The winds of change at Budo as Godfrey Kasamba takes the helm

For the first time in more than a decade, the headship of King’s College Budo has gone to one of its own. Godfrey Kasamba, a Budo man through and through, takes the helm of the school on the Hill with a brief he has framed in a single word: continuity.

A quiet succession on the Hill

There was no outside search, no fanfare, and no break with the past. The board reached for the candidate who already knew where every key on the estate hangs, and who has spent the better part of his career inside its gates.

Continuity, not rupture, is the message. The traditions stay; the changes Kasamba wants are administrative, faster fee reconciliation, a tighter pastoral system, and better data on where leavers actually go.

Rise through the ranks

Kasamba’s story is the unglamorous kind that schools like Budo are built on: a steady climb, one post at a time, over the better part of twenty-five years.

From old boy to the classroom

He arrived first as a pupil, sat his own UACE on the Hill, and came back a few years later as a physics teacher. Colleagues from that period remember a methodical, unflashy presence who marked scripts on time and stayed behind for the pupils who did not.

Head of department, then deputy

The physics department came next, then the sciences as a whole, and eventually the deputy headship, the office where Budo’s timetables, discipline and day-to-day crises are actually managed. By the time the headship fell vacant, there was little about running the school he had not already done in someone else’s name.

I am not here to remake Budo. I am here to run it well, and to leave it stronger than I found it.

What he wants to change

The agenda is deliberately modest. Fee reconciliation that closes in days rather than weeks. A pastoral system that flags a struggling pupil before a parent has to. And a destinations register that finally tracks where leavers go, to which universities, on which UACE results, and into which careers.

The quiet skills he brings

Some of what makes Kasamba effective is easy to overlook, but tells in the day to day:

• Institutional memory: two decades inside King’s College Budo mean he knows which traditions are load-bearing and which are merely old.
• Pastoral instinct: colleagues say he reads a struggling pupil early, the kind of attention a boarding school lives or dies by.
• Data discipline: he wants every leaver tracked to their UACE result and beyond, so the school argues from evidence rather than anecdote.

Is this the headship Budo needs for the decade ahead? The case of St Joseph’s SS Naggalama shows how patient, unflashy leadership compounds over time. Watch this space.

The first real test

The S6 cohort sitting UACE this year is the first scoreboard. Budo’s results rarely swing, but a new head is always read through the next league table, the way central Uganda read the rise of St Joseph’s SS Naggalama through a decade of patient gains.

What it means for parents

For families weighing the Hill, the appointment reads as reassurance rather than gamble. The man in charge knows the place from the inside, and his stated priorities, money, pastoral care and honest data, are precisely the ones parents tend to ask about first.