How FOBA was kicked out of Busia

Late one afternoon, Commander Benon Biraaro, who was at the time the commander of the 29th Battalion, drove into a home in Bulyali village, Busia District.

He was looking for Capt Job Were, a former officer in the Uganda Army who had fled Uganda during Idi Amin’s regime and later participated in the 1979 liberation war.

Were was not around. He had gone to his other home in neighbouring Busoga sub-region, where he also had a farm.
The two did not know each other. They had never met, but Gen (rtd) Biraaro’s insistence that he would not leave the area without seeing him, compelled the family to send one of the children post-haste to find him and ask him to return to Busia.
The two soldiers met at Masafu Sub-county headquarters.

“Capt Were, you are going to assist us in securing this place,” he said, stretching out a rifle with several rounds of ammunition.
It was an order, but one that Were was not ready to obey.

“I retired into farming. I am never going back into active service,” he told Biraaro.
“Captain, you say you retired into farming, but where are you going to market your produce when the country is insecure?” he asked him.
That sobered him. He took the gun and agreed to work with the NRA to pacify the area.

He was charged with the responsibility of coordinating the existing force of Local Defence Units (LDUs) and work with the NRA forces in combat operations, but that warranted a personal assessment of the strength and organisational capacity of the two forces.
“The NRA was a very small force when the insurgency broke out. They could not have possibly contained the insurgency and secured the whole country with it,” he recalls.

In order to bolster the force, government had recruited some volunteers and taken them to Serere in the Teso Sub-region for training as LDUs, but the training had come to a premature end because rebels of Alice Lakwena’s Holy Spirit Movement overran it and killed some of the trainees.
They were also poorly armed. They had been given Mark 4 rifles. The rifles were old and unsuitable for combat.
At the same time, there were also issues around the command structure. The LDUs had been placed under the command of a foot solider with whom they had been trained.

“He was not a commander because a commander in the armed forces is a planner. He is an administrator and plans how the fighting is to be carried. You cannot plan fighting simply because you attended a simple course,” Capt Were recalls.
The first step was to reorganise and redeploy the LDUs. Next, he reached out to the RCs. The third step was to start reaching out to supporters of UPC who were believed to be providing the rebels with information and some logistics. The message was, “please do not support them and please avail us with information about their whereabouts and their activities”.

For several months, he was the lone ranger riding around Busia on a bicycle with a rifle slung over his shoulder.
Initially, it looked like his efforts were headed nowhere. The rebels avoided direct confrontation with the NRA and LDUs, but kept making surprise attacks in which they would kill RC officials and LDUs before torching their houses. Pursuit would always end in futility.

At the time relations between Uganda and Kenya were very frosty, which played into the rebels’ hands. Kenyan security was not doing anything to curtail their activities. This meant they would simply flee and cross into Kenya whenever they would be put under pressure. The NRA’s fortunes changed for the better around September 1987.

Korokoto captured
The NRA forces had been split into two. The main force had stayed in Masafu, while the other was stationed in Bumungi.
Bumungi was part of Busia South, the area where 2nd Lt Franco Mangeni, alias Nabutono (the small bodied one), Charles Ojambo, alias Korokoto, David Wabwire, alias Masingo (cow dung), Vincent Oguttu and Thomas Mangeni operated but the man in charge of Bumungi sector was Korokoto.
He had ordered the May 1987 grenade attack on the home of the RCIII chairperson of Masafu Sub-county, Mr Semeo Makokha, which left his wife killed, but he still wanted Mr Makokha’s head.

“I left quite early that day. Someone had alerted me that the rebels were going to attack that evening. I went to Masafu and told the soldiers that the rebels were likely to attack that evening,” Makokha says.

On the fateful day, the rebels attacked Bumungi trading centre, breaking into houses and beating up people. Little did they know that the army was closing in on them. In what marked the first direct confrontation between the forces, many of the rebels were killed while Korokoto was captured as he tried to flee back into Kenya.

