What was Obote's Legacy? (Timothy Kalyegira)

What was the legacy of Milton Obote? (TIMOTHY KALYEGIRA)

Kampala

In death, as in life, Apollo Milton Obote continues to generate enormous debate. The full appraisal of his legacy is only just beginning, part of a process that has been underway since the mid 1960s.
His influence cuts across all political parties and across the four decades of Uganda’s post independence history.

Obote introduced to Ugandan politics the element of intrigue and succeeded brilliantly in it - the tendency in politics of working around people’s insecurities, playing one group against the next and in each instance emerging the winner at the two groups’ expenses, the understanding of human motives and how to make them work for you.



SAD: Mr Hamis Musisi, a trader on Channel Street told Daily Monitor that Obote should be granted a state funeral since he had his country at heart. Photo by Joseph Kiggundu

He knew appearances matter in politics and kept them up where that was required; but he also understood that much else in politics takes place out of public view and here is where the manipulation, the double-talk, the balancing of forces form the real politics.

With this cunning mind, he thoroughly out-maneuvered all the main actors of the late 1950s and early 1960s —- Kabaka Mutesa II of Buganda; the Buganda Protestant and Roman Catholic establishment.

He managed to get ultra-conservative Baganda royalists (the Kabaka Yekka party) to somehow throw their lot in with the Socialist- and Republican-leaning Uganda People’s Congress party.
One of Obote’s former personal secretaries, Anne Gihanga, who served him during the 1980s, affectionately said this of her former boss six months ago: “That head you see there? It is full of intrigue! But he is not the type of person to kill people.”

The 1966 Kabaka crisis

Because of this side to him that was “full of intrigue”, it became easy to pin blame on him over complicated matters such as the attack in May 1966 on the palace of the Kabaka, in what came to be known as the Kabaka Crisis.

All the evidence, when pieced together and unadulterated by revisionist history, indicates that the Mengo establishment had been courting this crisis since the national referendum on the “Lost Counties” in November 1964.

Any central government anywhere in the world would have done exactly what the Uganda government did, faced with that challenge on its authority.

The Clinton administration did this in 1993 when it sent FBI agents to storm a camp and disperse followers of the Branch Davidian doomsday cult led by David Koresh and the British government has done similarly for more than 30 years in northern Ireland in attempting to clamp down on the Irish Republican Army.

A Muganda chief hurled a stone at a Police 999 patrol car and fled to the Kabaka’s palace for safety.
When the central government started an investigation into the matter, the then Buganda Prime Minister Jehoash Mayanja-Nkangi, wrote a letter ordering the central government off Buganda soil. That was the background to the crisis.

This militant and provocative trait in the Buganda government has never been wholly acknowledged amid the labeling of Obote as a dictator.
Buganda has never acknowledged the fact that the central government did not, on an angry whim, send in the army to flush out the rebellious snipers from the Lubiri, but rather first sent in the civilian police.
The matter is far too complicated to simply be brought down to clichés and accusations against Obote and the then army commander, Colonel Idi Amin.

For example, on April 30, 1965, the Uganda People’s Congress’ secretary-general Grace Ibingira announced that the UPC’s central executive committee, national council, and parliamentary group had decided to pass legislation to ban the Kabaka Yekka party for the reason that the KY could not continue to use the name “Kabaka” while at the same time the Kabaka was the titular head of state of Uganda.

Fair enough. However, in the general narration of Uganda’s history, the impression is given that Obote took decisions alone and acted as a dictator. Nothing could be further from the truth, considering Obote’s penchant for consultation.

In this lies Uganda’s tragic history: because Uganda’s (even the so-called elite) generally do not read, research, or think through the truth about events and history they are told, it has been the country’s curse that clear falsehoods have been received as truth set in granite.

Amin’s appointment

Another error about Obote that has been deliberately perpetuated to this day by his critics and political opponents has been that he created a tribal army in the 1960s and failed or refused to make it professional.

A Sunday Monitor article on October 9, 2005 demonstrated that far from this being true, the only truly professional army Uganda has ever had was created —- not inherited from the colonial administration —- by Obote’s government beginning in 1964.

The other Ugandan professional army, although to a lesser degree than that of the first Obote government, was the army under President Idi Amin during the 1970s, a fact only the most informed, best educated, and most substantial Ugandans would believe.

Another decision attributed to Obote was the appointment of Amin as army commander in 1966. Obote himself later came to regard this as one of his major personal failures.

