Gabula: The ex-convict who founded formal education in Luzira prison

On October 17, 2013, Evans Africa Gabula finally left Luzira Maximum Security Prison after nearly 27 years of incarceration. The ex-death row prisoner had not only regained his long lost freedom, but also left a great legacy which had already leaped over that giant, heavily guarded prison gate to touch thousands of inmates’ lives across the country.
As a teenager battling treason charges, Gabula, now 47, founded formal education in Luzira Prison in 1988, at a time “when even possessing a pen outside referral offices was illegal.” Now, having survived administrative and logistical obstacles, the inmates’ school project is a major rehabilitation tool everyone proudly associates with.

Courting trouble
Before his ordeal, Gabula was an ambitious student at Busoga College-Mwiri. In 1984, then in Senior Five, his essay: “Under Development In Africa: a Case Of False Economics,” captured BBC’s attention. He presented it at the Bush House in London, winning £300, among other gifts.
At the All-Africa Universities Summit at Lake Victoria Hotel in Entebbe, in 1985, Gabula propagated his ideology of a unified Africa as the only solution to Africa’s underdevelopment.
He and other delegates conceived the idea of forming the States Union of Africa with the cardinal purpose of sensitising the common man on the need for a unified Africa and an African solution to African problems.
Gabula took this socio-economic gospel to several universities in Africa and USA. At Stratford University in Virginia in 1986, the Black Caucus raised $5m to the cause.
The States Union castigated the “borrowed ideologies” of capitalism and communism and preached Ubuntuism.
“We believed in economic growth based on massive investment in research, agriculture, mining, construction and manufacturing,” Gabula explains. They planned to establish research centres in different member states.
From USA, Gabula brought the $5m in form of traveller’s cheques. By then, foreign currency was restricted in Uganda. On the advice of the central bank governor, Gabula drafted a proposal on how to invest the money.
The governor approved it and referred him to the Internal Security Organisation. Lieutenant Godfrey Kamukama was “excited” by the project but Gabula later learnt he had kissed a poisoned chalice. This premiered jail series, conviction and eventually, a death sentence.

The arrest
On January 3, 1987, Lt Kamukama arrested Gabula with cheques worth $1.27m, for illegal possession of controlled currency.
“When he couldn’t sustain the charge, he accused me of compromising security and treason that I had wanted to bribe him so that I could access state secrets,” Gabula narrates his ordeal.
Thrice, court acquitted Gabula; but Kamukama, who only produced $10,000 as exhibit, rearrested him on all occasions. Even when the military court at Lubiri Barracks dismissed the case in 1987, Lt Kamukama rearrested Gabula, and added him to a file of 20 treason suspects in Jinja.
Under grave torture at Gaddafi Barracks, Jinja, Gabula was coerced to confess having participated in rebel activities with 22 others—whom he had actually seen for the first time in prison. “What do you do when a 3kgs load is suspended on your testicles; you are whipped every day; denied food and see others die of the same torture? I had to confess to survive,” Gabula explains.
Strangely, Gabula was the only one convicted of treason and sentenced to death in 1993. After a futile appeal, he was to suffer harrowing days and nights on death row, awaiting execution.

Founding the school
Amid protracted legal battles Gabula needed something to distract him.
On his arrest, he was a beginner at Makerere University, but he had much to offer to inmates at Luzira. “About 98 per cent of the inmates were illiterate, so I had to help them,” Gabula says.
In 1988, he pioneered the adult literacy programme, teaching inmates at primary level.
“We began from scratch; at a time when possessing a mere pen outside referral offices was illegal,” Gabula recalls. But he mostly attributes the success of the school project to one visionary cadet officer Wilson Magomu.
“Magomu was the architect of the project; he augmented all my efforts,” Gabula says. “He solicited for equipment like syllabus, text books, pencils, pens from donors even before I knew. He supported education as the only measurable rehabilitation tool.”

