Samuel Mugarura: In love with teargas

Missing Kayihura and Museveni

After Mugarura unveiled his teargas to the press, he says the Inspector General of Police, Kale kayihura expressed interest to meet him but it has not happened and he is still waiting. Meanwhile, he says he got a phone call from President’s press secretary, Don Wanyama, to meet Museveni and travelled to Entebbe State House home of the president but the meeting also did not happen.

“We didn’t meet him but he directed the Minister for Science and Technology, Erioda Tumwesigye to handle my case,” Mugarura says as he shows off a picture on his laptop of him posing with Tumwesigye and other ministry officials.

Mugarura says the Ministry of Science and Technology, of all government institutions, has been supportive and helped him, through the Uganda Registration Services Bureau (URSB), to acquire a patent from the Zimbabwe-based African Regional Intellectual Property Organisation (ARIPO) on March 22, 2017. Mugarura says the Ministry paid the Shs600,000 required for the patent.

Collission with law, academia

But Mugarura’s challenges have not been restricted to money. He has also had to contend with prying security agencies, especially the police, ever since he started working on his inventions in 2014, just a year after he had been admitted to Makerere University.

“One time I had gone to visit a friend in another room in the hall when plain cloth policemen raided the room and arrested the four of us and took us to Makerere University police post where they accused me of having a bomb in my room,” Mugarura says. He says a check of his room found no bomb and his teargas project was still on paper.

Even though he was released with no charge after spending a night in the police cells, he says security continued to trail him perhaps suspecting him to be involved in subversive activities. Even when he unveiled his teargas to the press, the police said he faced arrest as he had two cases of assault and possession of drugs at Wandegeya Police. Even the then-spokesperson of Police, the late AIGP Felix Kaweesi went to the university and to Mugarura’s faculty and Academic Registrar’s office. He asked for Mugarura’s academic records and later warned him to stop experimenting with teargas.

“But I insisted it was not illegal and I would go on since I was putting in practice what I was studying in class,” he says.

Mugarura denies being a criminal and says the charges were trumped up and police has since dropped them due to lack of evidence. He says the harassment by security agents led him to unveil his invention prematurely to hopefully end suspicions.

“It seems some of my friends who knew of my project either became envious of me or were state informers who went and informed the Police of what I was doing,” Mugarura says.

He says police only found a police teargas canister and then-Kampala Metropolitan Police spokesman, Emilian Kayima, said they would decide whether to charge him or not after the government chemist analysed it to establish the contents.  He has never been charged.

On the academic front, after unveiling his invention on September 25, 2016, the Makerere University Academic Registrar’s office released a statement saying Mugarura had results for only Year One and Year Two with seven retakes. A retake is where a student is required to re-sit a paper after failing to score the 50 percent pass mark. Mugarura says the office may have been pressured to release the statement and that he had three retakes and had simply not sat another four papers.

Lecturers at the university also piled pressure on him.  The head of department of Plant Sciences, Microbiology and Technology under the College of Natural Sciences (CONAS) said Mugarura was not focused on his studies and a former head of the Chemistry department, Prof. Muhammad Ntale, said he was seeking cheap popularity.

“Theoretically, we know the compositions of bombs or teargas, but making them is beyond him,” Prof. Ntale told the media.

Dr. John Wasswa, the head of the Chemistry department under CONAS, dismissed him as a plant science (botany) major without skills to make teargas or smoke bombs.

Mugarura dismisses Wasswa’s argument saying he uses his botany knowledge to make his formula for the teargas.

“Among others, I use ingredients from red pepper, onions and mangos and to get all these you need knowledge of plant science to extract them,” Mugarura stresses and says he is surprised by the backlash he got from security operatives and academicians. He says it may have been a result of not understanding his intentions or sheer malice.

“We spend a lot of money on importing teargas. I don’t know why some people including my lecturers should be against my innovation,” he says. He says, however, though he has not met Kayihura or Museveni, the harassment he was getting from security agencies has since stopped.

Away from his tiny lab in his mother’s store, Mugarura remain a typical young man who supports the English premier league Manchester United with such a passion that his friends nicknamed him “Falcao” after one of the legendary footballers of the side. He uses the name on his Facebook page. But even this attracted the attention of the police claiming that since it is a Colombian name, it means he takes drugs.

“It has nothing to do with Colombians taking drugs,” he says, and hopes the police buy that.

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