2 years, 6 months ago-
Why President Idi Amin Deported the British (and the British Asians) from Uganda.
Picture: President Idi Amin with the Asians who opted to take the Ugandan nationality and remain in the country.
To state the official facts, the expulsion affected the British. And the Asians who left were also British passport holders.
Secondly it was about the economic empowerment of the indigenous people of Uganda.
After the 1962 political independence, the economy was still in the hands of the colonialists and those they had brought to Uganda to serve their interests.
As the picture shows, the expulsion had nothing to do with xenophobia.
And as the saying goes, ” its about the economy, stupid.”
If we look at all the successful senior indigenous businessmen in Uganda for example, one notices dedicated indigenous entrepreneurs who ventured into big business only since Idi Amin’s 1972 economic empowerment policy for the indigenous people.
Before that, there was not a single Ugandan entrepreneur. All were British (and British Asians).
The Ugandans only became successful from the day President Idi Amin expelled the British Asians, nationalized all the businesses, compensated the deportees for their losses, redistributed the businesses and properties to Ugandans, and thereby gave Ugandan citizens an opportunity to also be successful.
While the global media tends to only discuss the disgruntled British narrative, the real perspective of the indigenous Ugandans and fellow Africans is completely different.
In 1972, once the deportations were implemented, the nationwide weeks-long celebrations by ordinary Ugandans was unprecedented. Not even independence day 1962 could match the euphoria.
In fact all the attempts by the foreign media to try and portray the event as a wrong xenophobic policy has been a complete waste of their time in the conscience of the ordinary Ugandan.
For Ugandans, President Idi Amin was right in empowering his people and ensuring a more equitable redistribution of the means of production. He tried to uplift the Ugandan people from economic servitude to people who clearly didn’t have Ugandans best interests at heart. A despicable situation that was not about to change as the British dominance was originally intended to be perpetual. Had Amin not intervened nothing would have changed for Ugandans.
So why this bizarre disconnect between the western press narrative and the African masses view on this subject?
Back then there was need to address the deliberate segregative economic discrimination. Not only in Uganda, but in all other East African countries as well.
Let me provide a quick historical background on the matter that some so-called historians are either ignorant about, or their selective amnesia is at work.
The Indians were given British passports upon independence in East Africa because they were not East African nationals. They were not Ugandans as they didn’t have Ugandan nationality. So calling them Ugandan Asians is a fallacy.
And technically they were Britain’s responsibility since it is London which had brought the Asian laborers to Africa. A responsibility that the UK probably shared with India, their country of origin.
How can one be Ugandan without official Ugandan nationality documents?
The British passports that were given to the Asians upon Uganda’s independence were originally just to give the Indians some diplomatic protection as they continued to serve British economic interests in Uganda after independence. However giving them those passports was the best indication of who was responsible for the Asians.
But in typical escapist fashion, the British colonial supremacists packed their bags and left the Asians (now British citizens) behind, and they weren’t allowed to follow the colonial master to the UK.
By the terms of the 1962 UK immigration laws, British passport holders living in independent commonwealth countries could move freely to Britain. This position changed in 1968 when new controls restricted entry to people with at least one UK-born grandparent.
In June 2010, a British Asian by the names of Asada Khan wrote: “After a highly effective populist campaign led by Enoch Powell MP and Duncan Sandys MP to deprive the British Asians of their right to enter the UK, the Wilson Government introduced emergency legislation – the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 – and drove it through all its parliamentary stages in three tumultuous days and nights. On its face, the 1968 Act was merely applying a familiar set of qualifications for the acquisition of UK citizenship to UK immigration law. But as members of all political parties, the press and the general public knew, the real purpose of this act was to deprive the British Asians of their right of entry into the UK on racial grounds.”
Amazingly India also closed its doors to those trying to leave Kenya, thereby causing the ‘Kenya Asian crisis’. The Indian government reportedly refused to recognize them as bonafide nationals and later even established new rules requiring that any returnees should re-apply for citizenship in a long and tedious process.
If any single decision was most painful in the whole event, It was India’s. Denying its own people their natural nationality and their own country.
The pain must have been felt by at least a million Indians not only in East Africa, but also those in all British colonies, territories and Islands across the globe. They were all affected by their country’s politicians decision. The entire Indian citizenry that had been forcefully emigrated abroad over a whole century, was made stateless over night by their own government back home. The magnitude and consequences of that decision have never been fully appreciated to this day.
In regards to the disturbing predicament, one elderly Indian, Suresh Somaya, said: ” When the bridge to turn around is destroyed, you just have to go ahead.”
After being forcefully exiled to Africa by Britain, they now found themselves with Britain as their best option for refuge. If there ever was karma, this was the beginning.
Basically, the events were far more complicated and difficult for all parties than is publicly explained. And those responsible are quite comfortable blaming Idi Amin in order to hide their heartlessness towards their own citizens.
The reality on the ground was that the three East African governments were under immense public pressure from their indigenous citizenry to address the issue of equitable opportunity for all and provide economic empowerment to their people just as was done with political empowerment after attaining independence. The indigenous citizens now wanted to fully own their country, and were demanding that the colonialists and the people they came with should all leave. The increasing social tensions and pressure from the people could not be ignored by any African leader. The sometimes harsh treatment Africans suffered at the hands of many Asian employers fueled those tensions that British Asians have to this day not expressed any regrets for either.
