Dr Brian Semujju, the journalism professor who has not lived to be

Sometime in 2016, while I was undertaking a master’s degree in Journalism and Communication at Makerere University, Dr William Tayeebwa brought for us a guest lecturer to take us through the course he was teaching; Communication Theories and Models.

This guest lecturer looked anything but academic compared to those we had got used to. He was putting on a shirt which was not tucked in and canvass shoes on a Monday. He had a heavy afro hairstyle, not common with academics.

He told us his name was Brian Semujju, a PhD student of Journalism and Communication at the KwaZulu Natal University in South Africa. By the time we were defending our proposals in late 2017, he had graduated with a PhD and had now been appointed as lecturer at the Makerere University department of Journalism and Communication.

Now doctor, Semujju had been at the Uganda Christian University at Mukono where he started teaching in the late 2000s having graduated from the same university. Semujju then in 2010 enrolled at Makerere University for a master’s degree which he completed in 2012 and returned to UCU to lecture.

When he returned to Uganda, he first taught at UCU and Makerere before permanently relocating to Makerere University. At Makerere, I was one of the first group of students that were allocated to him for supervision. He wasn’t your normal lecturer.

Semujju has been an extreme workaholic who got married to the academia. While he supervised me and four other colleagues, he would read our draft theses word per word.

There was no way you would smuggle anything in the thesis thinking that he would not see it. When I submitted to him my first draft, he returned it with more red ink than the black in which I had written it.

His comments wouldn’t stop at only substantives but would also look at small things like using a semicolon instead of a colon. He would be incensed by failing to put a comma where you should have.

In fact, one time he returned my draft thesis for simply forgetting to put a full stop on a sentence on the first page.

“Please, stop this mediocrity, don’t return this book until you have proofread it and corrected all the punctuation,” Semujju once told me.

He loved students and was always there to assist anytime. Public servants normally work between 8am-5pm, but for him, time boundaries were not a factor in his life. We would meet at 5am to go over comments he suggested that I should make in the thesis.

Semujju loved music and sometimes acted as a DJ

Sometimes we would meet at his club in Luzira where he doubled as a DJ. Semujju loved music. Outside the academia, he would be singing or learning karate or Chinese or learning about the universe. When you’re not meeting at the club, he would tell you, lets meet on the Northern Bypass the road he used from his home in Namugongo.

You would spend more than an hour when he is taking you through difficult concepts that he thought might help you advance an argument in the thesis. For as long as you had an issue that is academic based, he was more than willing to help you.

He would point you to sources of literature that you had never thought about. In just seven years after getting his PhD, he rose through the ranks from being a lecturer to becoming a senior lecturer. We were told yesterday at his funeral service at Makerere University St Francis chapel that he was applying in November for a promotion as associate professor, one step away from being a full professor.

In just seven years he has written and published more than 20 academic papers. Writing and publishing is one of the key requirements for academic promotion. All his colleagues admit one thing; he has been an academic through and through.

Semujju who was born in October 1980, felt some uneasiness in the stomach in June last year. He thought he had over done his karate and its what was causing the pain. He had had more life than a cat.

He had not taken sugar for over 15 years, he didn’t drink alcohol, he never ate junk food. He generally lived a healthy lifestyle. He went to see a doctor to check out what was causing him discomfort.

He was found with a tumour on the liver. Eventually he was found to have stage-three cancer of the liver. That’s when his health struggles started. But amidst these health challenges, he carried on with his duties as if nothing had happened.

Teaching, reading, writing and supervising students. In fact, just two weeks ago, he had picked student dissertations for reading. He had also asked to be put on the lecturers who are going to be teaching students this semester which began last week.

He refused to be concurred by cancer. On Tuesday, he was rushed to a hospital at Buganda Road unconscious and he breathed his last on Sunday evening. At his funeral service, one of his brothers revealed that another sister of his has breast cancer, another brother got a stroke. Semujju is survived by one child, a daughter named Venus; taking from the love of the universe.

bakerbatte@gmail.com