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Some Ugandans are taking the initiative in tackling their communities’ problems in spheres such as education, health, youth, agriculture, technology women and children’s rights and other social projects.
The late Musa Wakibi is one of the people New Vision readers identified. His legacy lives on. |
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At Musa Body ‘University’ your brain is your capital
Name: Musa Wakabi
Project: Musa Body University of Technology
In his son’s words
“Where he didn’t train you, he gave advice.”
Contact
Katwe By-Pass (opposite White Nile Club),
P.O.Box 15103,
Kampala.
Tel: 0772921825 |
By Nigel Nassar
What would you call a Ugandan metal fabricator toeing with the thought of manufacturing firearms? Some called him a day-dreamer. Perhaps he was – maybe not.
Then one day, the same man built a car – here in Uganda.
And everyone went, “wait a minute!”
But while we waited the minute, he passed away. It was on the night of Friday, March 18, 2003. He was 84. His name: Musa Wakibi of the Musa Body invention.
It was a silent death at his home in Katwe after a long battle with diabetes, high-blood pressure and heart-related complications.
Wakibi had a dream – a big Ugandan dream rooted deep into his not-so-attractive metal fabrication workshop called Musa Body University of Technology, aka, Musa Body.
In the early 1990s, Wakibi wanted to start manufacturing guns and bullets at this workshop in Katwe, a Kampala suburb. |
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| The aim: to reduce the hefty sums of money spent by the Government on buying firearms; to produce a generation of hands-on metal fabricators through apprenticeship and to employ a big number of the country’s unemployed.
But his dream came down crumbling like a tonne of bricks after failing to get support from the Government. Maybe they thought it was a joke.
Then Wakibi set his mind to his next big thing – making a car. An innovation that reassured many that he was a progressive-thinking Ugandan who, while not necessarily employing the learned, wanted to train them into able Ugandans.
The car was named Uganda1, an indication that it was the first to be made in the country. The claim that it operated on water was only speculation, just like Kentucky residents speculate Robots in Fort Knox, the US gold bullion depository.
Anyway, Uganda1 ran on Petrol and fascinated many; admirers and haters alike. This car used a Jeep engine, the only component aside from tyres and glass, that was not forged in the Katwe-based workshop.
But while on road test, it was impounded by the Police for lack of engine and chassis numbers. For being on the wrong side of the law, restriction orders were slapped on it, ultimately having it grounded.
Today, the disillusioned car enjoys a lifetime parking area at the home of one of the employees of Musa Body in Rubaga, also a son to the deceased brain.
It’s a family memento from the excellence of a human mind that did not have the opportunity to take its might to the next level due to lack of resources.
In fact, Wakibi died beating himself over failing to access external funding for his car- manufacturing ambition to take off. |
Wakabi displaying a car model he built, now a cherished family memento |
But although it did not fly, the Musa Body legacy remained – a legacy born of a history of metal fabrication into a myriad of amazing machine creations from the workshop, which has also churned out exceptionally skilled blacksmiths over the years.
In fact, Musa Body has churned out over 50 fabricators and electricians, who, in turn, have opened their own workshops, employed and trained several others.
According to 30-year-old Ibrahim Luyombya, Wakibi’s son upon whom the workshop was bequeathed, the old man (as he fondly refers to him) did not acquire much formal education.
His ‘great trek’ started at his home village in Kakinzi, Luweero district, where he went to a local primary school, before joining Boroboro High School in Lira in 1930.
He then enrolled at Wandegeya Technical School, and later, Kisubi Technical School, where he graduated with a certificate in carpentry in 1938.
“By Ugandan standards today, you wouldn’t say my father was literate. But the brain that lay in his skull was one of a kind,” says Luyombya of his father.
“He shared his brain with many, especially we, his children.”
Luyombya is the sixth-born of the old man’s 14 children, six of whom including himself, work at the workshop. Together with Musa Sserunjogi, Hadad Ssebunza, Isma Wakibi, Rehema Najjuma and Janat Namakula, Luyombya runs the workshop.
He is younger than four of them, and attributes being boss to his childhood obsession with machines, which bought him more time with his father.
“I didn’t even complete O’Level. I spent more time with father, who kept sending me for this and that tool. So I learnt their names and how they worked.”
Luyombya says his father was 21 in 1940 when he took up a job with a local Indian furniture mart. When he quit after 16 years and established Musa Furniture Mart in Industrial Area, he became popular for building wooden body parts for Bedford lorries.
A staunch Muslim, Wakibi believed in helping others. “Where he didn’t train you, he gave advice,” says Luyombya.
Around 1985, owners of dilapidated Bedford lorries came looking for a one Musa, specialist in making lorry body parts and rejuvenating worn-out autos.
So, to peg him to his job, people tagged him ‘Musa Body’, a name he came to like and turn into his company name later after leaving the Industrial Area for Katwe.
Luyombya recalls that by the time he started going to the workshop at the age of 10 in 1987, his father was already popular.
“At the time, the workshop was called Musa Body Construction Company, dealing in wood and metal works,” Luyombya recalls.
The old man was employing about five people who would help him complete clients’ work.
But when the backlog of pending tasks necessitated that he employ more people; Wakibi enrolled about 10 young men to help reduce the pending jobs.
