Africa-Press – Uganda. Veteran sports administrator John Mutenda is dead. The calm and amiable gentleman died on Wednesday. He was 73.
Mutenda served as KCCA FC vice chairman through some of the club’s most challenging periods in the 90s and 2000s.
Though he was never the club chairman, KCCA bestowed the title of ‘life chairman’ on to him.
He was a prominent fan before being invited to the club executive as committee member by then-chairman Jack Ibaale Snr (RIP) in 1987.
“In his days, he gave players lots of money and that got him many names,” veteran journalist Hassan Badru Zziwa said.
From 1993 to 2012, he deputised six chairmen.
In 2018, Mutenda was part of a group of former football administrators recognized by Fufa president Moses Magogo for their service to the game.
Godfrey Kisekka, a KCCA chairman from 2004 to 2010, found Mutenda to be well-groomed to lead.
“I was much younger than his class when I first joined KCCA,” Kisekka said.
“Unlike today where leaders emerge out of nowhere, they would see you and then develop you for a role within the club.
“The calibre of people chosen would then be the right one. He was calm. He knew how to respect people even if many of us were younger than him,” he added.
That Kisekka-led executive returned the league title to Lugogo after 11 years in 2007/08.
Mutenda, who was an importer of Volvo and Land Rover cars, served as Deputy Mayor of Kampala Central Division, while Kisekka was town clerk.
During that time, the support from the authority was not as pronounced as it is today.
Legend has it that Kisekka and his supervisor Mutenda used their influence to improve players’ welfare at Lugogo.
“As an executive, we split up the responsibilities of taking care of players. Every executive committee member would take care of all the needs of two or three players. Mutenda was part of that,” Kisekka noted.
In football, he also served on the football normalisation committee put in place to run Fufa following the disbandment of the Denis Obua executive in 2005.
A quiet man with a beaming smile saw him serve as an executive committee member and later chairman of the Automobile Association of Uganda (AAU). RIPJohn!
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