Martin Aliker: A diplomat who handled sensitive assignments 

The story of Martin Aliker, a dental surgeon—a consummate diplomat—a shrewd negotiator and a nimble boardroom titan, remains incomplete without the role of his father, Lacito Okech, the titular head of the Lamogi clan who served as a clerk in Gulu in the bureaucratic pre-colonial State under British rule.

It is this fascinating time capsule of Uganda’s colonial era that perhaps helped Okech to navigate his son’s trajectory from the red-rutted paths of his birthplace at Aworanga village on the outskirts of Gulu, to scale the lofty heights.

Okech, a linguist who spoke Arabic and English, was able to use his ties with the British and Buganda aristocracy to secure his son a place at Kings College Budo, which flung the door open for his son to succeed at the national and global stage. 

Perhaps it was Aliker’s self-effacing character that ennobled him to thread the needle across some of the most complex and sensitive negotiations that gave Uganda a fringe role in resolving global conflicts and cemented President Museveni’s role as the point-man of the United States in the volatile Great Lakes. 

Aliker’s skilful détente in negotiating the strained ties between the United States and the Libyan leader, Muammar Gadaffi, viewed as the pantomime villain of the West—his role in dispensing an olive branch to Sudan’s Omar Bashir, Museveni’s implacable foe; his ability to convince Lord’s Resistance Army warlord Joseph Kony to lay down arms; and his futile attempt to secure Muammar Gadaffi a safe passage as his government writhed in the death throes—could have been buried with him as secrets had he not authored his memoir, The Bell is Ringing in 2018.

Aliker joined Makerere where he studied History, Geography and Social Studies at the time it was transitioning to a university.

He interacted with former president Milton Obote at Makerere before the former Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC) leader dropped out because the college was not offering Law.  

In his typical sense of humour, Aliker wrote, “By then Obote had become eccentric. He walked around with an English dictionary, trying to learn the meaning of the words in the book. He went to Kenya to learn politics with Jaluo politicians like Tom Mboya.”

Coming to America
Aliker received a Fulbright Scholarship to study Dentistry at North-Western, Chicago. While at Chicago, he was elected as the president of the East African Students Association. A politically-conscious student, he led a demonstration against Apartheid during the age of McCarthyism, a period of political upheaval and persecution of left-wing individuals at the peak of cloak and dagger games between the United States and Soviet Union. 

“The dean of North Western warned me that I was being probed by the FBI,” Aliker wrote in his memoirs. 

While at North-western University, he met Eduardo Mondlane who was studying Social Anthropology for his postgraduate studies and later completed his PhD. 

Mondlane, who was the first leader of Frelimo—a nationalist movement fighting for the independence of Mozambique, was killed when a parcel bomb exploded in 1969, six years before Mozambique got independence. 

Aliker met his wife who was a student at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana in Chicago where she studied Biology. 

He later travelled to the UK and took the examination at the Royal College of Surgeons, Birmingham where he passed the exam in record time to be able to practice. 

And on May 29, 1959 married his wife, Camille, an African American, at the Birmingham Registry Office. 

Returning to Uganda
Aliker returned home on the eve of independence in 1959 and got a job at Mulago as a dental officer. He became the first native to practice dentistry in Uganda and later bought a private dentistry from a British man. 

He found favour with Obote who asked him to be his best-man at his wedding in 1963. It was these close ties with Obote and the Buganda aristocracy that gave him the platform to become a budding diplomat and the foresight to seal global business deals, including the purchase of shares in Cooper Motor Corporation. 

But nothing could prepare him for the tumultuous spell in the post-independence era and the role he and his brother, Daudi Ochieng, would play. 

Ochieng, a bosom friend of Uganda’s first president, the Kabaka (king) of Buganda, Edward Muteesa, who later appointed him the secretary general of the Kabaka Yekka Party, was placed in the crosshairs when he tabled a motion in 1966 accusing Idi Amin, then deputy army commander, of being paid ivory, gold, and cash by Congolese rebels. 

