IF JOSEPH MUGERA becomes the first person from his village to travel overseas, it will be with no help from British officialdom.
That the 31-year-old primary school teacher hopes to study in England is a source of pride in Nakyenyi, a remote settlement 140 miles from Kampala, the Ugandan capital.
Should he return with a sports science qualification, as he plans to, Mr Mugera will take up a promised university post in Kampala, giving his Aids-ravaged family a secure future. He has an unconditional offer from a London college and a British sponsor who will pay his £7,000 course fees and living expenses during the two-year stay, but he is still waiting on immigration authorities to give him a visa.
The wait has been more than a year. Twice Mr Mugera has applied for a student visa — paying £250 each time — and twice an entry clearance officer at the British High Commission in Kampala has turned it down, believing the course to be a ruse to stay in Britain.
The officer who considered the first application in July last year decided that a BTEC national diploma in sports science represented a bogus career change, given that Mr Mugera was studying for a business administration degree. However, as the application made clear, Mr Mugera has never studied business administration. He earns £40 a month as the head of PE. It is his fiancé e, Florida Muheirwi, 20, who is the business student. Her details were among the papers submitted to illustrate one of the many reasons why Mr Mugera would return once he had completed his course at Greenwich Community College.
Instead of correcting the mistake, each officer subsequently reviewed the application perversely repeated it. The second rejection letter used, word for word, the line trotted out in the first: “You have been admitted to Makerere University for a Bachelors of Business Administration in 2004 and claim to be studying now. I am therefore not satisfied that it is credible that you would now seek to study a BTEC diploma in sports science in the UK in the light of your current education . . . and your lack of prior study in this field.” On a third and a fourth occasion, after days of phone calls and heavy persuasion, the commission agreed to look again at the application, with by-now predictable results. Last week an independent judge heard Mr Mugera’s appeal against the visa refusal at an Immigration and Asylum Tribunal in Bradford.
The judge was scathing in his criticism of the way the Kampala office handled the application. His ruling is awaited, but justice may yet prevail.
I should come clean here. If the appeal succeeds, it will mean a great deal to my family, in particular to my brother, Tim, a psychologist whose life has become inextricably linked to Mr Mugera’s family — his seven younger brothers and sisters, Tim, his 11-year-old son, who is named after my brother, and Ms Muheirwi.
Mr Mugera’s tale is one of courage and a determination to succeed against seemingly overwhelming odds. When he was 18, he awoke on the morning of his maths A-level exam to hear his mother crying. He already knew that she had Aids — it had claimed his father’s life one year earlier — and she was in a great amount of pain. He took her on the back of his bicycle to the nearest doctor. They rode in the dark along a rutted four-mile dirt track and then another five miles by road.They waited two hours for the doctor to examine her, then Mr Mugera paid for some medicine, lifted her back on the bike, cycled home, put her to bed, washed and ran to school, arriving five minutes before the exam started. Asked why he looked tired, he recounted the story to an amazed teacher, ending with a shrug of the shoulders and the words: “That’s Africa. That’s life.”
My brother was the teacher. He spent three years living in a mud hut in Nakyenyi between 1993 and 1996.
He arrived in Africa on a personal journey that began in 1984 after watching Michael Buerk’s first BBC report on the Ethiopian famine. He joined the development charity Voluntary Service Overseas and ended up producing a new English language syllabus for all primary schools in Uganda.
While in Nakyenyi he was coach of the school’s first XI football team and Mr Mugera was his star centre forward. In 1993, when he was in the lower sixth, Mr Mugera told my brother that he was leaving the team. His father had just died. He was now responsible for his family and they could no longer afford his school fees.
My brother offered to pay the £15-a-term fees and was invited to meet Mr Mugera’s family. Thirteen years later, they are now his family. He paid for Mr Mugera to complete his schooling, his teacher training and his diploma in education. He returns to Uganda every year and his commitment means that young Tim is at boarding school and Ms Muheirwi, who is also an Aids orphan, is a university student.
Thanks to him, Jane and Kate, two of Mr Mugera’s sisters, are hairdressers and Robert and Freed, two of his brothers, have a laundry business. They are all living in Kampala.
Back in the village, which has no electricity or running water, the remaining members of the family have a small herd of goats. When there are emergencies — financial or medical — the bills are paid. It was not enough to save Frank, Mr Mugera’s youngest brother, who was born HIV-positive and died, little more than a dried bag of bones, aged 6.
I met Frank and the rest of the family when I spent three weeks in Nakyenyi in 1995. I was treated as an honoured guest — only the fifth white person to be seen in the village. The poverty was overwhelming, the strength of spirit indomitable. Eleven years on, Mr Mugera — with my brother’s help — has worked tirelessly to ensure his family’s future.
I may have been naive, but I was shocked by the entrenched cynicism and incompetence flourishing in the British High Commission in Kampala. Among fourteen important facts in ten separate documents submitted with Mr Mugera’s visa application, all of which officials chose to misread or ignore, was detailed evidence — including regular bank statements — of my brother’s commitment to Mr Mugera’s welfare. In the refusal letter, the officer wrote: “You state that a friend you met briefly in Uganda a few years ago . . . will sponsor you. You have no evidence that you have been in regular contact or have a genuine . . . relationship.”
Such crassness may help to explain why the rejection rate for student visa applications from Uganda is at odds with many other countries. In 2004-05, Foreign and Commonwealth Office figures indicate that 0.8 per cent of students from Japan were denied a visa to study in Britain. The rejection rate for Australians was 2.2 per cent, Americans 2.1 per cent, South Koreans 2.3 per cent and Mexicans 2.6 per cent. In Uganda, the rejection rate in 2001-02 was 38 per cent, in 2002-03 47 per cent and in 2004-05 68 per cent.
I hope Mr Mugera’s appeal succeeds because he is the sort of person that Britain should be proud to welcome. His stay would cost this country not a penny but would almost certainly change many Ugandan lives for the better.
Mr Mugera’s sister Jane gave birth to a son two weeks ago. She named him Andrew, after me. It was a great honour. I feel ashamed of the contempt with which my country has treated this baby’s uncle. A wrong has been done and it needs to be put right.
