Idea of using violence to rule took root in Moshi

Author: Peter Mulira. PHOTO/FILE.

What you need to know:

  • Mr Peter Mulira says: Moshi is the immediate cause of our present predicament where the gun is the master.  

One Thursday afternoon in March 1979, Robert Sebunnya, presently the Presidential Adviser on Buganda Affairs, came to me in Nairobi to inform me that I had been selected to be in the delegation of one of the Anti-Amin groups at the Moshi Conference.

The Moshi Conference of all anti-Amin Ugandan groups was a brain-child of President Nyerere, who wanted a Ugandan political cover to the military victory the Tanzanian army was now sensing.

As it turned out, Nyerere succeeded in getting a political solution he wanted, but handed the country to military cabals.

As I believed that only Ugandans as a whole had a right to elect their leaders, I informed my guest that I could not go to the conference but Sebunnya sweet-talked me into accepting the honour. 

The following day, we arrived at the Tanzania/Kenya boarder at Namanga at 2pm and were immediately arrested by the police. We were released only after we gave an undertaking that we would return to Nairobi and skip Moshi.

After gaining our freedom, we made a decision to sit it out at Namanga Hotel and continue to Tanzania through panya (paths normally used by smugglers).

On arrival at Moshi around lunchtime, we headed for the nearest hotel where we run into Shaffique Arrain, a bosom friend of Milton Obote, who was beside himself with rage. Arrain was shouting to no person in particular: “We shall not accept this. It is against all original plans. I am going to ring Mze...”

We left this hotel in a haste for another one after realising that the hotel was a preserve of Dr Obote’s supporters. It was like jumping from frying pan into the fire proper because the next hotel we went to seemed to be the preserve of those who were against “the domination of fighting groups.” 

Then there were the US-based groups that were comprised of people like Godfrey Binaisa, Lutakome Kayira, Ben Dramadri, and others, who I believe, included Paul Ssemogerere, and were pushing for a different line in the discourse. 

After the issue of accreditation was resolved, the conference took off in an acrimonious manner until Nyerere intervened by sending his trusted minister of Foreign Affairs and later president Mkapa to swing his whip as a result of which Prof Yusuf Lule emerged as the common leader imposed from above.

After church service on Sunday, Sebunnya and I sat down for pre-lunch drinks at our hotel gardens. Godfrey Binaisa joined us, but as soon as he sat down, he was whisked away by a man in a Kaunda suit, who engaged him in what looked like a hot discussion a few yards from us.

When Binaisa returned to us, he told us that the man in Kaunda suit was the permanent secretary in the president’s office and had just delivered a message from president Nyerere. 

The message was to request Binaisa to convince Prof Lule to allow Dr Obote to return to Uganda on the same plane, which Binaisa declined to do.

Nyerere’s request to Binaisa proved to me that everybody was in this game for his own personal interests and that intrigues were the order of the day. Moshi is the immediate cause of our present predicament where the gun is the master. 

To blame the present use of the army in political sphere and to misuse the police in the discharge of their work, is to go astray. 

Guns were introduced into our politics at Moshi where liberal views were looked upon as sacrilege and the notion that only a person who controlled the means of violence could rule the country, took root. 

Mr Mulira is a lawyer. 
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