“I liked [Muteesa] personally, but thought that he was, despite his charm, a fundamentally weak man who was in the grip of elderly, conservative and narrow-minded advisers on Mengo Hill,” Aliker wrote in his memoirs. 

Ochieng was diagnosed with stomach cancer and was treated in London but died at the age of 41 in June 1966. 

Nursing Obote, reign of terror
The Obote I government, a vipers’ nest beset by intrigue and factionalism, gravitated towards the cliff after the 1966 Kabaka Crisis. 

During the UPC delegates’ conference in December 1969, Mohammed Sebaduka, a taxi driver, shot Obote in the jaw before the pistol jammed during an assassination attempt. Aliker is among those who treated Obote. 

“The professor of surgery at Mulago, Sir Ian McAdam, phoned me at home and told me this is a job only you can do. Come straight away,” he wrote in his memoirs, adding, “I worked with McAdam through most of the night in the operating theatre. We treated most of the wound, saved most of the teeth and Obote was back in his office a week later.”

At the beginning of Amin’s reign of terror and during the purge of Acholi officers, Benny Kanyangeyo, Amin’s secretary, came to Aliker’s home and advised him to leave immediately as there was a plot to arrest him.

Aliker fled to Nairobi in 1972 and with no job and money, which was locked in the banks at home, he briefly lived in a house given to him by the chairman of East African Breweries Ltd, Kenneth Matiba, a longstanding boardroom colleague at the East African Breweries. 

Aliker later lived with his old boy at Budo, Chris Mboijana, a lawyer and chairman of the Africa Safari Airways Company. 

Finding his feet in Kenya
In December 1972, Tony Vickers, a dentist, sold his practice to Aliker. He later purchased a house on mortgage in the leafy Muthaiga and was no stranger in his neck of woods as his neighbours, including Geoffrey Kariithi, whom he first met at Makerere, was the head of the civil service in the Jomo Kenyatta government.

Aliker also counted Mwai Kibaki, who taught Economics at Makerere University and would later become president of Kenya as well as Kenyatta’s powerful Attorney General, Charles Njonjo, as his neighbours. 

Perhaps it is these contacts that provided him with a covert layer of protection from Amin’s intelligence bands that hunted down foreigners residing in Kenya. 

Aliker sought the intervention of Foreign Affairs minister, Njoroge Mungai, who took him to president Jomo Kenyatta to save him from being deported after he received a tip that Amin, during his visit to Kenya in 1976, had asked about him. 

“That young man, I know him very well, he cannot go back to Uganda. You can go,” Kenyatta told Aliker and Mungai at the meeting.

No love lost
To beef up his security, Ben Gethi, the head of the General Service Unit (GSU), personally gave Aliker two guards and he was taught by GSU how to fire a gun.

“I was aware of two attempts to remove Amin by force. Early in 1977, my friend Carl Ziegler of the first Chicago Bank introduced me to a man calling himself Peter Sprague who said simply, I cannot sleep at night while Amin is alive,” Aliker disclosed in his memoirs, adding, “Sprague provided $30,000 for an assassination attempt code-named Luzira. Although the planning was thorough and careful, two attempts failed.” 

Aliker returned to Uganda after Amin was ousted in 1979 by a joint force led by Tanzanian army and Ugandan exiles.  

Godfrey Binaisa, who was president, appointed him as his advisor. Aliker wrote in his memoirs that though Binaisa was genial, “he failed at everything he touched… and then it took him 12 years of sporadic study to complete a two-year law course in London to qualify as a barrister. At one stage he was working as a gravedigger.”

Binaisa was eventually arrested and removed from the presidency by the Military Commission led by Paulo Muwanga after he demoted the powerful chief of staff, David Oyite-Ojok, and sent him as an envoy to Algeria.

More intrigue
Obote returned in 1980 from exile in Tanzania, which Aliker viewed with deep foreboding. In the December 1980 polls, Aliker contested for Gulu South parliamentary seat on the DP ticket and his victory, he claims, was reversed by Paulo Muwanga who is accused of rigging the election in favour of Obote.  

Deeply frustrated and angry, Aliker returned to Nairobi where he continued to practice dentistry.

