House debate to implicate Obote – as it happened

On February 4, 1966, a motion was tabled by Daudi Ochieng in Parliament implicating ministers Felix Onama, Adoko Nekyon and prime minister Milton Obote as accomplices in the looting of gold, ivory and coffee from Congo.
By the time the motion was tabled, there had been a significant crossing of the floor, mainly from Democratic Party (DP) and Kabaka Yekka (KY) members to join Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC).

The remaining small group of KY, headed by Daudi Ochieng, was hostile to Obote and was banking on the support of DP, the official Opposition in the House. The KY and DP group was banking on the internal opposition within Obote’s party. UPC, as a party in power, officially controlled 74 of the 91 members in the House.
But of those, there were some whose allegiance was with Grace Ibingira, a less dominant figure in UPC. But when it came to voting, the whole House voted as a block, save for John Kakonge.

According to the National Debate volume 58, the tempo of the debate was not reflected in the voting. There were 34 laughter interruptions, 14 points of information, 16 applauding, 28 interjections, 11 member’s points of order and seven points of order from speaker Narendra Patel.

The easy atmosphere in the House was exemplified when a member asked whether it was in order for Amos Sempa not to have anything to say on such an important issue.

The split in Cabinet was displayed by the behaviour of the front bench during the debate. Cabinet occupied the front bench in the House and most of the points or orders from speaker Patel were directed to the front bench.
At one point when the mover of the motion seemed to suggest that the reaction of the members had gone beyond the original intention of having Col Idi Amin suspended because of his other accusation of a planned coup against the

Constitution, Grace Ibingira responded: “I would say while accepting this [motion] as it stands, an allegation has been made by the honourable mover which I think is of serious magnitude. That is the allegation, not about gold, etc – we have heard those and we are tired of them – but of some deliberate design to oust a constitutional government or the overthrow of the Constitution and I do not know what view to take on this.”
As earlier stated, it was one person who voted against the motion, but during the debate the impression was that not all of them were for the motion. According to the National Assembly debate volume 58 page 1,000 Sam Odaka asked the mover of the motion to substantiate his allegations since he was refereeing to unnamed people as his sources of information.

In the absence of the prime minister, the responsibility of defending the government fell on Cuthbert Obwangor. In his submission as the acting Leader of Government Business in Parliament and chairman of Cabinet, he said: “We as a government, despite the serious allegations or statements made by the honourable mover, wish to submit this matter to an inquiry to establish the truth, if any, because we are not small men. If we will find that there is no truth, it is he who is going to lose. Now it does not mean that government accepts these allegations, because these have got to be established.”

Obwangor went on to say: “Let us not, therefore, be misunderstood that because the government has accepted this motion, ipso facto there is corruption; or that the colonel in question and all these people whose names have been mentioned are by that very fact proved to have had anything to do with the allegations mentioned by our friend, far from it.”

The rallying conclusion was to have the named people in the allegation investigated and the entire House agreed on having a judicial commission of inquiry into the saga. Despite the call for the commission, there were those who voted for the motion but had question marks on the credibility of the motion mover.
Dr Emmanuel Lumu, then minister of Health who was in the Ibingira camp, told parliamentarians of his experience when the same Daudi Ochieng made corruption allegations against him only to find that the allegations had no evidence and the claims were political malice.

Obwangor’s belief that the government was innocent of any wrong doing was also echoed by Kakyama Mayanja who spoke in defence of the three Cabinet members, though he was short of supporting Amin’s innocence.
“When that is done, I know the prime minister will be found to be innocent. I know my friend the honourable minister of State for Defence will be found to be innocent and so is the minister of Planning and Community Development,” Mayanja said.

Before the vote was taken, the only anti-motion voter Kakonge said, “…the acceptance of the motion by the government as well as the division in the Cabinet was clear in the course of the debate as being rather odd and part of a carefully worked out strategy.”

Like him, there were those who didn’t see merit in the motion, but voted anyway. These included those implicated such as Onama, then minister of state for Defence. Despite accepting the motion on the floor of Parliament, Onama dared Ochieng to repeat the same allegations outside the chambers where he had no parliamentary immunity.
Other Obote loyalist in the House such as Sam Odaka, Onama, Abbas Balinda from Ankole, Martin Arom from Lango and Kamaswa from Bugisu, all voted in favour of the motion, but stated how they never believed in the allegations made by Ochieng.
Obote’s supporters who voted for the motion knew that the allegations were false but wanted the three ministers to be absolved by the commission of inquiry. They knew the facts behind the motion as had been explained during a Cabinet meeting.