In one of her columns in UK’s Independent newspaper, British politician Yasmine Alibhai Brown, while recounting her childhood in Uganda, admitted that she, her family, and Ugandan Asians constantly expressed hostility and contempt for black Ugandans whose country they were living in. That is just the tip of the iceberg on the sad reality of racism, abuse, and discrimination that many are not being open about in their discussions or publications on the matter, yet it was one of the core issues that helped fuel the deportations, and was the daily tragedy of many indigenous Ugandans who worked in total servitude under the British and British Asians. If the words racism and xenophobia could be applied to any group, the British and the Asians amply qualified for them.Meanwhile, Kenya, which also saw the same behaviors, embarked on the famous “Kenyanization” policy in 1968. In Uganda, by the time Amin implemented his decision in 1972, it was six years after Kenya had started its deportations, and ten years had passed since Uganda’s independence. Those were ten years of increasing pressure from the Ugandan people on the topic and any racist/abusive incident just made matters worse. Milton Obote who led Uganda before Amin, had found himself drafting “The Common Mans Charter”_ a policy document that included the deportations, nationalizations, and equitable redistribution of wealth.
Britain and India were not cooperative when this matter arose. Particularly the UK which was originally not willing to take their responsibility further than just issuing passports to the Indians. The British government would even refuse to attend a summit called by the three East African countries in Nairobi 1967 where Britain and India had been invited to discuss the repatriation/deportation subject.
It is after the UK and India’s refusal of diplomacy that East African presidents Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Julius Nyerere from Tanzania, and Uganda’s Milton Obote met in Nairobi and decided to go ahead and start the deportations to the country of passport nationality.
If I recall the figure correctly, Kenya deported around 50,000. A slightly lesser number were deported from Tanzania as well.
By 1972 President Amin had become the Ugandan president after Milton Obote who originally planned the deportations together with the leaders of Kenya and Tanzania. Amin’s only change to the decision was that the British should leave in one go rather than have time to first “milk the economy” as he said they were doing. That was a direct consequence from having them leave the country in small monthly installments. It literally gave them time to suck capital out of Uganda’s economy, thereby killing the economy as they left. For ones country’s sake, what other option does one have to stop that sad state of affairs?
In a 2003 article published in UK’s Independent newspaper, Mme Alibhai Brown who was amongst those deported said: “I cringe to hear recordings of Amin accusing Asians of milking the economy. But the truth is that many Asians, including members of my own extended family, were holding back taxes and sending out money to Europe. The truth is always messier than fables.”
Of all the deportees, only one is honest enough to admit this fact. She basically is saying “Amin was right”.
On the other hand, the British government had simply found themselves trapped after East Africans decided to implement deportation. London now had no other option but to accept its own citizens that it never wanted, and had abandoned in Africa.
That is why President Amin called himself the Conqueror of the British Empire in Uganda. He kicked out British political and economic supremacism from the country.
Let me restate this again clearly. Amin expelled the British. Those who chose Ugandan nationality as he had publicly offered, remained in Uganda as seen in the picture here.
And as mentioned earlier, Kenya and Tanzania had started deportations and redistribution of properties and businesses even before Amin came to power. To this day, those properties remain a sensitive political issue in Kenya as it seems President Jomo Kenyatta is accused of having taken some for himself, thereby making the Kenyatta’s the richest family in the country today.
After the Ugandan nationalization, President Amin established an open application process which was made available to all Ugandans so that the indigenous people could take over the nationalized properties. A proper business plan was one of the requirements. The names of those who took on the challenge is available in Uganda government records to this day. People from all religions and all tribes across the country. Yet some media houses made false claims that Amin shared the properties “with his kinsmen”, “with his cronies”.
Surprisingly, Obote, Kenyatta, and Nyerere remained mysteriously silent when Amin started to face undue condemnation on the matter from the UK, US, Australia and Canada. That was the skewed East African Unity Amin had to live within.
But despite the British media frantic attempts to berate the policy, Ugandans benefited from the Amin economic empowerment policy across the board and in every single town across the country. Most importantly, they continue to be thankful for the nationalism and patriotism behind the policy.
President Amin even refused one of the biggest bribes ever at the time from the deportees.
The Ugandan president was so disciplined and fair with the redistribution process that he actually didn’t take a single business or property for himself unlike in Kenya. Yet he had all the power to do so in one order had he so wished.
None of our pseudo Ugandan pan-africanist revolutionaries that we have today would have resisted taking some “British Asian handshake” for themselves and forget the poor Ugandan citizens. As Captain Thomas Sankara once said: “They buy big cars and have big bank accounts yet they talk about revolution”.
The 1990 Ugandan privatization process for example, where over a hundred state enterprises were sold off in a most corrupt IMF imposed structural adjustment programme, is one policy where not a single coin is accounted for to this day.
A testimony to the weakness of our politicians once they detect any money they can pocket. These are the very people who used to run to report Amin to the UK that he took properties for himself. Look what they did themselves years later.
The reality is that Idi Amin rejected all bribes from the corrupt deportees, and he did so publicly.
Let us analyze the event seriously. For example the record rise in Gross National Income (GNI) per capita for indigenous Ugandans as a direct result of the Amin policy.
Last Saturday, The Kampala Express published an article that basically asserted that the only time Uganda had a positive trade balance (where the income from our exports was higher than the total value of imports), was during the Amin presidency. They calculated excess income in 1977 to have been $2 billion in today’s dollars (adjusted for inflation) from coffee alone. This was the effort of Ugandans who have been berated as failures back then.
Yet this was an economic success that none of the other politicians before or after Amin have ever managed. Not even the colonialists before independence, nor their imported Indians.
