Luweero myths and missing NRA generals

When news media got awash with stories like “14 NRA/UPDF generals, over six hundred officers retired,” I was immediately struck by specific flashback. In national interest, I resisted, but it persisted. Still, I ‘resisted.’ Then I elected to peruse through the list of the ‘retired giants’. Bang, I got it; Koreta, Kutesa. I perused, looking for the-many Ssekatawas, Musaazis and possibly Namusisis. Then I halted.

Holding back the thoughts on falsehoods that NRA started its war of banditry in Luweero with ‘gallant’ 27 men instead of – possibly - 1,200 and over, I decided to trace common sense. 

First, that the little boys Museveni boastfully baptised as ‘kadogos’ were children ‘rescued’ from the UNLA and ‘adopted’ by the NRA. If so, where are the girls? Is it not logical that UNLA would have sought to kill the boys as potentially more war-machine threats than the girls?

Second, I witnessed these ‘kadogos’ as they arrived in Kampala. There were not many Musaazis among them and, certainly the ‘few’ were the most emaciated but again, perhaps my eyes were too ‘shy’ at the time to thoroughly and objectively observer after all, I was astounded – almost certainly traumatised – to imagine these were ‘soldiers’.

But what really did it for me was the recent retirement and so I went back to my loyal fact-sheet, Milton Obote’s Notes on Concealment of Genocide in Uganda, (a must read). The father of the nation suggests at paragraph 153 that a close examination of these issues would “not fit into Museveni’s lies and claims that he started with only 27 men and that the people of Luweero in their thousands joined insurgency willingly and happily”. 

Dr Obote argues that such “a massive support for Museveni, in Luweero, from 1981 to 1985 – 4 ½ years – could and would have meant the domination by the Luweero people at all levels of the NRM/NRA structures” yet, that was not the case by the time of his writing in 1990 nor is it the case today – 40 years later. 

And Obote continues, “There were no Luweero men in NRA holding the ranks of Major General, Brigadier, Colonel or Lt Colonel” nor were there any Luweero men as part of his personal protection brigade (PGB), “a fact which is curious and most incongruous to Museveni’s public claims of the love and trust the Luweero people overwhelmingly reposed in him”.

The late president continued: “It is inconceivable that the Luweero people in the NRA did not excel in the battles with the UNLA and could not, therefore, rise up in rank” and hence questions, “why and how not even a single man from the only district Museveni claims to have given him massive support, fought with him, lived with him and trusted him is not to be found in his praetorian guards”.

And just to seal it off, the former president argued that the military aside, the political wing of the NRA was found equally wanting as illustrated; Luweero was traditionally, the most cosmopolitan district in Uganda only next to Tororo (former Bukedi) and was not necessarily inhabited by people whom Museveni always loved to call ‘primitive and backward’. Second, the ‘father of Ugandan nationalism and independence struggle, for instance, IK Musazi, was born and reared in Luweero. In 1981 and thereafter, there were, in rural Luweero, highly educated retired men and women professionals, retired administrators as well as wealthy and influential landowners, farmers and traders’ effectively, opinion leaders. Yet by 1986, there was none ‘in the highest council of NRM/NRA!’

This, Dr Obote’s account, was of course in 1990. But, reading the list of those ‘retired’ in 2021 again and again, I could not help but fall sick by the extent to which Ugandans have been duped and blinded for so long.

But, backed by my daily prayer as ‘I put on the Girdle of Truth, the Breastplate of Righteousness, the Sandals of peace and the helmet of salvation’ I say, you decide.

The writer is a pan-Africanist and former columnist with New African Magazine

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