The judicial commission
The government agreed to the formation of a judicial commission of inquiry into the allegations. Under Legal Notice Number One, minister of Internal Affairs Basil Bataringaya on February 27, 1966, announced the formation of the commission. It was made up of top legal brains which had no Ugandan on it.
The three-man commission was headed by Justice Sir Clement N. de L’Estang, who was then vice president of the Eastern Africa Court of Appeal. Others were Justice Henry E. Miller, judge of the High Court of Kenya, and Justice Augustine Said, a judge of the Republic of Tanzania.

Hurdles
One of the hurdles the commission faced was the unavailability of witnesses from Congo. But this did not come as a surprise since the rebel leaders did not show up at an earlier internal probe and the rebel outfit had split. General Olenga had formed another faction while Christophe Gbenye, Thomas Kanza and others were in another faction.
Among the obvious witnesses who was supposed to appear before the commission was the motion mover himself. But when the commission started its work, Ochieng left the country for London for eye treatment. He never volunteered to appear before the committee until the commission issued summons.

According to the commission’s 700-page report, Ochieng told the commission that: “Many people had come to his house to report these allegations, but he really did not know them and could not identify them on sight.”
According to Mkombe Mpambara’s The Gold Allegations, “Ochieng was in the embarrassing position of telling it [the commission] that he had no firm, indisputable evidence to support his charges. The Amin bank account was the only tangible evidence he could produce.”
However, from the commission’s report, it was clear that Amin had indeed acquired the gold from the Congolese rebels. And in their submission to the commission, the rebels did not complain of fraud on Amin’s side.
“He gave us supplies according to the gold we gave him,” a witness was reported to have said on pages 334-356 of the report, adding that “he was commissioned to go to Europe to find buyers for gold which was in Amin’s possession.”
In its report, the commission went on to say on pages 402-438 that, “We are satisfied that he [the witness] was indeed approached to find a buyer for gold, that he saw in Colonel Amin’s possession a bar of unrefined gold estimated to weight about 20lb, that he was told by Colonel Amin that it was one of 11 similar bars he [Amin] had.”
In its concluding remarks, the commission stated that: “We have no doubt that the gold in Colonel Amin’s possession came from the Congo, and we strongly suspect that he obtained that gold from the Congolese revolutionaries.”
With this, the commission agreed with people like Obwangor, Mayanja and the rest who did not believe the claims. Though in his allegations Ochieng had talked of ivory and coffee being looted, they were not traced to the people named in the allegation.

A UPC/KY scheme to replace Obote
The motion was a means of trying to use Parliament to relieve Obote of his duties as prime minister.
By going through Parliament, according to Prof Akiiki Mujaju, “Politicians, unsure about their parliamentary strength, could damage the reputation of their opponents for purposes of public consumption.”
“In fact, this was part of a two-pronged strategy. Within the Uganda army an attempt was being made to recruit support for a coup, and the Opposition faction was being led by the army commander himself, Brigadier [Shaban] Opolot. Indeed, Parliament had been told that what Ochieng and Opolot wanted was to get rid of Amin from the army because it appeared he was the obstacle to their coup.”

In the commission’s final report, ministers opposed to Obote were quoted to have said, “Opolot was directly involved in attempts to discipline Amin and that there was a profound antagonism between him and Amin.”
Five ministers – George Magezi, Emmanuel Lumu, Baraki Kirya, Matthias Ngobi and Grace Ibingira – would later be arrested. Three of them, Lumu, Ibingira and Kirya, had expressed grave concern during their speeches in Parliament about that aspect of Ochieng’s allegations which concerned a plot to overthrow the Constitution and government.
According to Mujaju, the group that wanted Obote out of office resorted to intrigue rather than direct vote of no confidence because they did not have the numbers to see the vote through.
“This method of intrigue and oblique criticism was used because the combined KY-Ibingira Opposition could not gather enough support in an open procedural political battle. On May 27, 1965, the anti-Obote group had tested their parliamentary strength and had decided that Obote could not be voted out of office by a motion of no confidence,” Mujaju says.
“Had this not been the case, the plan had been that Obote’s opponents would have moved a motion of no confidence. Support had to be courted in the army; [Kabaka Edward] Muteesa II had to be recruited, although in my view, he remained marginal in Ibingira’s long-term scheme of things and might have been disposed of after victory. Obote’s forces did not lose sight of this fact; hence the heat and the contention in the debate.”

Parliament composition

By the time the motion was tabled, there had been a significant crossing of the floor, mainly from DP and KY members to join UPC.
UPC, as a party in power, officially controlled 74 of the 91 members in the House

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