As I recently stated, economic empowerment is the one area where Nelson Mandela failed the indigenous black South African people. The latest political party in South Africa, the EFF (Economic Freedom Fighters) are currently advocating for that very economic empowerment for the black people. And they have growing support amongst the majority black community which is increasingly frustrated with the African National Congress (ANC) corruption scandals with the Gupta’s for example.
Where Mr. Nelson Mandela failed in economic empowerment for black South Africans, President Idi Amin succeeded for indigenous Ugandans.
In a 1975 BBC interview, President Amin asked: “Why didn’t the British teach the local Africans how to build the railway, but instead opted to import labor from another continent?”
That is the essence of the issue. Many politicians discuss the 1972 expulsion from the disgruntled British media perspective, without being able to pin the root cause.
Yet President Amin can visualize the whole debacle, and state the cause in one simple question.
Knowledge and training is what Ugandan’s and Africans needed most back then, still need today, and will always need even in a million years. Knowledge in all fields including in business.
Had the British trained the indigenous Africans that they found in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda to build the railway, run businesses, and any other subsequent projects, they would have been uplifting the local African population themselves in a mutually beneficial way, and the East African expulsions wouldn’t have happened.
But the British establishment is continuing its attempts to flee responsibility for their flawed policies in East Africa during colonialism.
I was surprised that they even try to blame Idi Amin for crushing the Mau Mau independence uprising in Kenya, yet he was by then a mere foot soldier in the Kings African Rifles regiment and responding to their orders. Until a group of Kenyan victims saw through the diversionary trick and decided to sue Britain directly in 2009. They have since exposed the true magnitude of British heartlessness and moral depravity in crushing Kenyans aspirations for independence in the late 1950’s.
Until 2009, the UK government and political establishment was hiding behind frantic finger pointing at President Idi Amin in the hope that no one would ever notice the blood on their hands and deduce that it was actually them behind the tragedies in Kenya, just like they were in many other countries.
They marginalized and maligned Africans from the moment they set foot in Africa, and only exploited us to achieve their supremacist whims. They immediately embarked on abusing their welcome by establishing themselves as the political and economic rulers of our own countries. They then unilaterally declared Uganda a British Protectorate in 1894. As the late Ugandan statesman Mayanja Nkangi said recently in his last interview before his death last month: “the word ‘protectorate’ had nothing to do with protecting Ugandans, rather to protect their own interests”.
This was in line with the ideology behind the infamous “Scramble for Africa” at the Berlin conference.
British colonialism then sidelined locals from business, entrepreneurship, and political leadership within the centralized government system. Trade unions of African laborers were only allowed after immense suffering including torture, imprisonment and shooting live bullets at any African protesters. The same violent situation occurred when Africans demanded self rule/independence.
After their 1972 expulsion from Uganda, Amin had to send hundreds of thousands of Ugandans for specialized training and higher education to acquire the knowledge that indigenous Ugandans had been deliberately deprived of. He sent many Ugandans to learn to become technicians, administrators, managers, pilots, teachers, engineers, accountants, mechanics, electricians, nurses, doctors…etc, so as to take over the entire economy successfully. At the time there was not even one Ugandan CEO, or even a mere supervisor. Amin had to ensure that Ugandans handled all the responsibilities in their country, be they big or small.
So when he nationalized the British economy that he found here and handed it over to the indigenous Ugandans, that was the one major challenge Ugandans had to rise up to: Knowledge of how to run it. And let nobody deceive you, Ugandans did manage.
What we call the Ugandan economy before Amin’s 1972 nationalization, was actually 98% British, and it’s income only served themselves at 98% as well. More than 7 million Ugandans had to share the remaining 2%.
There was basically no Ugandan economy to talk about. It was all British.
Until President Idi Amin came and literally founded the true Ugandan economy in 1972.
When he gave the British the option to be Ugandan citizens and stay, or keep British citizenship but leave for Britain, 30,000 of them chose to leave.
Those who chose to become Ugandans and remain in the country, continued their trade in Uganda, and like other Ugandans, they also applied for, and took over properties and businesses of those who had left. They were now eligible for the process that redistributed the nationalized assets to any Ugandan citizen.
The behavior of berating President Amin’s fair nationalist and pan-africanist achievements is mainly coming from British disgruntlement (plus the so-called “Ugandan exiles” who came with the Tanzanians to Uganda in 1979). Yet they failed to do better for the people of Uganda. They actually grabbed the properties for themselves once they walked into Kampala, and started their destruction. Even the pseudo policy of returning the nationalized properties was a farce that is plagued with corruption and back deals.
Many Asians who had attempted to return to Uganda and reclaim the properties have since fled for a second time, abandoning the process for fear of their lives. The rot in the process has caused them further misery, and many still suffer another pain in silence.
Let us not forget that Amin had compensated them for all the nationalized businesses in 1972. It is also well known that in 1979 he left the country with zero national debt.
For 15 years after Idi Amin, there was constant war plus total collapse of the state and the economy. Uganda turned into a permanent failed state of decay and destruction. Not a single new government project, program or service. Widespread looting and chronic mismanagement of government and private companies.
That is what the Ugandan people see constantly after Amin. I’ll leave out their disturbing human rights record for now. As a researcher said during an April 12th 2013 BBC interview for their “Witness” radio program,, “if you thought Amin was bad, what came after him was unbelievable.”
Meanwhile, the International Journal of Historical studies wrote; “During the course of his eight year reign , President Amin embarked on one of the largest urban renewals the country had ever seen.”
