KAMPALA: Bank of Uganda Governor Tumusiime Mutebile has gone to be with the lord.
He was aged 72.
Although there is no official communication yet, close friends of the governor have been announcing the bad news on social media since around 6:00am.
Senior journalist and friend to Mr. Mutebile, Andrew Mwenda announced on his titter handle:
“Emmanuel Tumusiime Mutebile, this great architect of Uganda’s economic recovery, this titan of our banking industry, this intelligent, magnanimous and generous soul, this friend of all and enemy of no one, rested this morning at 5.30am. RIP my friend! You have been a true giant!”
Over the past few months, the governor has been in and out of hospital.
Two weeks ago, the Deputy Governor sent an email to all staff informing them that the governor had been flown out to an unnamed hospital in Kenya for emergency treatment.
“This is to inform you that the Governor is not feeling well and we have made arrangements to fly him to Nairobi. Please, keep him in your prayers,” he wrote.
Background:
Emmanuel Tumusiime-Mutebile was a Ugandan economist and banker. He was the governor of the Bank of Uganda, the central bank of Uganda. He was first appointed to that position on 1 January 2001 and was re-appointed for a second five-year term on 1 January 2006. In December 2015, he was re-appointed for a fourth five-year term, effective 12 January 2016.
Education:
Tumusiime-Mutebile attended Kigezi College Butobere for his O-Level studies (grades S1-S4). He then attended Makerere College School in Kampala for his A-Level studies (grades S5-S6). In 1970, he entered Makerere University, where he was elected president of the university Students’ Guild.
He was forced to flee Uganda in 1972 after he gave a speech publicly criticizing the expulsion of Asians from the country by Idi Amin. He fled to England via Tanzania, and was able to finish his studies at Durham University, graduating with an upper-second in Economics and Politics.
In October 1974, he began his post-graduate studies at Balliol College, Oxford, before returning to East Africa. He entered the University of Dar es Salaam to lecture and conduct research while pursuing his doctorate in economics. In 2009, Nkumba University, a private university based in Nkumba near Entebbe, awarded him an honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree in recognition of his “great contribution towards the development of Uganda’s financial sector”.
Career
Between the year 1979 and 1984, Tumusiime-Mutebile was appointed to several government positions in Uganda ranging from deputy principal secretary to the president at State House in 1979, to undersecretary in the ministry of planning in 1981 where he rose to senior economist and then chief economist in 1984. In 1992, he was appointed permanent secretary to the newly combined ministry of finance planning & economic development, a merger that he had advocated while working under Minister of Finance Gerald Ssendaula.
He is the longest serving chief executive in the Bank of Uganda’s history. He is credited with many of the sound economic policies adopted by the Uganda government at the urging of the central bank during the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s.
Other responsibilities
Since 2006, he has been a visiting professor in the Department of Economics at Makerere University, the oldest and largest university in Uganda. Tumusiime-Mutebile is the chancellor of the International University of East Africa, a private university established in 2011, with an urban campus in Kampala, Uganda’s capital.
Additional information sourced from Wikipedia