AMECEA: Former Secretary General Appeals to Members to Take Ownership of the Association

Having served AMECEA as Secretary General for the last seven years, the immediate former Secretary General Rev. Fr. Lugonzo understand well the challenges the Association faces and therefore strongly recommends all member bishops to take the responsibility of ownership of the institution to heart.

In an exclusive interview with him, Fr. Lugonzo confessed that the greatest difficulty he experienced as Secretary General of the Association is the question of staffing the AMECEA Institutions, which apart from the Secretariat, includes the Catholic University of Eastern Africa (CUEA), Blessed Bakanja AMECEA College and the AMECEA Pastoral Institute (API). He said that it becomes very difficult in the position of the Secretary General when positions in these institutions fall vacant and the replacement, or rather, the recruitment process is staggering. This means that the health of those institutions is not assured.

In addressing the question of staffing the institutions of AMECEA, Fr. Lugonzo recommends that all Member Conferences, every Bishop who is a member of AMECEA, should feel that the AMECEA institutions belong to them.

“If this sense of ownership is inscribed in the heart of each and every Bishop, and every Member Episcopal Conference, it would be like when a parent hears that his or her child is sick: he or she runs to help and offer solutions. So whenever an institution needs staffing, all AMECEA Members should be generous enough and show commitment by offering personnel to the Association’s institutions, otherwise the Secretary General finds himself in a very awkward position,” Fr. Lugonzo explained.

He further recommended that AMECEA invests in the preparation of the leaders of its institutions so that they have the right experience, the right training and the right formation for them to perform.

“The more we have well prepared Secretaries General for the Secretariat, Vice Chancellors for Catholic University of Eastern Africa (CUEA), Blessed Bakanja AMECEA College, as well as the departmental heads, the more cannot go wrong as AMECEA, and the more the mandates of the Association would certainly be fulfilled.”

According to Fr. Lugonzo’s experience, another greatest challenge the Association faces is lack of mechanisms and clear structures on how to finance its institutions and departments.

“Our departments are heavily dependent on donor funding, which is not a healthy situation. Again, in solving this, let the Bishop Members of AMECEA take seriously their statutory contributory responsibilities, again is in the spirit of ownership of AMECEA.”

He thus recommends that the entire AMECEA family, and by extension all the partners who are friends of AMECEA, synergize and find practical ways to ensure the completion of the Mixed Development Project of AMECEA within the shortest time possible. For him, it is only through this project that the AMECEA Secretariat would become self-sustaining, thereby enhancing its capacity to fulfil its mandate.

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