A Canadian reporter remarked in a 1978 report for the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) that: “Construction is booming and the government has invested seriously in education, health and the agricultural sector”.
This is the reality. And all ordinary Ugandans know that. Tat is why they thank President Amin for the development efforts he made.
Younger generations of Ugandans learn from their parents and grandparents. They then discover that Ugandans actually enjoyed his company. Many benefited from Amin’s exceptional nationalism and his unfaltering stand to see his countrymen and women succeed.
The elders know exactly how locals where completely disadvantaged and marginalized from owning property and the means of production in their own country by the British…until Amin.
They know the segregation and abuse they endured at the hands of British and Indian political and economic supremacism in Uganda. These Ugandan elders are also the first to tell their children that “forget all these lies from racist Bazungu (white people) who hated Amin for nationalizing and redistributing all colonial interests to indigenous Ugandans”.
An Asian lady called Jamila Siddiqui once wrote an article that gave a rare insight on the 1972 expulsion. She said: “When the British formally left Uganda [upon it’s independence in 1962] and the Blacks took over, hundreds of Asians swore they would be going back to India. But they didn’t. As a student at Makerere University in 1972, judging by the reaction of my peers to the Expulsion order, the vast majority of educated, and reasonable-minded Black Ugandans were actually very supportive of Amin’s decision. Every night when the countdown for Asians to get out was updated at the end of the evening news, cheers went up. Blacks needed more of a chance to do their own thing. That such a “chance” would most certainly materialize once the exploitative Asians had been booted out. Black African servants where the only link that Asians had to African culture. General Idi Amin was actually the catalyst who finally caused the time-bomb to explode, a time-bomb that was initially planted by the British and then, in many ways nurtured by the Asians ourselves. All the time that bomb was ticking away, we never thought of Uganda as home. But once ousted, many of us cried bitter tears of fury for the so-called “homeland”. It took an expulsion for Asians to start claiming Uganda as home.”
The above words are from an Asian who had first hand experience, and knew how her people felt about Africa.
To this day, many indigenous Ugandans still find it incredible that British Asians came back to reclaim what they had already been fully compensated for by President Amin. However, Asians are known to be opportunistic in financial matters. I am told that’s what makes them successful businessmen. And that’s partly why leaving for Britain was their obvious choice once they were offered the options by the Ugandan leader in 1972. They celebrate in secret and cry crocodile tears in public They had never expected to be freely flown to first world Europe aboard British passenger jets, experiencing the take off and jet lag, snowfall, Buckingham palace, and custard pudding for the first time in their lives. All with their hefty compensation already being wired by Amin to their new British bank accounts. What better Diwali celebration than that ever?
One British Asian lady S. Hassam wrote; I was sad at first but happy to move Canada.” Another male responded saying: “Amin was the best thing to happen to us.”
In Uganda, the ordinary citizen can be regularly found saying: “Amin is the most patriotic president Uganda ever had”. “Amin opened our eyes”. “Amin is the only president who had the country and its citizens at heart”.
So why is it that Ugandans speak that way if the British slander against the Ugandan leader was true? Aren’t Ugandans the very people they say he killed? For any keen observer, something just isn’t right.
I who lived with him, can’t help wondering where these stories of blood and cannibalism came from.
I grew up and studied in this country. My fellow school mates in different schools are around. Where did 500,000 people die in Uganda and we neither saw nor heard about it?
The only such number of deaths we can see even today, are in Uganda’s Luweero district. Victims of the infamous ” Museveni bush war” that happened for 6 years (between 1980 and 1986) after Amin had left the country.
500,000 skeletons and mass graves can be found everywhere in the region, and all Ugandans know those responsible. Some are living on government housing and other stipends in the UK. Many have become British citizens as well. It appears they got military support including training and weaponry from Britain during that genocide. Nothing like the Luweero disaster ever happened in Uganda before.
The same people killed hundreds of thousands of Ugandans simply because they were from Amin’s ethnic group. They went after thousands more because they shared the same faith as Idi Amin. Where is the concern at the documented killing of innocent civilians. Everyone knows the Ombachi massacre (1982). It was part of a well orchestrated campaign to exterminate everyone in Amin’s home region. Where is the global concern at loss of life?
In my quest to establish the truth about Amin, I took the time to contact Amnesty International in 2014. They are the source of the numbers of people they say Amin killed. I asked them where they got their numbers and gory tales from, and what was their actual evidence?
It turns out they simply sat in hotel lobbies in London and Nairobi, then literally created the numbers from thin air. This they did together with the so-called “Ugandan exiles” who were hoping for a few dollars in exchange.
It is sad that an organization can appropriate for itself a noble cause (human rights), but they then use it for ulterior supremacist agenda’s. I was shocked to learn that they were once caught working with Al-Qaeda terrorists in the Middle East. What kind of human rights organization is that?
Yet other foreign and independent journalist came on the ground in Uganda st the time, and toured the country. None ever saw any killing take place in this country under Amin. Plus the around 5000 exiles who returned to Uganda with the Tanzanians during the 1979 war, are the very people who allegedly “disappeared”. This is what I found from my own research during which I met all kinds of people from all sides of the topic.
If they claim that Amin killed all those people then where is the ruling of that judgement, and where is the justice for those people?
The sole reason neither exists is because the accusations are just bullshit.
As a person who was raised by Amin, talked to him every day, and lived with him, I can look at people lying about him in broad daylight and just shudder at the level of hypocrisy and lies vested in some
humans.
Amin was no murderer. Not a single gunshot was ever fired at home.
