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The lives and times of Uganda’s presidents

Friday October 05 2012
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Uganda has had six more presidents than Kenya; five more than Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo respectively; and three more than Rwanda.

Over the past 50 years, Uganda has made phenomenal progress in transforming its governance, but two-thirds of its 34 million population have not known any president other than Yoweri Kaguta Museveni who, having overseen the lifting of presidential term limits, is set to rule at least until 2016.

At 26 years, his stay in power is longer than all his eight predecessors’ combined.

They are, in descending order, Tito Okello Lutwa, Paulo Muwanga, Godfrey Lukongwa Binaisa, Yusuf Kironde Lule, Idi Amin Dada, Apollo Milton Obote, Edward Mutesa II and Benedicto Kiwanuka.

None of these men left power peacefully.

Uganda has had six more presidents than Kenya; five more than Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo respectively; and three more than Rwanda.

The private lives and political exploits of these men who, with exception of Museveni, are all dead, is the subject of Fountain Publishers’ newly published, and evidently ambitious, paperback Uganda’s Presidents: An Illustrated Biography.

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Uganda's first president. Illustration/JOHN NYAGAH

Respect for Museveni clearly restricts what Frederick Guweddeko and Timothy Kalyegira, the biography’s researchers, can say about him.

The duo have a reputation as rigorous researchers who pay a lot of attention to detail, but still like to theorise and to push the envelopes.

Thus Museveni’s story ends up on a mere 39 pages despite his quarter-century rule. Yet Binaisa’s, for example, who ruled for just 10 months, ends up on twice as many pages.

That’s why they use phrases like “Museveni is known to have only one wife” when, with other presidents, they are dead-on certain.

Okello, for example, was a polygamous man; Muwanga had one wife and 13 children; Binaisa married thrice, including being the first Ugandan to have the now commonplace European style wedding where the bride dresses in white, has a matron, bridesmaids, etc. 

While Fountain is obviously hoping to cash in on the Golden Jubilee fever, the significance of the book is in the fact that these men who have come from all the country’s regions but the east have by their actions and inactions taken Uganda where it finds itself today.

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Uganda's second president. Illustration/JOHN NYAGAH

Opposition pressure group For God and My Country claims Uganda has endured 50 years of suffering. As such, on October 1, they launched week-long Walk to Freedom marches, which they believe will begin the journey to reverse the country’s misfortunes.

4GC morphed out of Activists for Change, which the government outlawed because of the Walk to Work protests last year. Guweddeko and Kalyegira have credited them with providing the biggest civil challenge yet to Museveni’s grip on power to date.

More sober analyses of Uganda, however, recognise that while the country has made great strides since 1962, it is not where it should be today.

These analyses compare Uganda with countries like South Korea, which had a similar GDP to Uganda’s in the early 1960s but today counts among its aid givers.  

According to Charles Odoobo Bichachi, the biography’s co-editor, Fountain’s decision to issue all the stories in a single volume “was to give highlights of Uganda’s story of 50 years told through the leaders. So in one way this is really a continuous story and the various leaders are mere chapters in the country’s history.”

The book relies heavily on impressive photos that reveal not only the fashion sense and style of the day but also the poise, gait, and demeanour of these men that perhaps no words could have transmitted.

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Uganda's third president. Illustration/JOHN NYAGAH

According to Bichachi, Uganda’s Presidents “is heavily illustrated because it sought to tell the story through images as well to capture not just the leaders but the people around them, and events of their time.”

The decision to have a single volume, however, must have also been informed by financial realities.

Whereas each of the presidents’ stories can stand on its own, some would undoubtedly be hard to market given the generally poor culture of reading, let alone buying books, in Uganda.

As such, it makes commercial sense to let those that cannot sell on their own ride on the back of those who can.

Indeed, some of these presidents like Obote, Amin and Museveni have had a lot written about them but reading about them as part of one continuous story reveals at once that Uganda has never had the fundamental change in leadership that Museveni famously proclaimed he was ushering into the country when he was first sworn in as president.

