Africa-Press – Uganda. Today marks a year since the death of Uganda Cranes captain Jimmy Kirunda, who led the team to the 1978 Africa Cup of Nations final.
There aren’t any memorials planned for Kirunda today. However, the football fraternity will spend it laying to rest another ex-player, Peter Wandyete, who passed on Sunday at the age of 66.
It is tough phase. Yesterday, former Uganda referees’ association chairman Prof. Isaac Kigongo Bukenya was laid to rest after his passing on Saturday.
He also taught at Makerere Univeristy.
While Bukenya made his mark as a referee and later as an administrator, also serving as a Fufa delegate, Wandyete was a famous footballer in the 70s and 80s.
Wandyete won five league titles and five Uganda Cups at KCCA. He added the 1978 Cecafa Kagame Club Championship, a feat the club didn’t repeat until 2019.
‘Umbwa Kali’
A well-built tenacious defender, Wandyete earned the name “Umbwa Kali” (fierce dog) for his no-nonsesnse approach to the game.
It’s this character that helped then Mbale-based Gangama United earn promotion to the topflight in 1975. That fanned the move to KCCA soon after and a call up to the national team under coach David Otti.
At KCCA, Wandyete played alongside Kirunda and Tom Lwanga in an iron-clad defence.
“He was the kind of teammate you wanted because he had your back, always,” Lwanga says.
Tom Ddamulira, a friend of Wandyete and a lifelong KCCA fan and sports pundit, thinks the deceased was one who was “willing to die for the team.”
“I first saw him in 1976 when he was still a squad player. He wasn’t the most technically gifted but the most willing to work. I have always advocated for such a player,” Ddamulira says.
“He was a typical man-marker and a tackler who had so many sliding tackles when [hard] tackling was still allowed in the game.”
Wandyete spent 13 years at KCCA before moving to Bell in 1988 where he was also appointed a coach alongside Polly Ouma, another hero of the 1978 Afcon finals.
The Lugogo hierarchy would later recall Wandyete as an assistant coach and he went on to win the 1994 Uganda Cup with the club.
He was sacked in 1995.
Wandyete’s later life was not pretty as he descended into alcoholism and was locked out of Lugogo when he attempted to watch KCCA’s home matches many times.
He was frail and barely recognisable from the imposing frame in his playing days.
“I can attribute the drinking to the retrenchment of government employees in the early 90s,” Ddamulira says of the footballer he once admired.
“He lost his job at KCCA and slid into depression. It’s not that he was a drunkard as he could control it when he was an active player.”
