Employing Amin’s son Lumumba

The fall of Amin. In our series on the Idi Amin published in the Saturday Monitor and the Sunday Monitor, Amin’s son Jaffar Remo narrated their dramatic rescue from Kampala preparatory school as the liberations forces cut off Kampala access. Conrad Nkutu was one of the pupils in that school and in the following article recounts the events of that day, what it was like studying with the president’s children oblivious of the fact that his father was one of the first victims of Amin’s government.continued from yesterday.

I got the sense that while he had obviously grown up surrounded by press reports describing his late father as a killer, he was living in denial and had possibly never been confronted with a detailed murder case involving his father as the orchestrator. He was in a very bad emotional state and we were all very sorry for him.

I asked Peter to get a company car to take him home and later asked Martha to assure him that I held no grudge against him and he could take a few days off to recover from the shock then return to work. Unfortunately, but perhaps understandably, Hussein Lumumba Amin did not return to work at KFM and did not send in a resignation letter. We understood his dilemma and did not pursue him though we remained sorry for how he had found out and KFM missed his good work.

Revisionist history at play
When I left Monitor and KFM in 2007 and was transferred to Nation Media Group head office in Nairobi as Group Business Development Director and later Managing Director of the Nation Broadcasting Division, I called my colleague Charles Obbo and told him about a website I’d just come across, set up by Remo and Amin’s other children to clean up his reputation as a killer of his political opponents.

The most prominent article posted on the website was a declaration by Amin’s daughter Mayi, also a former Kabale Prep schoolmate. I am paraphrasing her words from memory since that website now appears to be non-existent.

According to Mayi Amin, her father’s government “never killed anybody except the Late Hon. Shaban Nkutu, who was an Uncle to our mother, Mama Maryamu.” The article claimed, incredibly, that when the army came to arrest him, “Nkutu’s supporters were armed with guns and shot at the soldiers sent to effect his arrest and unfortunately Shaban Nkutu was shot dead in the cross-fire...” i.e. his death was unintentional! The website article expressed much regret for the fact that my dad had met his death at the hands of an army commanded by his in-law, Idi Amin.

The “killed-in-cross-fire” version was a poor and unsuccessful effort at repackaging history by my former Kabale Prep school-mates because it has been widely reported that on the day the body was discovered at the river, President Amin, under family pressure from his in-laws to surrender the body, announced on Radio Uganda that former Cabinet Minister Shaban Nkutu had fled to exile in Tanzania, was a wanted person and there would be a huge reward for his capture.

How can one reconcile this fact with Nkutu’s alleged death in a cross-fire while he was being arrested? Amin’s children took their website offline soon after I posted a polite rejoinder about the true facts on the website’s feedback page. I do sympathise, though, with the weight of the baggage they were doomed to carry by their father inspite of their innocence as his children.

That is the history of my interface with Idi Amin’s children at Kabale Preparatory School and the aftermath of events involving our fathers before and after I joined the school in 1975 as a Primary Three student. Amin’s children were good, normal, friendly kids who have absolutely no responsibility for the acts of their father.

I got my first detailed account of what had happened to my father by reading Henry Kyemba’s book in 1979 and later speaking to relatives and my family is very grateful to Kyemba for telling us what happened as well as the various forms of support he gave to our family until he himself fled Amin’s regime in 1977 fear for his life.

I resolved, in my early teens, to become a journalist and play some role in influencing non-violent political debate and dispute resolution for a more democratic dispensation in Uganda.
Most journalists practicing today, and indeed most Ugandans now of adult age were not born or were too young to recall this dark phase in Uganda’s history and many journalists now seem to lack inspiring role models to guide their reporting of Uganda’s many governance and economic problems while most voters lament about huge national problems but do not meaningfully exercise their civic power and responsibility.

Great editors like Wafula Oguttu and Charles Onyango-Obbo, who founded Monitor, emerged as leading pro-democracy activist journalists because of that phase in Uganda’s history when human rights and freedoms were so extensively abused.

They were very good mentors to younger media professionals and they were an inspiring example for me even when I was in direct competition with them during my tenure as William Pike’s deputy at The New Vision.

I believe most of the next generation of good editors and media leaders like Joachim Buwembo, Andrew Mwenda, Peter Mwesige and Onapito Ekomoloit were all drawn into journalism because Wafula, Obbo and Monitor as a newspaper stood up boldly for Ugandan democracy, a stance that is no longer very visible in Ugandan journalism today, irrespective of which newspaper one reads.
Kabale Preparatory School (KPS) still exists and I had the opportunity to visit briefly during the mid-‘90s but I am not well informed about how the school is currently faring. The British Missionaries and expatriates have long left.

I was told that KPS is now a government school, operating with all the limitations that come with that framework. It was a great school in the 1970s with almost all students passing Primary 7 with First Grades and we were given what was probably the best welfare available in a Ugandan school at the time.

When Amin’s children left KPS in 1979, the school was depopulated by a factor of about 25% and my P7 class was left with only 5 or 6 candidates for the exams. We witnessed great celebration of Amin’s overthrow by all the teachers and support staff, who had for years treated Amin’s kids with much love and kindness.