Progress
When Life reached Magomu, the Kampala Extra Regional Prisons Commander, was noncommittal but he acknowledged Gabula’s role. At first Gabula taught alone, until 1993 when Lt Oliver Odweyo (RIP), Edward Mpagi, Johnson Kamya, Peter Masete and one Deo, joined him.
The school had taken root but Gabula’s conviction and death sentence in 1993 halted its progress. “Everything turned upside down; I suspended education until late ’94. There was a dead mood, everyone wondered why I was convicted,” Gabula recounts in a sad tone. “Everything became meaningless; after all, I was going to die.”
With hope melting like frost in the morning ray, Gabula needed serious persuasion by Magomu to resume his services. Even when he was supposed to be locked up in the Condemned Section after conviction, Magomu allowed him to teach other inmates in the Main Boma.
Willis Okello, an assistant in the principal’s office at Makerere University Business School (MUBS), was condemned in 1995.
“I had stopped in S5 before I was arrested, so I taught inmates from P7 to S.4,” Okello explains. “We improvised in a way that those who completed Senior Six would teach others.”
Despite all efforts, the school, which had grown to Advanced Level, was not formalised by ministry of education and sports until 2000. Inmates started sitting exams at all levels, with some competing with their counterparts in outside schools.
Gabula was the founding headmaster for all sections. He was also a vice chairman of university coordination committee leading to the introduction of university education in 2009. MUBS and Uganda Christian University, Mukono offered scholarship programmes to inmates. Makerere University donated computers.
The Catholic Church sponsored Gabula’s degree in Philosophy, with the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, through correspondence. He attained two more degrees in Commerce and in Law from London University.
MUBS established a branch in Luzira prison with inmates pursuing courses in law, entrepreneurship and small business management, among others. The programme spread to the women’s section and other prisons across the country as the Gabula legacy grew.
Death looming
Nine days after conviction in 1993, an execution welcomed Gabula into the Condemned Section—a quick reminder that the hangman’s noose was hovering inches above his head.
There is no prior notice ahead of an execution and any slight change in the normal routine triggered unrest and premonition among death row inmates.
“Cheap wood (amakooko) was brought to make coffins,” Gabula narrates. “Warders came to our cells, locked us in and started reading out names of those going to the gallows. They dragged them to the no-return chambers amid weeping, wailing and kicking. There, they handcuffed them, shackled their legs with iron and dressed them in black clothes.
Such is the horror that if a warder stopped outside a cell door, the prisoners inside would end up soiling themselves. You kept praying your name is not read out.
At the death chambers, above our cells, warders kept reminding them: “so and so, you are going to die in the coming so hours, for killing so and so.”
Our colleagues kept calling out to us and singing hymns to inform us of their fate; some pleading innocence, some admitting guilt. Others insisted that while they committed offences, their co-accused were innocent. The grisly night of executions were filled with loud sounds like a sudden explosion, as the trap doors of the gallows opened and corpses dropped. Inside the death chambers, there is nothing like surviving. Sledge hammers, pangas were used to kill prisoners who had not died by hanging. Back in the cells was a dead silence and some inmates attempted suicide to escape the hangman’s brutality.”

Escaping the gallows
After a failed appeal in 1995, Gabula petitioned the Committee on the Prerogative of Mercy seeking the Presidential pardon. He says that though Justice Cosmas Kato had sentenced him to death, he surprisingly wrote a positive report requesting the Committee to give him a second chance. Somehow, he survived the ’96 and ’99 executions.
Come 2003, Foundation for Human Rights Initiative through Suzan Kigula and 417 others challenged the constitutionality of the death penalty.
As a result, the Constitutional Court annulled the mandatory death penalty.
In 2009, the Supreme Court ruled that death row prisoners who had not been executed three years after exhausting the appellate process should have their sentences commuted to life imprisonment—defined as 20 years without remission by the Prisons Act.
Consequently, in 2010, Gabula left the death row section to the Boma—where lifers stay. He was finally freed on October 17, 2013 after 20 years since conviction for a crime he vehemently denies.

Against the death penalty
Gabula strongly opposes the death penalty. He argues that all the executions he witnessed (1993, 1996 and 1999) claimed many innocent prisoners. Others were killed for crimes they committed when they were juveniles—which is against the law. He notes, one Musisi who was charged with murder yet he raised an alarm after knocking the dead body as he rode a bicycle at night. Even when the real murderers were arrested later and reiterated Musisi’s innocence, the poor boy was still executed.
Gabula also decries the death row syndrome which kills more condemned prisoners than executions. “Imagine waking up when two of your cellmates are dead,” Gabula says.
Of the 34 who were sentenced alongside him in 1993, only one was released; one executed in 1996 but by 2000, the rest had died. He thus insists “any sentence beyond 14 years is a virtual death sentence.”
“We must be cognizant of the formative influences of our society on offenders; most are products of broken families; others, street children who were never shown love. We should use people such as chaplains who reform prisoners via the scripture and education,” he advises.
“And imprisonment should aim at rehabilitating and reintegrating prisoners into society rather than eliminating them. Otherwise, corrective programmes are meaningless if a prisoner is going to be killed, after all.”
Gabula also suggests the need for a parole board comprising a doctor, cleric, psychologist, and a prison officer to certify a reformed prisoner before release.

Picking up the pieces
His father died when Gabula was just two months old but he had bequeathed to them enough property to cater for them. However, his mother Naome Nabirye lost all the property in the desperate pursuit of her only child’s freedom.
Lawyers, who had represented Gabula only once, took advantage of Nabirye’s illiteracy and colluded with the area chairman to sell off her land without her consent. She ended up on the streets, until Pr Joseph Siira of the Born Again Pentecostal Chaplaincy Mission (BAPCM) rescued her.
While Gabula was earning a decent pay as headmaster of Musanya Secondary School, in Kamuli, he was arrested again on December 26, 2014. His tormentor Lt Kamukama died but his brother arrested Gabula for “defaming” his brother. He was detained in a safe house until February 15, 2015.
“Now nobody wants to employ me,” Gabula says.
“They fear I could be arrested again.”
To avoid more such arrests, he sued Kamukama’s brother for wrongful detention and torture. Gabula and his mother survive on handouts from BAPCM, where he volunteers.
As Gabula tries to make up for the lost time, he counts on hope: hope to earn a better living; to reconstruct his mother’s life and to revive the States Union—the organisation which overturned his life.