Moses Ali’s rise from teacher to Amin, Museveni Cabinets

On the evening of March 21, President Museveni made a few changes to his Cabinet. Among the names that trended on social media  following the announcement were that of 2nd Deputy Prime Minister and Deputy Leader of Government Business in Parliament, Gen Moses Ali.

At 84 years of age and sometimes seen to be frail, many Ugandans using social media have resorted to conspiracy to explain why for years Gen Ali has been a permanent fixture in President Museveni’s Cabinet.

Some say Ali has represented East Moyo in Parliament since the National Resistance Council days in 1989. 

Yet if you wind back to 2006, Ali’s political career seemed to have met its Waterloo moment.  The results of the East Moyo parliamentary elections had seen Piro Santos Eruaga, a novice politician who stood as an independent candidate, defeat Ali, subsequently putting an end to his time in Parliament.

Ali hadn’t only represented East Moyo in the 6th and 7th parliaments, but also represented the constituency in the Constituent Assembly that midwifed the current Constitution. 

Ali did not only lose his parliamentary seat, but President Museveni dumped him from Cabinet where he had been the First Deputy Prime Minister and minister for Disaster Preparedness. He had in the past served in several ministerial dockets such as Youth, Culture, Sports, and Tourism.

While Ali selflessly conceded defeat to Eruaga, he didn’t take dumping him from Cabinet lightly, blaming it on intrigue. He claimed that he was booted from Cabinet in a bid to bring back National Resistance Movement’s (NRM) Eriya Kategaya who had fallen out with his childhood friend Museveni who had dealt away with the presidential term limits.  

Ali said if then prime minister Apolo Nsibambi, who has since passed on, and Museveni had approached him and told him that they planned to offer his position to Kategaya as a way of enticing him back to NRM, he would have obliged and stepped down “for purposes of harmony”.

But it wasn’t the first time Ali was being dropped from Museveni’s Cabinet because in 1991 he was removed from his Cabinet position of minister of Culture, Youth and Sports and charged with “plotting terrorist activities”.

Ali was charged after insurgence cropped up in his West Nile sub-region when the West Nile Bank Front (WNBF) and its splinter faction, the Uganda National Rescue Front II (UNRF II), began operating in the region. 

In his paper ‘The Fate of Rebels: Insurgencies in Uganda’, Christopher Day says both WNBF and UNRF were led by Idi Amin-era elites who had been thrown out of power. 

Ali was among the elites during Amin’s time, having participated in the 1971 coup that overthrew Milton Obote and installed Amin as Uganda’s third president. 

Ali was born on April 5, 1939, at Meliaderi village, Ataboo Parish, Pakelle Sub-county in Adjumani District. He would later become a primary school teacher before he joined the army in 1968. 

During the Amin years, the status of many West Nilers was elevated through the military, a process that violently displaced groups loyal to Obote. This could partly explain Ali’s rise to the rank of Brigadier before Amin would appoint him minister of Finance in 1975.  

One person who wasn’t going to forget Ali’s tenure as minster is Joyce Mpanga, the former State minister of Education who recently passed on.  

In her book It’s A Pity She’s Not A Boy, Mpanga narrated how during Amin’s regime politicians often got sozzled on authority at the cost of the ordinary person. Ali, who at the time was in his 30s, Mpanga wrote, was in charge of authorising purchase of foreign currency on account of being minister of Finance.

With her husband Frederick Mpanga, the former Buganda attorney general, ailing from pancreatic cancer, Mpanga wrote that they needed to take him to Kenya for treatment.   

Without giving her audiences, Mpanga said Ali got hold of the papers and without even giving them a look, ripped them and discarded them in a wastebasket.

“NRM was not a bad thing, because I forgave Moses Ali, which I didn’t think possible. But when I became a Cabinet minister, as I sat down for the first Cabinet meeting, who sits next to me? Moses Ali. We talked – I had no choice,” Mpanga would later tell the Observer newspaper. 

When Amin was eventually overthrown by a combination of Tanzanian troops and Ugandan rebel groups that had taken refuge in Tanzania, there were reprisals on West Nile soldiers and civilians, nearly half of whom became refugees in southern Sudan and eastern Zaire (now DR Congo).

Formed from the ruins of Amin’s army in Sudanese and Congolese refugee camps, Day says, three rebel groups —the Ugandan Army (UA), the Former Uganda National Army (FUNA), and the Ugandan National Rescue Front (UNRF) fought the Uganda National Liberation Army, the national army that had taken over from Amin, from 1980 to 1985.  

“With no external sponsorship and divided between Aringa and Kakwa tribal elements, they fought one another nearly as much as the UNLA,” Day says.  

The UA and FUNA dissolved into Sudan and Congo while the UNRF of Ali, fought until a political settlement was reached with Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA).

But that wasn’t enough to stop the fighting is the restive West Nile because by 1994 the WNBF became part of Sudan’s overarching campaign against the NRA. This support provided the capacity to launch hit-and-run attacks into West Nile from the Sudanese garrison towns of Kaya and Oraba-Miju, often supplied through eastern Zaire.  

While Ali was in government, UNRF II was formed under the leadership of Ali Bamuze, a member of the original UNRF. 

Bamuze insisted on the rebellion on the grounds that the agreement between Ali and Museveni had not been fully implemented. Moreover, the group claimed that it was responding to the arrests and extrajudicial killings of its traditional leaders. 

UNRF II said its purpose was not to overthrow the State, but to resist it and create a space for peace, stability, and development.

UNRF II, however, couldn’t sustain the fight having spent years as refugees, as their grievances could not gain enough traction to mobilise more fighters drawn from a conflict-fatigued population.  

“Above all, the 1999 Nairobi Agreement and rifts within the Sudanese government put pressure on the UNRF II to exit Sudan. In December 2002, the Ugandan government entered into a peace agreement with the UNRF II. Bamuze was given a government post and his fighters received amnesty and material incentives for disarming,” Day says. 

The agreement Ali struck with Museveni that saw him demobilise his rebels has been key to his claims to power within the ruling NRM and at one time claiming that he was a “shareholder”.

In that agreement, Ali alleged, the President who had just seized power after his NRA ousted the Gen Tito Okello Lutwa-led military junta, agreed to assurance that Ali’s UNRF had two Cabinet positions – a minister and a deputy minister – all the time. 

“Why then am I left out [of government] because I lost elections? The agreement had nothing to do with elections and if the agreement has expired then I should be told,” Ali said after he was dumped by Museveni in 2006.  

Ali also bragged how he and Museveni met with now-deceased Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi who advised the two rebels to work together as opposed to running parallel rebel fronts against Obote.  

“Having started working with President Museveni before he formed a government, we are more than colleagues and I feel I have made a significant contribution to the peace and democracy in this country,” Ali said.

After the setback of 2006, Ali bounced back to Parliament in 2011 and Museveni appointed him Third Deputy Prime Minister and Deputy Leader of Government Business. One year later, he was promoted to the rank of General, an elevation that put him among the highest echelons of the army.

The others at the rank of General, whose company Ali joined, were Museveni himself; his brother Salim Saleh; then Chief of Defence Forces Aronda Nyakairima; Elly Tumwine and David Sejusa.