Former Voice of America journalist, Shaka Ssali has died at the age of 71.
Whereas details about Shaka’s death are still scanty, it is said he died from the US where he has been living.
Ssali hosted the popular weekly show Straight talk Africa and doubled as the editor-in-chief of the VOA television and radio show before retiring in 2021 after over 20 years of service.
Shaka, who hailed from Kabale district in Southern Western Uganda, hosted guests on the show to discuss topics of interest to Africans and the African diaspora including politics, good governance, rule of law, economic development, press freedom, health, social issues and conflict resolution.
He often said that he dropped out of secondary school in the 1960s and ended up in the Uganda Army as a paratrooper, before fleeing Idi Amin’s regime in 1976.
That is how he ended up in the USA where he arrived as a half-baked former lieutenant in the Uganda Army of the President Obote I and early Idi Amin days.
He had only his Primary Leaving Certificate and the Junior Leaving Certificate. He had joined Kigezi College for his secondary education but was expelled when he was in Senior Two. He then went to Kololo Secondary School where he dropped out in Senior Three to join the Uganda Army in 1968 aged 16.
He went through cadet training and was commissioned as a lieutenant. But in 1974 his name was linked to a failed coup attempt against Idi Amin and he fled to Kenya.
He returned to Uganda and went into what he jokingly refers to as “international business” but was actually smuggling ivory. In 1976 he arrived in the U.S.
“I often say that information is the oxygen of democracy. When I left my country in 1976, I left behind a corrupt regime. Information was manipulated, human rights were abused, justice did not exist,” he once wrote in a blog for the Young Africans Leadership Initiative (YALI) website.
“Fast forward a few decades later and I find myself in a position to ask tough questions of people who play a leading role in shaping the future of the African continent. But I also open the microphone to concerned African citizens who also want to ask questions and get answers that affect their lives directly.”
In the US, Ssali launched the weekly `Straight Talk Africa’ in August 2000 as the VOA’s first TV offering on the continent.
He was 48-years old at the time and that was just eight years after he joined the VOA team in 1992.
Shaka held a doctorate in cross-cultural communication and history from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and is a former Ford Foundation Fellow and has also received a number of awards including a United Nations Peacekeeping Special Achievement Award in International Journalism and VOA’s Best Journalist Award.