting in them traditional
values even after converting to Christianity in the 1950s. Mzee Kaguta,
a former traditionalist, converted to Christianity and got baptised as
Amos around 1944, the year Museveni suspects he was born, and had the
toddler baptised at an Anglican Church on August 3, 1947 – without going
through requisite catechism lessons.
What Museveni writes
“My father [is] a very kind person, except occasionally when he would drink [traditional beer] and become rather violent,” Mr Museveni writes, “He was [during my childhood] a person [to] whom I would ask many questions – and if I didn’t ask, he would tell me.”
“My father [is] a very kind person, except occasionally when he would drink [traditional beer] and become rather violent,” Mr Museveni writes, “He was [during my childhood] a person [to] whom I would ask many questions – and if I didn’t ask, he would tell me.”
Theirs too appeared to have been a fond and open
relationship, although the President confesses that he was more
affectionate with his late mother, Esteeri Kokunduka, who became a
conservative Christian upon conversion.
Mzee Kaguta’s resolute decision to take young
Museveni to school opened him doors in adult life, lifted him out of the
village and liberated his intellect, empowering him to engage in
successful protracted guerilla struggles and becoming Uganda’s
longest-serving President.
The President also praises his father for clinging
on the virtues of African tradition and keeping as a liberal Anglican,
values Museveni’s noted helped nurture “more balanced” people. Like
father, the President says he does not eat chicken and fish, although he
these days promotes their tending in the country to enable citizens
earn income.
Daily Monitor
Daily Monitor
