By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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April 11 will be the 44th anniversary of the ouster of Ugandan dictator Field Marshal Idi Amin by a combined force of the Tanzania army and Ugandan rebel groups.

Decades later, that event continued to define East Africa in significant ways. In fact, together with the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, which also started in the same month, April 7, 1994, they top the list of history-remaking events of the region.

However, in the case of the Amin ouster, many don't always see its link to present realities.

Feud with Nyerere

Amin, who had a long-running feud with President Julius Nyerere, ordered his troops to attack Tanzania in early October 1978. The Ugandan army took and occupied Tanzania's Kagera Salient. In a post-independence Africa, where the sanctity of colonial borders was supreme, it was a shocker, even for someone like Amin, who often came across as unhinged.

Tanzania was caught flat-footed and took a while to put together the counter-attack, which it did as the year ended. As it pushed Amin's forces and entered Uganda, it scrambled to cobble together a front of the anti-Amin dissident groups scattered around the world so that its campaign would have "local content" and political legitimacy with the people who might have seen the Tanzania People's Defence Forces (TPDF) as a pure foreign invasion force.

By April 11, 1979, Kampala had fallen, and the march continued eastwards and northwards, reaching the border with Sudan. One of the most covered-up massacres in East Africa happened during the war; Ugandan Nubians were slaughtered, their towns or neighbourhoods razed, and many fled to Sudan, but mainly to Kenya.

Dealt a blow

The idea that an African country couldn't militarily invade another (as Amin's Uganda did Tanzania) or couldn't strike back in retaliation and install a rebel government (as Nyerere's Tanzania did to Amin's Uganda) was dealt a blow.

When Rwanda avenging attacks by former genocidal forces on its territory from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, with others supported anti-Mobutu Sese Seko rebels to seize power in 1997, we had seen it all before.

When Uganda sent its army into southern Sudan to support the Sudan People's Liberation Army in its war against a repressive Khartoum – one of a series of actions that eventually led to South Sudan's independence – it was all too familiar.

Changed beyond recognition

The Uganda from which Tanzania helped depose Amin 44 years ago has changed beyond recognition. It has a population almost four times larger, and its economy is nearly 20 times bigger.

But there is one thing that will look very familiar from that period – the security services still rule the roost, and their violent episodal crackdowns on real and imaginary regime opponents are straight out of the Amin playbook.

One outcome of Tanzania's Uganda campaign that is the least studied (and is embarrassing) has been the most enduring. The TPDF came to Uganda at a time of austere socialism/Ujamaa back home. Luxury and ostentation were frowned upon. Though Uganda's economy was in dire straits, Amin's lieutenants lived like kings.

Two of the most popular cars with Amin's top men were the sporty Honda Accord and Nissan's rally sensation Datsun 280Z. The victorious TPDF seized many of them from Amin's henchmen as war booty. They also "charged" top-end televisions and stereos that weren't commonplace in Tanzania.

Flashy cars and electronics

As the soldiers returned home, these flashy cars and electronics began to pop up all over Tanzanian towns. There were several reports in the foreign press about how a frugal Nyerere had lost the balance of power to his victorious army, who were celebrated as heroes at home, and was powerless to stop them from bringing home and flaunting their shiny trophies of war.

Tanzanian tastes for the good things in life, forbidden under Ujamaa, were aroused. They could not unsee the glitzy war booty from Uganda. They became corrupted by the desire for capitalist things.

Meanwhile, the cost of the war took a toll on the Tanzanian economy, which in turn discredited Nyerere's socialist model further. There is a view among Tanzanian and Ugandan scholars and political analysts that the inevitability of Nyerere's retirement as president formed in the immediate aftermath of the Uganda war – as did the ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi's eventual adoption of a limited free market (at the start) economy. That the forsaking of socialism came from the spectacle of the hedonistic consumption of the Amin elite that a conquering Tanzania encountered and took home with it.

Crisis for nationalists

Inside Uganda, there was a crisis for nationalists that had presented itself first dramatically in July 1976 by the audacious Israeli raid on Entebbe Airport to rescue hostages. As proud nationalists, they were against foreign involvement in national affairs. But they also hated Amin passionately, and they wanted him gone. Should they reject Tanzania's role in getting rid of him because it was a foreign force? They went through many contortions to justify it, although a small hardline nationalist tendency firmly rejected Tanzania's involvement.

Tanzania, then, won the shooting war in 1979 and pulled off Africa's first successful regime change by another African country. However, it might have ultimately lost the ideological war.

The Tanzanians living the joys of capitalism of today have Amin partly to thank for it. I wonder if Nyerere would have prosecuted the war all the way to Kampala if he had known that that was how victory would look in the end.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the "Wall of Great Africans". Twitter@cobbo3