Footnotes to odyssey of retired CJ Wambuzi’s career – Part I

Several reviews appreciating retired Chief Justice Wambuzi’s book have appeared elsewhere and correctly describe it as excellent. I agree.
I only wish to add one or two footnotes. Justice Wambuzi was the longest serving and most industrious Chief Justice Uganda has ever had. I wish to re-echo the opinion Justice Egonda-Ntende expressed in his endorsement of the book. I also endorse the opinion of Prof Oloka-Onyango in his forward to the same book. The book is written in a simple readable style and absorbs the reader.
When Justice Wambuzi was a judge in the Kenyan Court of Appeal, I was a human rights activist and in the NRM struggle for the liberation of Uganda from misrule and anarchy. I visited him in Nairobi and I possess a photograph of both of us in that happy reunion.
I had known and interacted with Samuel Wambuzi when he was still the first parliamentary counsel in the post-independence government and later Chief Justice.
In both positions, his work was exemplary. Following our return home, we both discovered two mutual interests not connected with law, namely, the love of music and the game of Omweso. We together listened to or attended musical recitals in diverse places or played Mweso, often supplied with refreshments by the late Gladys Wambuzi, his first wife who was a wonderful host and is terribly missed by all of us.
Now to the footnotes. My first footnote relates to the events described in chapter 8 and subsequent chapters of the book. Some of the facts in these footnotes may not be known to Justice Wambuzi. However, on page 113 of the book, Justice Wambuzi ably describes how he was invited to become Chief Justice for the second time after the Moshi Unity conference.
At that conference, I was the leader of the UK delegation of exiles who included several future ministers and president of the administration that succeeded the regime of Idi Amin after he was militarily defeated by Tanzania People’s Defence Force, assisted by Ugandan exiles and rebel forces.
Following the election of Yusuf Lule as chairman of the UNLF and future president of Uganda at Moshi, his close advisors, including me, were invited to his hotel suite to discuss the governance of the country. In this meeting, we unanimously recommended that former Chief Justice Wambuzi be the Chief Justice in our new government.
On Pages 118 -119, Wambuzi refers to Peter Allen’s book Interesting Times, describing the events of the latter’s service as Chief Justice of Uganda.
I cannot testify about all the events described by Peter Allen but several of us, including Ambassador Butagira and the late Obola-Ochola worked with Allen when he was the Principal of Nsamizi Law School, the predecessor of today’s Law Development Centre.
Allen was always honest, blunt and fair in his conduct and writing and may be that is why he also became Chief Justice of Uganda.
I agree with the view Wambuzi has expressed about president Lule’s Cabinet on page 115. However, I will add a footnote on the comments he makes on page 119. The reasons he has given for the removal of Lule from office are not the ones I know.
There were two main reasons. The first was Lule’s refusal to submit to the will of president Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and his close allies in the UNLF, namely UPC and what came to be known as the gang of four who dominated, manipulated and controlled the affairs of the UNLF.
Under this scenario, the UNLF deputy army commander, the late David Oyite-Ojok, refused to recognise Lule as the legitimate president of Uganda and referred to him only as the temporary chairman of the UNLF. I describe president Lule’s attempts to solve this insubordination in my book Constitutional and Political History of Uganda from 1894 To the Present.
The second reason for the immediate removal of president Lule was his naivety of always relying entirely on the advice of a small clique of conservative narrow-minded members of the UNLF who appeared to have been the decisive force behind every decision he made.
It is this stubbornness that led to the immediate fall of Lule’s government because he refused the advice of others to cooperate with the National Consultative Council which was the supreme organ of the UNLF.
I take issue with the accuracy of Wambuzi’s narration on pages 118-121. Since he has admitted that he does not remember much of what Peter Allen wrote and what I narrate in my own publication The Blessings and Joy of Who You Are, I will simply accept his admission that he cannot remember but emphasise that for me, I vividly remember what happened.

Prof Kanyeihamba is a retired Supreme Court judge. [email protected]