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Uganda's fourth president. Illustration/JOHN NYAGAH

What has really obtained in Uganda in the past 50 years is what Museveni was trying to distinguish himself from in his 1986 inaugural speech — a mere change of guard.

“The distinction between a ruling government or party and the state has not yet been made 26 years since Museveni rose to power. The state security, legal and political machinery continue to serve as their first priority the president and his government, and not the citizenry,” Guweddeko and Kalyegira conclude of Museveni’s legacy.

As it were, rather than the country making a clean break with the past with every new government it got, state power has continually revolved among the same coterie of people and served exactly the same interests.

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Uganda's fifth president. Illustration/JOHN NYAGAH

The shifts from one man to another have always been precipitated by personal ambitions, a perceived sense of betrayal but most importantly by whoever got both his calculations and the timing of shifts right.

These changes in guard were pursued mostly through isolation, high level scheming and temporary alliances.

When, for example, Kiwanuka became chief minister in July 1961, his main political opponent turned out to be Buganda’s King Edward Mutesa II, with whom he had fraternised.

Mutesa ganged up with Obote through the UPC-KY alliance and Kiwanuka was speedily overthrown.

When Obote’s political star was threatened by allegations that he had corruptly benefited from Uganda’s involvement in the Congo war, where gold was exchanged for arms, Guweddeko and Kalyegira say, he engineered a military coup, which culminated in the attack on King Mutesa’s palace, the dissolution of monarchies and total chaos.

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Uganda's sixth president. Illustration/JOHN NYAGAH

Obote’s right hand men were Binaisa, his attorney-general, tasked to clean up the legal mess, and Amin, his army commander, in charge of the military side.

Amin’s mother, a renowned herbalist, had incidentally helped Mutesa’s mother to conceive the future king, president and Obote’s eventual opponent.

Amin would go on to win Buganda’s adoration when he returned Mutesa’s body from exile and accorded it a state burial.

“Binaisa was personally responsible for turning the February 22, 1966 military coup into a constitutional coup. With Kofi Crabbe, a Ghanaian, and Nkambo Mugerwa, the solicitor-general, Binaisa wrote a new 1966 Constitution within one night,” Guweddeko and Kalyegira write.

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Uganda's seventh president. Illustration/JOHN NYAGAH

It is this document that would famously come to be known as the “pigeonhole” constitution since MPs found it in their mail boxes and were coerced to accept it without so much as a day of discussion.

The scheming centred around taking Obote down in 1971, and threw up Amin. Eight years later the same revolving door forced Amin out even as Lule came in for 68 days, then Binaisa for 10 months, Muwanga for nearly a year and Okello Lutwa for just six months.

In her 2011 memoirs, My Life’s Journey, Janet, President Museveni’s wife, says Okello and his wife were warm to the Musevenis, often watching over their children. Jennifer, Okello’s wife, treated Janet as a daughter.

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Uganda's eighth president. Illustration/JOHN NYAGAH

This, however, didn’t stop Museveni from leading Okello on with peace negotiations he never really believed in, in order to buy time to eventually defeat him militarily.

Interestingly, Okello Oryem, Okello’s son, holds a ministerial position in Museveni’s government as does Janet.

The point in all this is really simple: To read Uganda’s Presidents is to understand, albeit more clearly, that there has never been a clear divergence in ideology or vision among the people who time and chance have been privileged to lead Uganda.

Nor has anyone ever really espoused a programme of, say, production upon which other countries have transformed their standing in the world.

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Uganda's ninth president. Illustration/JOHN NYAGAH

According to its cover notes, Uganda’s Presidents aims to present the nine men in their totality — not just as political actors but as men like all others with families, quirks, dreams and fears — a task at which they are only marginally successful.

This isn’t for lack of effort, though. Just as the evil that people do outlives them, the political ambitions of Uganda’s nine men have outlived them and cast a shadow over the country’s history.

Those charged with Uganda’s education should not fail to make it required reading a secondary level, because any nation that has no accurate sense of its history can hardly articulate its future.

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