Bazilio Okello and Odong Latek later overthrew Obote in 1985. Aliker wrote in his book, “Five days after the coup, I was invited for three days and I met Tito Okello and he proposed that I become financial secretary, but Olara Otunnu, [a nephew of Tito Okello] and Foreign Affairs minister [then], opposed it. I also visited Bazilio Okello [Chief of Armed Forces] at his house in Kololo. While I was there Bazilio said to one of his aides in Swahili, ‘Kwenda nipatiye gari ya Mercedes [Go and get me a Mercedes].’ Later that night, while watching the local news on TV, I heard about the killing of a man named Lubwama at Najjanankumbi. The following day, I returned to Bazilio’s house for a further meeting and there in the drive was Lubwama’s red Mercedes Benz.” 

Aliker returned to Nairobi vowing not to work with the military junta led by Tito Okello. 

Enter the NRM
He returned home after the NRA rebels seized power in 1986 and President Museveni, whom he had earlier met in the 1970s at Red Bull, a haunt for the powerful Kikuyu elite in Nairobi, appointed him in 1986 as a junior Foreign Affairs minister. 

He tried to negotiate a peaceful settlement between the LRA and government, and later received a strange letter from Joseph Kony asking for drugs to treat gonorrhoea, diarrhoea and cholera. 

Aliker says the President instructed then army commander, Mugisha Muntu, to fulfil the wishes of Kony. 

“The President’s reaction shocked me. Instead of trashing the letter, he told me, we will help them on humanitarian grounds,” Aliker, who later failed to convince the LRA rebels to down their guns, wrote in his memoirs.

Aliker had earlier on handled sensitive assignments even before he joined Cabinet and in 1992, he was sent by Museveni to Washington DC to commence negotiations between Gaddafi and George Bush senior over Libya’s role in the Lockerbie incident after a bomb brought down a plane over a Scottish town, killing 270 people in 1988. 

In 2002, Aliker travelled to the UN with Museveni after the September 11 terror attacks where US president George Bush Jr during the UN General Assembly addressed the subject of terrorism. 

Museveni introduced Aliker as his minister and adviser and Bush met him and said he would work well with Condoleezza Rice who was serving as the National Security Advisor, to resolve the Lockerbie row over reparations for the victims, among others.

“Tell that cowboy [Gaddafi] to behave or I will kick his a** off,” Aliker quoted Bush Jr verbatim in his memoirs. 

Meeting Bush Jr
Aliker later flew with Museveni to Tripoli to brief Gaddafi of what Bush Jr said and this later culminated in the compensation of the Lockerbie victims, worth $3 billion, as relations between Britain, US and Libya thawed.

In April 2011, Aliker flew through Dubai and later Tunis where he met three Tunisian diplomats who placed him in a plane to Djerba, which lies at the border between Tunisia and Libya.

“I was in a convoy of three vehicles, driving at 160kph of the 400km, the one in front was a sweep, the one behind was armed, I was in the middle car, Nato bombed at night, of course I was scared, [in Tripoli] I stayed at the hotel Western journalists were staying, which provided some protection,” Aliker wrote.

He later met Gaddafi’s key aide, Bashir Saleh Bashir, who headed the sovereign wealth fund. 

“When the telephone rang Bashir answered and spoke to me in a subdued tone. He told me that the leader could not come to our meeting because the enemy was tracking his movements.”

Gaddafi then wrote, “Please convey to President Museveni my warm greetings and good wishes. Libya trusts only Uganda. South Africa voted against Libya in the UN Security Council. Congo Brazzaville, Mali and Mauritania are in the pockets of the French.”

Despite his ailing health, Aliker whose ideas ruminated over key boardroom decision-making and lifted companies from financial ruin, remained undimmed and often appeared at social gatherings and at Uganda Golf Club, Kitante, to play the game of golf alongside his friends. 

He also served as the board chairperson of Uganda Breweries Ltd, Coca-Cola, Lornho, Heritage oil and Nation Media Group Uganda, among others. 

He is survived by his wife and children Julie, Martin, Philip and Paul, and will be buried at Aworanga, Gulu District today.