However, the truth bears out the correct action taken by the government. Officers in the 1960s’ army were appointed and promoted, not by the head of state, but by the Public Service Commission.

The British, Israelis, and Ugandan governments each separately saw Amin’s clear leadership qualities and the high regard with which his men held him and even though he was of limited formal education, all came to promote him to the head of whichever platoon, company, or army unit he was deployed in.

A report on Amin commissioned by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad during the 1976 Entebbe hostage crisis described Amin in these terms: “Amin is from a lesser northern tribe. He has never read a book in his life. The hijacking is the most important historic opportunity for him.... There is no doubt he has the gift of leadership; his control of his soldiers...comes largely from his tall stature, his great physical strength, his mastery of English, and his Fuhrerlike rhetoric.”

It is ironic that Obote and many of his supporters came to regret a decision such as the one on Amin that demonstrated, if anything, Obote’s ability to identify talent even if it was not so apparent.

Luweero massacres

All criticism of Obote on the basis of his 1960s politics pales into insignificance when compared to the most damaging allegations directed at him and his second administration between 1980 and 1985 —- the massacre of civilians in the Luweero Triange during the civil war against the NRA rebels led by former minister of state for defence, Yoweri Museveni.
The picture is complicated here and several questions can begin to raise debate on it.

Obote explained it this way in his 1990 paper Notes On The Concealment on Genocide in Uganda (www.upcparty.net, published under “President’s Corner”):

Obote argued: “It could never have been in the interest of the UPC government to spread death, terror, destruction and misery in Luwero. If the government had done so...the result would have been the spread of the Luweero insurgency into the rest of Buganda and into other regions.... Does anyone seriously think or believe that the Ugandans of Luweero were or are so different from the rest of Ugandans that they alone willingly, in their thousands, joined in the insurgency because the elections had allegedly been rigged! If they are or were so different...why is it that Museveni did not use the same “peaceful” means he claims to have used in Luwero to spread out elsewhere particularly if, as he claims the UNLA was committing gross atrocities in Luweero?”

The truth about what happened in Luweero will be debated for decades to come. However, following the autobiographical series by Obote published by The Monitor (now Daily Monitor) in April 2005, the matter is no longer as clearly cut in black and white as it once was.

During the 1990s, as the NRA’s former commanders started becoming complacent, they began publicly admitting to an orchestrating hand in the atrocities of the 1980s that have generally been blamed on Obote and his regime.
One such was Colonel Pecos Kutesa, quoted by Obote on April 15, 2005.

Obote’s words

Here are Obote’s words: “According to Pecos Kutesa’s own testimony on Capital Radio [broadcast on January 15, 1995], Konge roadblock was the most notorious in harassing civilians, robbing them of their money and killing some. Kutesa says reports reached army headquarters of his harassment of the civilians and Oyite Ojok summoned him to Kampala for disciplinary action. He ran to the bush.

Kutesa’s story on Capital Radio has many lessons, mainly because he gave it as personal congratulations for a job well done.... Museveni has for the last twenty three years fought different enemies in different regions of Uganda: Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA) in Luweero, Uganda People’s Democratic Army (UPDA) in the north, West Nile Bank Front in West Nile, Uganda People’s Army (UPA) of Peter Otai in Teso, Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) in western Uganda, and the (Lord’s Resistance Army) LRA.

In all these wars, the adversaries are different, the theatre of war different, the periods different. There are only two elements that are constant: Museveni on the one hand and massive atrocities against civilians on the other.”

From Obote’s testimony and Kutesa’s admission that he and other NRA officers who have since publicly admitted to these NRA “tricks” of committing atrocities against civilians in order to have them blamed on the government, a whole new dimension to that 1980s tragedy is opened.

While he admitted that many of the atrocities in Luweero were committed by unruly UNLA soldiers, Obote said the mastermind was Museveni. History will perhaps one day give the verdict.

Achievements

The first was the attainment of independence and the receipt of the instruments of state by Obote as Prime Minister on October 9, 1962.

Obote’s principal legacy to Uganda was his continuation of the sense of public order and public service laid out by the colonial government.
Most of today’s elite in Uganda’s government, business, education, and military establishment had their education in schools strengthened by the Obote governments and received medical care in any one of the 22 hospitals built by the 1960s Uganda government.

He greatly added to the lustre of Uganda and gave the country a position of prestige among the nations.