In return, they would benefit from the skills he passed on to them. And that was the beginning of an apprenticeship programme that kept enlisting more hands and later, university graduates who had finished mechanical and electrical engineering courses but lacked hands-on experience. |
They learnt how to use different machines to make electrical appliances and fabricate metal into finished goods like locally made electric or firewood-fueled ovens, wheat mixers, wheel chairs, car bodies and maize mills.
They also made machines that cut hay, separated maize from the cones, separated rice and coffee from the husks, made vent and half bricks.
Wakibi gave them a small daily fee to cater for their transport and meals.
Luyombya recalls that his father was surprised that the graduates were low on know-how.
“So he decided to rename his workshop Musa Body University of Technology, after all he would beat university graduates at what they had studied,” says Luyombya.
Most of the graduates, according to Luyombya, spent about a year and got jobs with construction companies, while the other initially unskilled ones used the knowledge from Musa Body to start up their own workshops.
Charles Matovu, the proprietor of CM Workshop of Technology, trained at Musa Body as an apprentice mechanic and electrician for five years.
He left Musa Body in 2000 and opened up his own workshop. Now registered under Katwe1 Youth Development Project, the workshop trains the youth in motor-rewinding, making welding machines, stabilizers, battery charging machines, step-ups and step-downs.
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Luyombya (right) helps a student at the workshop. |
“I have so far churned out about 30 apprentices, some of whom now employed, others putting together resources to start up,” Matovu says. He proudly shows off photos of students at work, some of whom are Tanzanian soldiers he says opened up workshops in Tanzania.
“I owe it all to Musa Body. To date, I still consult his sons on a lot of work-related issues. Other metal fabricators in Katwe also go there for consultancy,” Matovu says.
John Mayanja came to Kampala in 1984 and spent two years jobless. In December 1993, a friend introduced him to Musa Body, who eventually trained him in welding and the manufacture of steel products.
Today, Mayanja owns a metal workshop in Bwaise and employs permanent and temporary hands. Other beneficiaries include Abby Mulondo, who owns a metal workshop in Lubowa and Derrick Lule, the proprietor of Ssesa Workshop in Lweza.
Apart from the above who moved on, the apprenticeship project continues at Musa Body.
Victor Wakholi, an 18-year-old P.4 drop-out is one of the eight apprentice trainees in metal works, having joined in November 2006. Today, Wakholi can weld, make brick machines, gates and windows and looks forward to starting his own workshop.
Twenty-three-year-old Harunah Muyenje has been an apprentice at Musa Body for two years now. A Makerere University graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Education, Muyenje says with his metal-fabrication knowledge, he might end up not teaching, and concentrating on metal work.
The other six apprentices are also happy with what they have achieved without having to pay for it. |
Many small-scale industrialists in Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Kenya got their training from the renowned Musa Body.
The old man emphasised doing a good job, a belief that today consists the workshop’s motto.
Inside the workshop, a metallic board hanging from the roof bears the motto: “Do A Good Job And The Money Will Take Care Of Itself.”
“I remember the day father erected that motto,” Luyombya recalls before he is overtaken by grief on remembering the day his father died.
The news that Wakibi had died spread like a wildfire. “Radio stations and newspapers were on top of it, each christening him titles that came to one thing, a guru in metal works.”
Luyombya says business in Katwe came to a standstill the following day as hundreds thronged the old man’s ancestral home in Luweero to bid their adieus.
“The evening prior his death, I watched him admiringly as he swept the workshop before retiring. Then he was gone,” Luyombya recalls. |
The ‘university’ workshop which has churned out over 50 metal fabricators
A tata lorry body by Musa Body
Send your comments and nominations to changemakers@newvision.co.ug
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“The most important thing he taught me and my siblings was that one’s brain is their capital, so you don’t need money to start up.”
Now as the director of the company that built a name worth every mention, Luyombya wakes up at 6:00am daily to make sure his father’s legacy goes on and on.
He says the old man used to caution him against ever letting Musa Body’s reputation slip away. “For that reason I take care not to squander any money accruing from our services.”
Like his father, Luyombya does not sit back to watch the students and his brothers do the job. He believes in having his hands do something.
Musa Mayanja, a grandson to Wakibi, who is also employed at the workshop, believes part of the old man rubbed off onto Luyombya.
“The old man believed in having his hands busy. Even while he rested, his hands would be caressing something — at least a stick,” says Mayanja.
Soon, I was to believe Mayanja’s assertion. By the time my interview with Luyombya was done, the business card I had given him an hour ago was tattered.
While responding to the raised questions, he had been squeezing the card, rolling it on the table and tearing away bits of it. And now the remaining part looked as if it had been smeared with fish gravy and slipped into a rat hole.
“I am an action-packed man just like the old man. Can you imagine his idea of relaxing at home was to make some bricks?” Luyombya says as he escorts me through the only aisle in the congested workshop, pointing at different machines he says are more efficient than the ones his father invented using the old technology.
And that is the man who, from bits and pieces of metal, is making a difference in many people’s lives. And he’s doing it for the love of his late father, plus the satisfaction of the very reason he dropped out of school.
Musa Wakibi is believed to be the father of Uganda’s hitherto little-known small-scale industrial sector, whose main hub lies in Katwe. |
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