When minister Kibedi attacked Amin from exile

A few days after Rugumayo’s defection, 31 year old lawyer, President Idi Amin’s brother-in-law and Foreign Minister Joshua Wanume Kibedi (younger brother of Amin’s first wife Mama Malyamu), arrived in Kenya with 20 government representatives for official duties.

They reportedly booked in rooms 301, 302, and 303 at Panafric Hotel in Nairobi. He had arrived there with a special message rom Amin to President Jommo Kenyatta intended to discuss matters relating to the positions of Kenyan and Ugandan nationals under each other’s’ jurisdiction.

According to John Kato’s book “The Eight Years of Terror”, although no formal extradition procedures existed between the two countries, Amin wanted to be sure Kenya would not give sanctuary to his potential victims and enemies. He sent his foreign minister Kibedi promising Kenyata: “Uganda armed forces will do everything to ensure that Kenyan citizens and all our brothers and sisters from the African continent will not be molested or mishandled and the lives and property of all people living in Uganda will be protected”.

Kibedi got ill upon arrival and turned up in Nairobi Hospital where he was said to be under constant care and sedation. However rumour that reached Kampala indicated that the youthful minister was touring upcountry farming areas of Nakuru, Kericho and Eldoret and that the Kenyan newspapers reported that the private party held for Kibedi at Kericho had been brought to a premature end when Ugandan security men travelling with him began brawling drunkenly.

Kibedi however, dispatched a letter to Amin refuting the report that he had resigned his office and reaffirmed his “total support and loyalty” as a minister of Foreign Affairs. “The imperialist newspapers have been writing up their own false stories, suggesting that I am not in the hospital at all, in order to cause confusion between you and me”, the letter reads. 

Amin then advised his brother in-law to take one month recuperation and the minister remained in Kenya. However, Amin’s familial generosity did not last. He soon started berating Kibedi for not returning home where he could get lasting treatment for his sickness. He threatened to dismiss the minister if he did not return within two days, accusing him of plotting with Obote to attack Uganda.

To that effect, Kibedi sent his resignation letter to Amin and like Rugumayo, he said he had given the decision a very careful thought.

However, he denied reports that he was joining Obote’s Foreign Minister Sam Odaka in Europe to recruit guerillas.

At the press conference in Paris, France in June 1974, the former minister released a lengthy open letter to Amin which began:

“Ever since I resigned from the office of Forein Minister, you have not ceased to broadcast slander, calumnies and other fabrications about me. Hitherto I have not bothered to answer back, because I found it unnecessary to deny statements whose falsehood was obvious even to a three year old Ugandan.

Furthermore, I wanted to give you plenty of time to wallow in the mire of you own lies, contradictions and other inconsistencies, the more so to expose your true characters to the people of Uganda and to the world at large.”

The letter mentioned Kibedi’s personal experiences in Amin’s cabinet. It recalled Amin telling him the day Chief Justice disappeared: “The boys have got Kiwanuka. They had to pick him up from the High Court because he knew he was being followed, and he was very careful about his movements.” Kibedi claims in his letter his reply was: Oh! My God! This is terrible. He is a Chief Justice. Whatever he has done his arrest will be disastrous for the country.

Kibedi also says in his letter that Amin casually admitted to him Makerere University vice chancellor Kalimuzo had been killed at Makindye and that the head of Uganda Television, James Bwogi was also taken on his orders and killed while driving to work--his crime being that he had shaken his head in dismay during a television discussion.

“I could go on page after page quoting denunciations by you of specific individuals who were shortly murdered. Not in one single case did you produce a shred of evidence to support your allegations against the victims. You simply made denunciations, which then amounted to a death sentence without trial. In such cases, you have been the accuser, the judge and the executioner all rolled into one”, Kibedi noted.

He said while serving in Amin’s government, some of his best friends and people who had been his closest associates in the pre-coup political campaigns were liquidated by Amin’s thugs. He says among those were Kagulire Kasadha, a Czech-trained engineer, Henry Kasingwa, a town treasurer of Jinja Municipal Council, Lume Kasadha, a personnel manager at Nyanza Textiles, Ndaruzi, Mrs Ogwang, both traders at Jinja Town.

“Kalungire, for instance, was working at his office at Makerere University when your thugs came for him. They were driving two cars, one of them a peugeot. On being told that he was being taken for questioning, Kasadha told his capters: ‘take me to Kibedi or at least inform Kibedi that you have arrested me’. Thereupon the abductors set upon Kasadha, beating him up severely. They bundled him into the boot of one of the cars and drove off”, Kibedi wrote

Kibedi says he heard of his friend’s kidnapping within 15 minutes and, with the description of one of the cars, telephoned the security departments in Kampala: the Military Police, the State Research unit, the Public Safety Unit and the Ministry of Defense and Internal Affairs. “I also telephoned you personally asking you to help trace Kasandha... You gave me your standard answer whenever I made such reports to you namely: The individual concerned is probably Obote’s guerilla and that is why he was arrested”, the former minister noted.

Kibedi’s own uncle, Shaban Nkutu (Obote’s former minister of Works) was seized from his home in Jinja in January 1973 when Kibedi was in Ghana heading a Ugandan delegation to the Organisation of African Unity’s Liberation Committee meeting in Accra, where Kibedi was a committee’s outgoing chairman.

“Local citizens put up a determined fight to try to save him, but they were overwhelmed by the gang of your assassins. The following day, you ordered a statement to be put out saying that Nkutu had run away and that anybody who saw him should report to the police”, he added.

Kibedi noted that when he returned from the Ghana conference a few days later, Nkutu’s body was found floating on R. Nile in Jinja, badly disfigured by several bayonet incisions. The body was taken to the mortuary at Jinja Hospital where soldiers mounted guard over the mortuary and refused to surrender the body to the relatives.

Kibedi’s letter tackles Amin’s personal involvement in the liquidation of thousands of innocent Ugandans, including deaths of men whose wives or girlfriends Amin wanted, saying by killing for personal reasons soldiers emulated Amin.

Kibedi says his classmate and manager of Barclays Bank branch in Kabale who had turned down a loan application from a soldier was dragged away from the bank in the full view of the bank employees, never to be seen again. “Later, the assassins took his trouser and shoes to the family to show that he had been finished”.

Kibedi’s letter corroborated endless killings directed especially against the Langi and Acholi... “You have at various times ordered the liquidation of tribal groups in the army and civilian life, largely as a result of your paranoiac hatred arising from your deep-seated fear of all ethnic groups other than your own small one. The lawless elements that you have licensed to kill are certainly not Ugandan armed forces as a whole who have suffered at the hands of the assassins as bitterly as the civilians, notes Kibedi.

The former minister further wrote that Amin entrenched his brutal, erratic and factional rule in Uganda without any shame and extensively employed mercenary soldiers clandestinely recruited from Southern Sudan. 

On the Economic War, Kibedi said the expulsion of the Asians from Uganda was not intended to place the economy into the hands of the common people but to transfer wealth to individuals and foreigners favoured by Amin.

Amin later claimed he had forgiven his brother in law and had alerted all his contacts oversea and asked them not to chase Mr. Kibedi because he had written to him about some Ugandans in exile who were conducting subversive activities against Uganda. He said Kibedi, Rugumayo, Banange, and John Kazora along with former Obote’s Attorney General Godfrey Binaisa--all living in exile at the time--were not bad people and were among his best friends and performed their duties efficiently.

“But they were confused by some bad elements and they decided to run away. I’m happy that they are all employed. Nobody will harm them if they decide to return to their motherland”, Amin said impudently.

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