Death of Maj. Gen. Rwigyema

According to President Museveni’s son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, just before Museveni flew to New York for the UN summit in 1990, Rwigyema went to State House Entebbe to bid farewell to him. As would be expected, they conversed for several hours.

From his exile home in Lusaka, Zambia, 65-year-old Milton Obote who, although he wrote a few pamphlets and political working papers in the 1960s, had never really bothered much with intellectual life, now became one of the most astute and in-depth analysts in Africa.

The searching, investigative, broadly historical reports and papers Obote wrote in the 1990s from Zambia on the situation in Uganda under the NRM are among the most important ever written on Ugandan history.
Seasoned academicians like Prof. Mahmood Mamdani and Prof. Ali Mazrui, in their assessment of the conflicts breaking out in Uganda and Rwanda missed the root cause by a wide margin. Even the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in its analysis of the eruption of conflict in the Great Lakes region in the 1990s, clearly showed it was explaining the surface but not the root cause.

Obote’s mind, on the other hand, seemed to work like that of a highly-trained counterintelligence officer. His dancing and merry-making with Cabinet ministers at UPC party events and rallies of the 1980s was gone and in came a brilliantly analytical mind. He would later make fairly strong reflections on the war in Luweero Triangle, the RPF war and the counterinsurgency operations by the Ugandan Army in northern Uganda in the 1990s.

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