UGANDA'S FLAWED ELECTIONS: In defence of UPC, Observers report and Muwanga

A: Obote was a nationalist, he was patriotic, he was a Pan-africanist, he was not corrupt and he was very, very smart. Very smart in the way that you couldn’t believe it, he would listen, be able to chair those cabinet meetings. There is no cabinet meeting that took place if he was in the country without him chairing. He would advise the ministers and we too were taking decisions collectively.

Where he had a problem was that he was at times a poor judge of character. He would choose at times people who would later betray him or work against him. Starting from the Grace Ibingira’s, Felix Onama and of late the people he had wanted to be in the Presidential Policy Committee (PPC), the ones he thought would be his right hand men, they have all ended up in the NRMO.

He had such fascination and admiration of proping up a person like Dr Ruhakana Rugunda. Rugunda definitely worked against him. So he was a bit of a bad judge of character that is why it cost the party at times and put it into a crisis. Like when he dropped Kakonge from being the Secretary General and yet Kakonge would have been the person to support him, when he did not take Adonia Tiberondwa to be on the PPC and when he decided to say that the party should not take part in elective political activities in this country when NRM had come into power.

If he hadn’t done that, the history of this country would have been different because those of us who went in the NRC ended up doing a superb job although we were very few. We ended up chairmen of committees; we ended up stopping bad laws from being passed. And if all of us had gone as UPC in those elections in 1989 and 1996, we would have changedŠnow because of taking faulty decisions we have ended up having some of our areas with our supporters going away from us.

But otherwise he was a superb person and he wasn’t sectarian. If you see the developments in Buganda and the entire country and in the selection of people who were holding positions in government. He looked at Uganda as Uganda and a place he had to serve. So we are definitely going to miss him, at least his advice since he was already ageing any way. But he had that dynamism of being able to look at the national interest and not being corrupt.