I knew he underwent surgery at Mulago Hospital in the 1990s. When Henry Mayega (today called Ambassador Henry Mayega) and I visited him after the operation, he told us:

 “Never hold urine in your urinary bladder for long. As soon as you feel you want to urinate, go to the toilet immediately (and release it). It is dangerous to hold urine for a long time. It was the cause of my problem. I have been holding urine for a long time. It affected my prostate gland. Luckily, it has been removed before it became cancerous.”

Those words keep echoing in my ears to this day.  In fact, two days ago in sleep I heard the professor speaking the same words in my ears while in sleep. It was not surprising. I have since October 2023 been on treatment to stabilise my prostate gland. Quite expensive. I wouldn’t manage the financial demands if a long-time friend in Canada, counsel and politician Davies Bagambiire, had not intervened. However, I believe it was the caution that Professor Patrick Rubaihayo sounded to Henry Mayega and myself that has helped most to prevent my prostate getting infected by microbes from my urinary bladder.

So when my former postgraduate student, Muhumuza Harriet, sent me a WhatsApp message today informing me that Professor Emeritus Patrick Rubaihayo was no more, I was greatly devastated.

I had heard of Professor Patrick Rubaihayo in the early 1980s when I was a postgraduate student in the Zoology Department at Chiromo Campus of Nairobi University as one of the very few ministers in then Uganda President Apollo Milton Obote between 1980 and 1985. However, I did not meet him until 1991, when I joined Makerere University’s Department of Zoology as a lecturer. Apart from Dr Pantaleo Kasoma who was the Head of that Department at that time, Professor Rubaihayo was one the very first people I met and knew in Makerere in the first one week, thanks to Henry Mayega, then an administrator in the Vice Chancellor’s office.

Mayega became an instant acquaintance because of similar political orientation towards the Uganda People’s Congress (UPC). Apart from introducing me to Professor Patrick Rubaihayo, he introduced me to many academics and administrators who were staunchly UPC, including Professor Adoniya Tiberondwa, Prof. Akiiki Mujaju, Prof. Kagendo Atwoki, Prof. Opolot, Mr. Patrick Kirunda, and many others.. I settled in quickly and became influential very early although I had never been educated at Makerere University, but at the University of Dar-es-Salaam and University of Nairobi.

My association with Professor Patrick Rubaihayo grew from weak to strong to excellent. I would always check on him at his office in the Faculty of Agriculture and forestry and he would check on me at the Faculty of Science. He taught me a lot about Uganda politics, since I had been out of the country for about two decades. He also convinced me to accept that the best politicians are scientists. At that time, he did not know like I did that science is one with three dimensions – natural, social and arts (or humanities).

Professor Rubaihayo was a member of the Presidential Policy Commission (PPC) of the Ugandan People’s Congress (UPC), which was functioning as a presidium since the party president was in exile in Zambia. He asked me to visit Uganda House, the building that housed the headquarters of the party on Floor Six. He asked Henry Mayega to accompany me. When Mayega and I went, we found all the members of the PPC waiting for us. At the time, the recently fallen Iron Lady Cecilia Ogwal, was the chairperson of the PPC and Dr James Rwanyarare was her deputy. The PPC was a diverse group with great representation of all parts of Uganda. However, it was finding it difficult to operate under the increasingly militarised and politically exclusive governance of the country by the new group from the bush, the National Resistance Movement/Army. However, the members were  very courageous. I found Professor Patrick Rubaihayo a very courageous politician. One day, when Mayega and I visited the UPC headquarters, we found the PPC members discussing what they all thought was true: that the political leadership of Uganda was overinfested with Rwandese Tutsis. I heard them agreeing, under their chairperson, Cissy Ogwal, that Uganda was occupied and needed freedom from Rwandese Tutsis. The most vocal on this issue was Professor Patrick Rubaihayo. The PPC tasked him and the then national chairman of the party, Haji Badru Wegulo, to draft a policy statement on the issue of domination of the political space and other spaces by the Rwandese Tutsi

The real drafter of the party position on Rwandese Tutsi was Professor Patrick Rubaihayo. It seems he was chosen to draft the party position guided by history. I learnt that back in Ankole he had tried to send Rwandese Tutsis from the swamps back to their country of origin – Rwanda, because they were interfering with the politics of the country. In fact, when the party position document was finally printed and produced, it was so scathing that it angered the head of state, Yoweri Museveni, as he was then called.

The president chose to address the nation over the matter in full combat fatigue. He ordered the arrest of Professor Patrick Rubaihayo and Haji Badru Wegulo and their incarceration in Luzira Maximum Prison. The president showed that the issue of who is citizen of Uganda was squarely in his hands when he simultaneously granted citizenship to one of his ministers, then Brigadier Moses Ali, and widely known to be a Nubian from South Sudan.

Eventually Patrick Rubaihayo and Haji Badru Rubaihayo were released from Luzira by order of the president. Rubaihayo remained true to his party but Haji Badru Wegulo was routinely accused of working for the regime from within the UPC. Much later in the early millennium, when the military invaded UPC headquarters and shot at the lift in Uganda House before arresting the man who replaced Cissy Ogwal as chairman of PPC, Dr James Rwanyarare, and shooting down a journalism student called Higenyi. Haji Wegulo was accused of hiding when the party headquarters were being raided by uniformed men with guns. 

Patrick Rubaihayo remained strong in articulating the ideals of his party and criticising the excesses, suppression and oppression and other vices reigned on the people by the rulers. While party leaders such as Cissy Ogwal, Haji Wegulo, Henry Mayega deserted the UPC, either for NRM or Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) Professor Patrick Rubaihayo remained in his party and preferred to fight from withing to ensure good leadership in the party.

Earlier in the 1990s, he played a critical role in the formation of the Interpolitical Forces Committee (IPFC), which fielded Dr Paul Kawanga Ssemogerere against President Yoweri Museveni.

If we still had men of Character rather than characters, then Professor Patric Rubaihayo stood astute as a man of character till his death.

We shall remember his contributions to agricultural development during a most difficult period when the government of which he was a part was also allocating time, energy and money to combating the rebels now in government for more than 38 years at the exclusion of pluralism and a pluralistic society in Uganda.  His time as Minister of Agriculture was the last time Agriculture was taken to be  far more important than the military, State House,  President’s Office and politics.

May His Soul Rest in Peace!

• A Tell report / By Prof Oweyegha-Afunaduula, a former professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences of the Makerere University, Uganda