Omwero killed
Much as Korokoto’s capture was a major setback, the rebels did not cease their operations. Richard Wilson Adula, alias Omwero, continued raining havoc, engaging NRA and LDU forces in running battles and staging ambushes on vehicles in the section between the Busitema junction and the Busitema University premises.
His main base was the hill opposite the university, but he eventually lost the support of the people. According to Capt Were, at some point in 1988, the people tipped the NRA about where he was hiding, leading to a gunfight between him and his men. He did not survive that battle.
The next rebel commander to fall was David Wabwire, alias Masingo, who was killed during a gunfight at Buyunda village in Bulumbi Sub-county.

Foiled attack on police
According to Were, the biggest tactical blunder that the rebels made was to imagine that they had acquired enough man and firepower to engage the NRA and LDU forces in direct combat.

He says the rebels had been outgunned in all the encounters that they had had with the NRA in 1987 and 1988 and that for that reason, they should have known that it would be foolhardy to launch a direct attack on any government facility.

Well, their commanders certainly did not think like Were. One night in April 1989, they launched a direct attack on Busia Police Post.
“It was at around 7pm when they arrived hoping to take us by surprise, but much as the policemen fled leaving only the NRA and the LDUs to defend the facility, we dug in. The firepower was so big that they couldn’t take it. They beat a hasty retreat back into Kenya,” Were says.

It is not clear how many men they lost in the fight, but that seemed to be the last major battle that the opposing forces were to fight.
A mop up operation that was carried out in several parts of Bukedi region also led to the destruction of what was believed to be a rebel camp in Amonikakine Forest. The rebels who were there are believed to have fled into Kenya.

Retraining
Aware that the enemy had been dealt a major blow, the government moved to retrain the LDU personnel. After the training they were given uniforms and equipped with better rifles.
The government also set up permanent LDU posts in areas like Bumungi, Busitema, Tiira, Busitema, Bulumbi, Meela, Kalit and Fungwe to serve as the first line of defence if the rebels were to regroup and make an attempt to return to the area.
The next phase of the war entailed launching a charm offensive aimed at killing off support for rebel activity.

Whereas the government of Kenya had still not warmed up to that of Uganda, the Samia are a tribe that lives on both sides of the border and it is not strange for one to find split families with siblings living as citizens on either side of the borders.

One of the cases is point is the Awori family. Whereas Aggrey Awori is a Ugandan politician who rose to represent Samia Bugwe in Parliament and also served on President Museveni’s Cabinet, his siblings are Kenyan citizens, the most prominent one being Arthur Moody Awori, who rose to become the 9th vice president of Kenya during president Mwai Kibaki’s tenure.

Besides the close ties, Kenyans around the border rely on their Ugandans brothers for most of their food supply and a few other food items.
“We engaged them to stop giving support to the rebels lest we would cut off supply of food items. I think the engagements worked. By the end of 1991 FOBA could no longer be looked at as a fighting force,” Were says.

Deaths of the commanders
Richard Wilson Adula, alias Omwero, and David Wabwire, alias Masingo, had been killed during the fighting, but others had by the end of 1991 either been captured in fighting or simply surrendered.

Most of the surviving commanders had been pardoned and either integrated into the army or reintegrated back in their communities.
Lt Franco Mangeni, alias Nabutono, was pardoned and later deployed to serve in the NRA’s 4th Division in Gulu, but as he was returning home to visit his family in Siduhumi village at some point late in 1989, he was killed by a mob in Namungodi in Bulumbi Sub-county, which lynched him.
The circumstances under which he was lynched remain unclear, but it is highly suspected that the mob action was a reprisal attack for some of the atrocities he committed as the rebels reigned terror in Busia south.

Charles Ojambo, alias Korokoto, who had been captured in the fighting, was later pardoned. The former UNLA officer later became a herbalist before he succumbed to the effects of HIV/Aids at some point in the 1990s.

Thomas Mangeni was descended on and killed by a mob in Kubo village in Masafu Sub-county after he had killed his father following a domestic tiff.

The former rebel recruiter and trainer, Mr Charles Wafula of Kubo West village had been pardoned and reintegrated in the community, but later succumbed to opportunistic diseases associated with HIV/Aids.

Another fight
The guns fell silent more than 28 years ago, but another fight between the people and government is on.
The families of the RC officials and LDU men who were killed during the fighting are battling government over promised compensation packages, which have never come, just like surviving LDUs who fought alongside the NRA are up in arms against government demanding demobilisation packages that have never come.