Why Yusuf Lule was removed from office after only 68 days

When Lule became president in April, he contacted a former Police Special Branch officer, David Nsubuga Barlow, to become the Inspector-General of the new post-Amin Uganda Police force. Barlow had been in America in exile and agreed to set up the structures of the new force.

Barlow was one of the Special Branch investigators at the police headquarters in 1970 who had been asked to create a file on the murder of the Commanding Officer of the Masaka-based First Infantry Brigade, Brig. Pierino Okoya Okoya, and his wife Anna in January 1970.

From the beginning, as soon as he saw what was being presented as the evidence that suggested that the army commander Idi Amin had contacted six men to kill Okoya, the highly trained Barlow knew that this was concocted evidence and neither Amin nor the six men – Capt. Frederick (“Smutts”) Guweddeko, Patrick Mukwaya, Siperito Kapalaga, Fred Kyamufumba, Kalule L. Lutalo and Sebastiano Lukanga and two women who were girlfriends to two of the men, Milly Nantege and Mary Kajjansi – were guilty of Okoya’s murder.

Barlow refused to have any further part in the Okoya investigation, saying he was not going to condemn an innocent man (Idi Amin, that is) when all this was politically forged “evidence.”

President Lule was distressed by the appalling rise in violent crime and asked Barlow to investigate where this was coming from. Having seen the fact that Lule’s downfall was not because of his abuse of office but because he dared to accuse the UNLA of carrying out the murders of prominent Ugandans after April 1979, in the next part of this series we return to the wave of unexplained murders of prominent Ugandans, what Barlow uncovered and who else was in the Ugandan security and law enforcement apparatus at the time.