He was no cannibal either. We had our regular Ugali, Matooke, chapati or rice for supper, and nobody’s head was ever kept in our fridge. I would have known since I was there.
They then said he had eaten one of his own sons. Yet my brother in question is alive and well to this day and recently got married.Indeed politics is a very dirty game. That is what my father also used to tell us.
However it is quite boisterous for someone out there to try to tell me what was happening in my own home, yet they never even lived there and I did. That is the stupidity I encounter almost everyday. But it is not their fault. They believe white media more than they would believe their own mothers.
On the national level, unlike the situation that is common today in Uganda, Amin never once deployed the army against the Ugandan people, and never carried out any assault against civilians. He was a soldier and the only people he fought were the rebels who were known to deliberately attempt to terrorize the Ugandan people in an effort to grab power for themselves. Ugandans know them, and they themselves actually confess publicly about their actions and intentions these days. Some of the most dishonest people on earth are those who were against Amin. But all Africans who were there in the 70’s will tell you that Idi Amin was an African hero.
He supported all the liberation struggles on the continent. Their fighters had training camps in Uganda. He offered them Ugandan passports for their mobilization trips abroad, and catered for their welfare. Even contributing weapons and funds on behalf of the Ugandan people. That is how I came to meet Joshua Nkomo, Jonas Savimbi, Robert Mugabe and the freedom fighters from Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique and Angola. From UNITA to SWAPO, to South Africa’s ANC, they all found sanctuary in Uganda under President Idi Amin. In the 70’s, especially from 1975 when he was chairman of the OAU, the single most vocal person against Apartheid on the African and global scene was Idi Amin. That is why upon his release from prison, Nelson Mandela never forgot to thank him for his great effort to liberate the indigenous people of South Africa from Apartheid.I doubt if any youths today know Amin as a staunch pan-africanist. Most are clueless about all this because the media deliberately tells them the other stories that demonize a man who actually fought for oppressed black people everywhere. He even took a stand against the racism and discrimination endured by black Americans in the United States. That was the true Idi Amin they don’t want any African to remember. And the media has been busy flooding the youths with lies, mockery and ridicule instead.
Even their stories about how he came to power is a lie. They won’t tell you that he was forced at gun point. Luckily those involved have recently started to speak out.
But Amin was right on many issues, and it hurt many people in western capitals that he stood against their exploitative agenda’s on the African continent.
The Saudi’s told us he was too honest for politics. And indeed Amin himself once declared; “I am a soldier. Not a politician.”
My father was an honest person who was constantly trying to help people. He was religious and could sometimes get up at 4am and make the 80km journey simply to pray in the holy city of Mecca and then drive back home. His advice to us was always about hard work. He used to tell us that the two kinds of people he never wanted near him were liars and thieves. He also tried to make sure we got an education. He knew that it was necessary even if he himself never got the opportunity. All Ugandans know him for being the one president who never allowed corruption, and never enriched himself from state funds.
From his home in Zambia, it is Amin’s main political enemy in Uganda, Sir Apollo Milton Obote, who once said: “In all the people who have led Uganda, the only person I can respect as a President, the one who truly had the country at heart, is Idi Amin.”
In brief, the biggest “Fake News” of the century on this planet is the media reports about Amin.
In conclusion, the whole 1972 deportation of the British and their imported cronies in Africa turned out to be a win-win for both the indigenous Ugandans and the British Asian deportees. They got the free opportunity to become British citizens and now live in first world Europe.
Hundreds of thousands of African, Arab and Asian migrants are dying in the Mediterranean sea everyday to get that opportunity.
Meanwhile the British Indians from Uganda watch their dead bodies on British satellite TV and UK cable news. And every year they joyfully celebrate Diwali (the Indian new year) in Trafalgar square. The Mayor of London today is a British Asian. Thanks to Idi Amin.
He is also standing shoulder to shoulder with world leaders in the fight against terrorism, and publicly refusing to respond to taunting tweets from Donald Trump junior.But the real disgruntled looser in this whole British Asians saga, the people who caused it all in the first place, is Britain. If anything, their recent Brexit decision, which is fueled by “Britain First” anti-immigration ideology and related terrorism that killed humanitarian MP Jo Cox last year, is testimony to their state of anger.
I however, call on all Ugandans to remain vigilant. We and the Indians still have some accounts to balance after the deportees returned to Uganda in recent years and reclaimed properties that they had already been compensated for by Amin.
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Brief history on the Asians question and how the Indians chose British passports over Ugandan citizenship: http://minorityrights.org/
minorities/ east-african-asians/ UK Parliament debate on the subject in August 1972. Note the arrangements the British government already had for deportations even before Amin was President: http://
hansard.millbanksystems.com /lords/1972/aug/07/ uganda-future-of-british-as ians) To state the official facts, the expulsion affected the British. And the Asians who left were also British passport holders.
Secondly it was about the economic empowerment of the indigenous people of Uganda.
After the 1962 political independence, the economy was still in the hands of the colonialists and those they had brought to Uganda to serve their interests.
As the picture shows, the expulsion had nothing to do with xenophobia.
And as the saying goes, ” its about the economy, stupid.”
If we look at all the successful senior indigenous businessmen in Uganda for example, one notices dedicated indigenous entrepreneurs who ventured into big business only since Idi Amin’s 1972 economic empowerment policy for the indigenous people.
Before that, there was not a single Ugandan entrepreneur. All were British (and British Asians).
