Milton Obote’s legacy 8 years after his death

On October 10, 2005, Independent Uganda’s first prime minister, and two-time president , Milton Obote, died in South Africa after 20 years in exile. As we mark the eight anniversary of his death, Sunday Monitor’s Timothy Kalyegira explores what legacy the Uganda Peoples Congress founder left, and what the country remembers of him.

One day after Uganda’s 43rd independence anniversary in October 2005, the first independence prime minister Milton Obote died at a Johannesburg hospital.

Even in the timing of his death, fate had it that it would fall around independence. Obote seemed destined to be tied with Uganda’s independence.

Milton Obote. That name will remain a gigantic image in the Ugandan mind and cast a shadow over Uganda’s history for at least another generation to come.

Many in central Uganda shudder at that name. Many more in western, eastern and northern Uganda associate that name with the proudest days of Uganda’s post-colonial history.

There was a time after 1986 when the mere association with Obote’s name was viewed as treasonous. A rebel group purportedly called Force Obote Back Again (FOBA), obviously a creation of the State, was said to be operational in 1987.
Stories and reports about 300,000 Ugandans massacred in Luweero in the first half of the 1980s were enough to legitimise the NRM in the southern half of the country.

So much about Obote has not yet been documented to its full, largely because most Ugandan history is still undocumented.

Genesis of tension
The origin of the tensions between Obote and Buganda’s Kabaka Edward Mutesa II, the friction over budgeting between the central government and the Mengo government in 1963 --- all these areas have gone without comment from Mengo and unexamined by Ugandan historians.

Between 1962 and 1967, for example, the Mengo government submitted only one financial report to the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee as was required under the 1962 Constitution.

The narrative handed down to Baganda is that the Obote who formed an alliance with Mengo, at whose wedding reception to Miria Kalule in 1962, Mutesa was the guest of honour, suddenly and for no reason turned into a monster and enemy of Buganda.

But in recent years, as it is with Idi Amin, the last 10 years of the NRM government have given Ugandans ample time and conditions to re-evaluate Ugandan history before 1986.
It is no longer an oddity for a newspaper or TV station to feature a former cabinet minister defending his time under Obote or Amin.

The wholesale disposal of government property, the collapse of the public school and public healthcare systems, the massive corruption reported almost daily, has left these greatly disillusioned Ugandans open-minded enough to think afresh about the leaders who came before the NRM government.

The idea that the NRA guerrillas in Luweero Triangle dressed up as the government UNLA army, committed atrocities or harassed civilians in order to convince these civilians that the people torturing them were Obote’s soldiers, has now taken firm root in the Ugandan mind.

The other notion that is now a majority one in Uganda, is that while many still perceive the Obote and Amin governments as being brutal, they clearly delivered much more in public services and infrastructure than the Museveni government.
The 22 government hospitals built during the first Obote administration are the most widely-quoted achievement of the UPC government. The agricultural and transportation cooperative unions and district farms and farm institutes are the next most noted UPC achievement.

The most that the NRM government officials can say to counter this new appreciation of the 1960s UPC government is that “the population was still small”; but they can’t refute the fact that public and social services were at their best in the 1960s.

Dissent
By September 2013, even formerly sworn military foes like Gen David Tinyefuza and the commander of the counterinsurgency operations in Luweero Triangle in the 1980s, Col John Ogole, had met in London and could even speak of a common goal of removing the NRM government from power.

The NRM, then, by many of its deeds while in power after 1986, slowly but steadily ended up redeeming the image of the very UPC government that it fought and did so much to discredit.

Obote during his second presidency was a jolly man, frequently dancing away at party or State House social occasions with his cabinet ministers like Dr James Rwanyarare, Chris Rwakasisi, Peter Otai and Dr John Luwuliza-Kirunda and others.
He behaved as if these were both his ministers and personal friends and the perception was that he used to drink heavily as president between 1980 and 1985.

The rumours were that Obote in the second UPC administration was much weaker than he had been in the 1960s and that his powerful vice president Paulo Muwanga and army chief of staff, Major-General David Oyite-Ojok controlled the real state power.
But once in exile again, this time in Zambia, Obote revealed a serious-minded side to him. He left behind several papers and documents, some of which are extremely vital to an understanding of Ugandan history. The most important of these is Notes on Concealment of Genocide in Uganda, written in April 1990.
This paper gives an extensive explanation on the civil war of the 1980s and is, so far, the most detailed overview of the massacres in Luweero. It also outlines the atrocities that were meted out on the people of northern and northeastern Uganda by the victorious NRA army after 1986.

Unique
As a commentator on Ugandan history since the 1970s, Obote in these documents he wrote in the 1990s and early 2000s, demonstrated analytical skill of a kind very few African leaders past and present have demonstrated, not even the celebrated type like Kwame Nkrumah and Nelson Mandela.

Obote did not just state political ideas or make soaring declarations like Nkrumah or Mandela. He was much more than an ideologue. He probed and questioned things. He sought to understand and explain puzzling events and incidents.

