By Frank Kamuntu
Kampala: Former Kampala Lord Mayor Al Hajji Nasser Ntege Ssebaggala commonly known as Seeya has died this morning at the age of 72, at International Hospital Kampala.
According to the family sources, Ssebagala has been admitted after he developed a disorder in his stomach, commonly referred to as intussusception which he has been battling in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) for the fortnight.
Nasser Ntege Ssebaggala has been a Ugandan businessman and politician who was Mayor of Kampala from 2006 to 2011. He was an independent presidential candidate in the 2006 general election before dropping out and joining the Kampala mayoral race.
He was born in Kampala, Uganda’s capital city, on 15 November 1947. Nasser died on 26 September 2020.
Following the expulsion of Asians by Idi Amin in 1972, Nasser Ssebaggala acquired a supermarket called UGANTICO on Nkrumah road the lower entrance to current CHAM towers an electronics and clothes store on Kampala Road, the main thoroughfare in Kampala. His business interests grew over time.
In 1998, he began his political career by running for the position of Mayor of Kampala. Ostensibly a member of the Democratic Party, Ssebaggala won the first direct elections for mayor of Kampala in 1998, beating two government-sponsored candidates.
However, he was arrested in the United States two months later, in June 1998, on eight counts of fraud and lying to U.S. customs officials. In February 1999, he received a 15-month sentence but was paroled in December 1999. He returned to Kampala in February 2000 to a warm welcome and considered a bid in the 2001 presidential elections.
In mid-December 2005, he broke with the Democratic Party (DP), after he came third in the party presidential primaries, which was won by Ssebaana Kizito, and registered himself as an independent. A week later, he reversed himself, withdrawing his candidacy and announcing his support for Kizito. When he lost the Democratic Party nominations to Norbert Mao in 2010, he quit the DP and formed his own party.