The Ugandans only became successful from the day President Idi Amin expelled the British Asians, nationalized all the businesses, compensated the deportees for their losses, redistributed the businesses and properties to Ugandans, and thereby gave Ugandan citizens an opportunity to also be successful.
While the global media tends to only discuss the disgruntled British narrative, the real perspective of the indigenous Ugandans and fellow Africans is completely different.
In 1972, once the deportations were implemented, the nationwide weeks-long celebrations by ordinary Ugandans was unprecedented. Not even independence day 1962 could match the euphoria.
In fact all the attempts by the foreign media to try and portray the event as a wrong xenophobic policy has been a complete waste of their time in the conscience of the ordinary Ugandan.
For Ugandans, President Idi Amin was right in empowering his people and ensuring a more equitable redistribution of the means of production. He tried to uplift the Ugandan people from economic servitude to people who clearly didn’t have Ugandans best interests at heart. A despicable situation that was not about to change as the British dominance was originally intended to be perpetual. Had Amin not intervened nothing would have changed for Ugandans.
So why this bizarre disconnect between the western press narrative and the African masses view on this subject?
Back then there was need to address the deliberate segregative economic discrimination. Not only in Uganda, but in all other East African countries as well.
Let me provide a quick historical background on the matter that some so-called historians are either ignorant about, or their selective amnesia is at work.
The Indians were given British passports upon independence in East Africa because they were not East African nationals. They were not Ugandans as they didn’t have Ugandan nationality. So calling them Ugandan Asians is a fallacy.
And technically they were Britain’s responsibility since it is London which had brought the Asian laborers to Africa. A responsibility that the UK probably shared with India, their country of origin.
How can one be Ugandan without official Ugandan nationality documents?
The British passports that were given to the Asians upon Uganda’s independence were originally just to give the Indians some diplomatic protection as they continued to serve British economic interests in Uganda after independence. However giving them those passports was the best indication of who was responsible for the Asians.
But in typical escapist fashion, the British colonial supremacists packed their bags and left the Asians (now British citizens) behind, and they weren’t allowed to follow the colonial master to the UK.
By the terms of the 1962 UK immigration laws, British passport holders living in independent commonwealth countries could move freely to Britain. This position changed in 1968 when new controls restricted entry to people with at least one UK-born grandparent.
In June 2010, a British Asian by the names of Asada Khan wrote: “After a highly effective populist campaign led by Enoch Powell MP and Duncan Sandys MP to deprive the British Asians of their right to enter the UK, the Wilson Government introduced emergency legislation – the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 – and drove it through all its parliamentary stages in three tumultuous days and nights. On its face, the 1968 Act was merely applying a familiar set of qualifications for the acquisition of UK citizenship to UK immigration law. But as members of all political parties, the press and the general public knew, the real purpose of this act was to deprive the British Asians of their right of entry into the UK on racial grounds.”
Amazingly India also closed its doors to those trying to leave Kenya, thereby causing the ‘Kenya Asian crisis’. The Indian government reportedly refused to recognize them as bonafide nationals and later even established new rules requiring that any returnees should re-apply for citizenship in a long and tedious process.
If any single decision was most painful in the whole event, It was India’s. Denying its own people their natural nationality and their own country.
The pain must have been felt by at least a million Indians not only in East Africa, but also those in all British colonies, territories and Islands across the globe. They were all affected by their country’s politicians decision. The entire Indian citizenry that had been forcefully emigrated abroad over a whole century, was made stateless over night by their own government back home. The magnitude and consequences of that decision have never been fully appreciated to this day.
In regards to the disturbing predicament, one elderly Indian, Suresh Somaya, said: ” When the bridge to turn around is destroyed, you just have to go ahead.”
After being forcefully exiled to Africa by Britain, they now found themselves with Britain as their best option for refuge. If there ever was karma, this was the beginning.
Basically, the events were far more complicated and difficult for all parties than is publicly explained. And those responsible are quite comfortable blaming Idi Amin in order to hide their heartlessness towards their own citizens.
The reality on the ground was that the three East African governments were under immense public pressure from their indigenous citizenry to address the issue of equitable opportunity for all and provide economic empowerment to their people just as was done with political empowerment after attaining independence. The indigenous citizens now wanted to fully own their country, and were demanding that the colonialists and the people they came with should all leave. The increasing social tensions and pressure from the people could not be ignored by any African leader. The sometimes harsh treatment Africans suffered at the hands of many Asian employers fueled those tensions that British Asians have to this day not expressed any regrets for either.
In one of her columns in UK’s Independent newspaper, British politician Yasmine Alibhai Brown, while recounting her childhood in Uganda, admitted that she, her family, and Ugandan Asians constantly expressed hostility and contempt for black Ugandans whose country they were living in. That is just the tip of the iceberg on the sad reality of racism, abuse, and discrimination that many are not being open about in their discussions or publications on the matter, yet it was one of the core issues that helped fuel the deportations, and was the daily tragedy of many indigenous Ugandans who worked in total servitude under the British and British Asians. If the words racism and xenophobia could be applied to any group, the British and the Asians amply qualified for them.Meanwhile, Kenya, which also saw the same behaviors, embarked on the famous “Kenyanization” policy in 1968. In Uganda, by the time Amin implemented his decision in 1972, it was six years after Kenya had started its deportations, and ten years had passed since Uganda’s independence. Those were ten years of increasing pressure from the Ugandan people on the topic and any racist/abusive incident just made matters worse. Milton Obote who led Uganda before Amin, had found himself drafting “The Common Mans Charter”_ a policy document that included the deportations, nationalizations, and equitable redistribution of wealth.