Everything from the rapid advance into central Uganda by the rebel leader Alice Lakwena to the skulls in Luweero, the Kanungu massacre, the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and mysterious deaths of prominent civil servants and medical doctors in 1979 after the ouster of Idi Amin, were treated analytically by Obote who, in his mid 60s to early 70s, retained a mind as observant as a crime scene detective or a military intelligence officer.

It was a fortunate turn of events that the then Daily Monitor managing director Conrad Nkutu assigned the then Political Editor Andrew Mwenda to travel to Lusaka in October 2004 to have extensive discussions with Obote on his life and times.
The series was published by the Daily Monitor in April 2005 and were to prove to be, in hindsight, Obote’s last political testament.

Following Obote’s death, the UPC party was able to witness a handing over of leadership, first to Obote’s widow Miria Obote, then to former diplomat Olara Otunnu.

The NRM party has never yet come to that point, so the verdict on whether or not it can survive its founding leader Museveni remains to be seen. There has been friction within the UPC since the late 1990s and much more public and bitter after Otunnu assumed the party presidency in 2010.

Stuck
Despite the present splits within the party, the most visible of UPC assets, the party headquarters on Kampala Road in Kampala, remains in UPC hands more than 40 years and several governments and wars after it was first built.
The 1960s party newspaper, The People, revived in the early 1980s and active until the mid 1990s, appears to have been abandoned by the UPC. The party runs a website that includes several of Obote’s documents.

It is now clear that the UPC is not a family political party. What is less clear is what it is today in 2013.
While its image has been restored somewhat since 2005, the perception of the UPC as an old-time 1960s independence party prevents it from appealing to a large enough section of the youthful population.

It is still viewed as the party of Nilotics and Nilo-Hamitics, seen as a reminder of the past rather than the future in the same way typewriters bring back fond memories of the 1960s and 1970s, but since overtaken by computers.

Challenge
The UPC, in that sense, faces a more serious problem not of breaking apart but of not ever recapturing serious relevance today.
When Uganda marked its 50th independence anniversary, the UPC as the party that led the country into independence, failed to rise to the occasion and present itself as the bearer of this historic mission or reach out to younger voters with a concept and branding that promised them a similar role in repairing Uganda’s current image of dysfunction.
Otunnu often speaks out with urgency about this descent into dysfunction, which he places squarely at the feet of President Museveni.

Otunnu’s message is compelling and rings true at every level. However, the UPC has not yet presented a cohesive view of how it can or would act to reverse the last 27 years of increasing erosion of public institutions and the public ethos.
Taken overall, given the way its image was damaged by the NRM from 1981 to 2004, for the UPC to still exist as a party, still own Uganda House, twice seen a hand over of the party presidential office and that today it is a fairly respectable party, is in and of itself an achievement.

What comrades say about the icon

Henry Kyemba (Principle Private Secretary 1962-1971): Obote belongs to the Africa’s independence brand of leaders. Leaders like Nasser of Egypt, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Sekou Toure and others. This brand of leaders was pre-occupied with the pre-independent Africa, and tried their best to put the African continent on the world map. Locally, Obote was faced with the challenge of building a unified nation and did a good job.

Locally he was faced with the challenge of building a unified nation. He had to deal with the unfinished business left by the British. The British just drew straight lines to form a country called Uganda bringing together different societies, before they could consolidate this union they handed the responsibility to him. Under the circumstances he did a good job.

Dr Charles Olweny (VC Uganda Martyrs University): His first term was fantastic. He did a wonderful job for this country. His 22 hospitals have stood out until now. Even some of the roads like the one to Ishaka was built by Obote. He did not think of himself, he always thought of the country. However, during his second term, he had lost it... Some other people were telling him what to do. The second term, unfortunately, undid what he had done in the first term.

Aggrey Awori (Former minster and presidential aspirant): Obote was a nationalist who never tolerated corruption. I recall when I joined the civil service, I was required to show all the receipts of my overseas trip expenses. At the same time, the man was stiff scared of the army which was one of his undoing, his other being tolerating the federalist which cost him his political life. He was a good disciplinarian and a nationalist who had Uganda at heart.

Dr Eric Adriko (Former minister and deputy prime minister): His two regimes found me out of the country. During his first regime, I was a student in the UK and the second I was in exile. But based on what we read in books. He was a nationalist who did a lot for this country, he built the Pakwach Bridge and a rail line. These are signs of a nationalist. The people from West Nile will always be grateful for those things.

Dr Ruhakana Rugunda, Minister of Health: Obote led the country to independence and made wonderful contributions towards the development of this country. But as a human being, he made some mistakes.

Dr Ezra Nkwasibwe (Minister of Health in Obote II): Obote was a very good leader only that the circumstances he was working in were not good. We had limited recourses which had to be divided between developments and war. There was also a campaign against UPC government in Buganda because of the relationship between obote and many Baganda. Despite this, Obote did very well in education and health.