Why Yusuf Lule was removed from office after only 68 days

In part eight of our series on the fall of Idi Amin’s military government, Timothy Kalyegira explains why Yusuf Kironde Lule was thrown out of office after one of the shortest stints ever as president: -

When he was elected at the unity conference of the Ugandan exiles in the northern Tanzanian town of Moshi in March 1979, the former Principal of Makerere University College, Prof. Yusuf Kironde Lule, became the chairman of the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF) and therefore President of the Republic of Uganda after the fall of Idi Amin.

Having been welcomed by millions of Ugandans in an outpouring of emotion on April 13, 1979, Lule’s presidency appeared promising. He was the compromise candidate who would appeal to a broader cross section of the population than any other political leader at the time. Well-educated, soft-spoken, mild-mannered, Lule was the very antithesis of the rambling Idi Amin.

In late 1976, Lule had formed, with a dentist called Dr. Martin Aliker, an organisation named the Uganda Society, and based in the Kenyan capital Nairobi. In their manifesto, the Uganda Society argued that Uganda had been destroyed by leaders who lacked education and personal wealth and so (lacking the latter), had been tempted to loot from the national treasury.

Lule and Aliker, in their manifesto, took a pro-Israel stance, promising that if the former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, would help secure them weapons and financial support, any government they formed in the event of the fall of Amin would adopt “an economic bias to suit the Israelis.”

The Uganda Society was one of the lesser known of the Ugandan exile groups, so the fact that the openly pro-Israel Lule, inexperienced in politics, became president after the fall of Amin should raise the question of exactly who it was that funded the 1979 Tanzania-Uganda war.

According to the Kenyan scholar Bethwell A. Ogot, President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania had put all his support behind his friend and the former president Milton Obote to succeed Amin in 1979.

Nyerere, according to Ogot, asked Obote and the Tanzanian Defence Minister Rashidi Kawawa to fly to Masaka town and get ready to enter Kampala with the Tanzanian army should it finally oust Amin.

However, Tanzania, a poor socialist-leaning country, was finding it almost impossible to meet the $200 million cost of the war against Amin (another version later put the cost at $500 million) and appealed to its former colonial master Britain to help meet the costs.

Britain accepted but only on one condition: that somebody else, anybody, could become president but not Obote.
Furthermore, a powerful lobbying effort by Baganda in Britain appealed to the British to block the return of Obote to power. When asked whom they would prefer to become president instead of Obote, the Baganda lobby in London proposed Lule. And so it became.

So crucial was the British financial role in the 1978-79 war and to the eventual rise of Lule to power that a telling and rather embarrassing symbol was missed by the tens of thousands of cheering crowds lining the Entebbe-Kampala highway to cheer on the motorcade bringing Lule and some of his supporters like the playwright Robert Serumaga for the swearing-in ceremony in Kampala on April 13.

The president-elect of Uganda was being driven in a Mercedes limousine that bore the British flag, the Union Jack. The Uganda flag was nowhere in sight.

As we have already seen, Idi Amin in his farewell radio broadcast to Ugandans had told them that they might be praying for his impending downfall, but what they were going to get after him was a return to a colonial state with western powers determining all essential policy.

As usual, nobody listened to Amin and so here we were witnessing the ridiculous sight of the British national flag – not the Ugandan flag – mounted on the limousine of the new Ugandan President Lule, 16 years after independence.

However, after becoming president, Lule showed that he too could be independent-minded. In a Radio Uganda broadcast in May 1979, President Lule voiced his opposition to growing suggestions that the British– and Asian-owned companies that the Amin government had taken over and given to indigenous Ugandans should be returned to their former owners.