Britain and India were not cooperative when this matter arose. Particularly the UK which was originally not willing to take their responsibility further than just issuing passports to the Indians. The British government would even refuse to attend a summit called by the three East African countries in Nairobi 1967 where Britain and India had been invited to discuss the repatriation/deportation subject.
It is after the UK and India’s refusal of diplomacy that East African presidents Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Julius Nyerere from Tanzania, and Uganda’s Milton Obote met in Nairobi and decided to go ahead and start the deportations to the country of passport nationality.
If I recall the figure correctly, Kenya deported around 50,000. A slightly lesser number were deported from Tanzania as well.
By 1972 President Amin had become the Ugandan president after Milton Obote who originally planned the deportations together with the leaders of Kenya and Tanzania. Amin’s only change to the decision was that the British should leave in one go rather than have time to first “milk the economy” as he said they were doing. That was a direct consequence from having them leave the country in small monthly installments. It literally gave them time to suck capital out of Uganda’s economy, thereby killing the economy as they left. For ones country’s sake, what other option does one have to stop that sad state of affairs?
In a 2003 article published in UK’s Independent newspaper, Mme Alibhai Brown who was amongst those deported said: “I cringe to hear recordings of Amin accusing Asians of milking the economy. But the truth is that many Asians, including members of my own extended family, were holding back taxes and sending out money to Europe. The truth is always messier than fables.”
Of all the deportees, only one is honest enough to admit this fact. She basically is saying “Amin was right”.
On the other hand, the British government had simply found themselves trapped after East Africans decided to implement deportation. London now had no other option but to accept its own citizens that it never wanted, and had abandoned in Africa.
That is why President Amin called himself the Conqueror of the British Empire in Uganda. He kicked out British political and economic supremacism from the country.
Let me restate this again clearly. Amin expelled the British. Those who chose Ugandan nationality as he had publicly offered, remained in Uganda as seen in the picture here.
And as mentioned earlier, Kenya and Tanzania had started deportations and redistribution of properties and businesses even before Amin came to power. To this day, those properties remain a sensitive political issue in Kenya as it seems President Jomo Kenyatta is accused of having taken some for himself, thereby making the Kenyatta’s the richest family in the country today.
After the Ugandan nationalization, President Amin established an open application process which was made available to all Ugandans so that the indigenous people could take over the nationalized properties. A proper business plan was one of the requirements. The names of those who took on the challenge is available in Uganda government records to this day. People from all religions and all tribes across the country. Yet some media houses made false claims that Amin shared the properties “with his kinsmen”, “with his cronies”.
Surprisingly, Obote, Kenyatta, and Nyerere remained mysteriously silent when Amin started to face undue condemnation on the matter from the UK, US, Australia and Canada. That was the skewed East African Unity Amin had to live within.
But despite the British media frantic attempts to berate the policy, Ugandans benefited from the Amin economic empowerment policy across the board and in every single town across the country. Most importantly, they continue to be thankful for the nationalism and patriotism behind the policy.
President Amin even refused one of the biggest bribes ever at the time from the deportees.
The Ugandan president was so disciplined and fair with the redistribution process that he actually didn’t take a single business or property for himself unlike in Kenya. Yet he had all the power to do so in one order had he so wished.
None of our pseudo Ugandan pan-africanist revolutionaries that we have today would have resisted taking some “British Asian handshake” for themselves and forget the poor Ugandan citizens. As Captain Thomas Sankara once said: “They buy big cars and have big bank accounts yet they talk about revolution”.
The 1990 Ugandan privatization process for example, where over a hundred state enterprises were sold off in a most corrupt IMF imposed structural adjustment programme, is one policy where not a single coin is accounted for to this day.
A testimony to the weakness of our politicians once they detect any money they can pocket. These are the very people who used to run to report Amin to the UK that he took properties for himself. Look what they did themselves years later.
The reality is that Idi Amin rejected all bribes from the corrupt deportees, and he did so publicly.
Let us analyze the event seriously. For example the record rise in Gross National Income (GNI) per capita for indigenous Ugandans as a direct result of the Amin policy.
Last Saturday, The Kampala Express published an article that basically asserted that the only time Uganda had a positive trade balance (where the income from our exports was higher than the total value of imports), was during the Amin presidency. They calculated excess income in 1977 to have been $2 billion in today’s dollars (adjusted for inflation) from coffee alone. This was the effort of Ugandans who have been berated as failures back then.
Yet this was an economic success that none of the other politicians before or after Amin have ever managed. Not even the colonialists before independence, nor their imported Indians.
As I recently stated, economic empowerment is the one area where Nelson Mandela failed the indigenous black South African people. The latest political party in South Africa, the EFF (Economic Freedom Fighters) are currently advocating for that very economic empowerment for the black people. And they have growing support amongst the majority black community which is increasingly frustrated with the African National Congress (ANC) corruption scandals with the Gupta’s for example.
Where Mr. Nelson Mandela failed in economic empowerment for black South Africans, President Idi Amin succeeded for indigenous Ugandans.
In a 1975 BBC interview, President Amin asked: “Why didn’t the British teach the local Africans how to build the railway, but instead opted to import labor from another continent?”
That is the essence of the issue. Many politicians discuss the 1972 expulsion from the disgruntled British media perspective, without being able to pin the root cause.
Yet President Amin can visualize the whole debacle, and state the cause in one simple question.
Knowledge and training is what Ugandan’s and Africans needed most back then, still need today, and will always need even in a million years. Knowledge in all fields including in business.
Had the British trained the indigenous Africans that they found in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda to build the railway, run businesses, and any other subsequent projects, they would have been uplifting the local African population themselves in a mutually beneficial way, and the East African expulsions wouldn’t have happened.
But the British establishment is continuing its attempts to flee responsibility for their flawed policies in East Africa during colonialism.
I was surprised that they even try to blame Idi Amin for crushing the Mau Mau independence uprising in Kenya, yet he was by then a mere foot soldier in the Kings African Rifles regiment and responding to their orders. Until a group of Kenyan victims saw through the diversionary trick and decided to sue Britain directly in 2009. They have since exposed the true magnitude of British heartlessness and moral depravity in crushing Kenyans aspirations for independence in the late 1950’s.
Until 2009, the UK government and political establishment was hiding behind frantic finger pointing at President Idi Amin in the hope that no one would ever notice the blood on their hands and deduce that it was actually them behind the tragedies in Kenya, just like they were in many other countries.
They marginalized and maligned Africans from the moment they set foot in Africa, and only exploited us to achieve their supremacist whims. They immediately embarked on abusing their welcome by establishing themselves as the political and economic rulers of our own countries. They then unilaterally declared Uganda a British Protectorate in 1894. As the late Ugandan statesman Mayanja Nkangi said recently in his last interview before his death last month: “the word ‘protectorate’ had nothing to do with protecting Ugandans, rather to protect their own interests”.
This was in line with the ideology behind the infamous “Scramble for Africa” at the Berlin conference.
British colonialism then sidelined locals from business, entrepreneurship, and political leadership within the centralized government system. Trade unions of African laborers were only allowed after immense suffering including torture, imprisonment and shooting live bullets at any African protesters. The same violent situation occurred when Africans demanded self rule/independence.
After their 1972 expulsion from Uganda, Amin had to send hundreds of thousands of Ugandans for specialized training and higher education to acquire the knowledge that indigenous Ugandans had been deliberately deprived of. He sent many Ugandans to learn to become technicians, administrators, managers, pilots, teachers, engineers, accountants, mechanics, electricians, nurses, doctors…etc, so as to take over the entire economy successfully. At the time there was not even one Ugandan CEO, or even a mere supervisor. Amin had to ensure that Ugandans handled all the responsibilities in their country, be they big or small.
So when he nationalized the British economy that he found here and handed it over to the indigenous Ugandans, that was the one major challenge Ugandans had to rise up to: Knowledge of how to run it. And let nobody deceive you, Ugandans did manage.
What we call the Ugandan economy before Amin’s 1972 nationalization, was actually 98% British, and it’s income only served themselves at 98% as well. More than 7 million Ugandans had to share the remaining 2%.
There was basically no Ugandan economy to talk about. It was all British.
Until President Idi Amin came and literally founded the true Ugandan economy in 1972.
When he gave the British the option to be Ugandan citizens and stay, or keep British citizenship but leave for Britain, 30,000 of them chose to leave.
Those who chose to become Ugandans and remain in the country, continued their trade in Uganda, and like other Ugandans, they also applied for, and took over properties and businesses of those who had left. They were now eligible for the process that redistributed the nationalized assets to any Ugandan citizen.
The behavior of berating President Amin’s fair nationalist and pan-africanist achievements is mainly coming from British disgruntlement (plus the so-called “Ugandan exiles” who came with the Tanzanians to Uganda in 1979). Yet they failed to do better for the people of Uganda. They actually grabbed the properties for themselves once they walked into Kampala, and started their destruction. Even the pseudo policy of returning the nationalized properties was a farce that is plagued with corruption and back deals.
Many Asians who had attempted to return to Uganda and reclaim the properties have since fled for a second time, abandoning the process for fear of their lives. The rot in the process has caused them further misery, and many still suffer another pain in silence.
Let us not forget that Amin had compensated them for all the nationalized businesses in 1972. It is also well known that in 1979 he left the country with zero national debt.
For 15 years after Idi Amin, there was constant war plus total collapse of the state and the economy. Uganda turned into a permanent failed state of decay and destruction. Not a single new government project, program or service. Widespread looting and chronic mismanagement of government and private companies.
That is what the Ugandan people see constantly after Amin. I’ll leave out their disturbing human rights record for now. As a researcher said during an April 12th 2013 BBC interview for their “Witness” radio program,, “if you thought Amin was bad, what came after him was unbelievable.”
Meanwhile, the International Journal of Historical studies wrote; “During the course of his eight year reign , President Amin embarked on one of the largest urban renewals the country had ever seen.”
A Canadian reporter remarked in a 1978 report for the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) that: “Construction is booming and the government has invested seriously in education, health and the agricultural sector”.
This is the reality. And all ordinary Ugandans know that. Tat is why they thank President Amin for the development efforts he made.
Younger generations of Ugandans learn from their parents and grandparents. They then discover that Ugandans actually enjoyed his company. Many benefited from Amin’s exceptional nationalism and his unfaltering stand to see his countrymen and women succeed.
The elders know exactly how locals where completely disadvantaged and marginalized from owning property and the means of production in their own country by the British…until Amin.
They know the segregation and abuse they endured at the hands of British and Indian political and economic supremacism in Uganda. These Ugandan elders are also the first to tell their children that “forget all these lies from racist Bazungu (white people) who hated Amin for nationalizing and redistributing all colonial interests to indigenous Ugandans”.
An Asian lady called Jamila Siddiqui once wrote an article that gave a rare insight on the 1972 expulsion. She said: “When the British formally left Uganda [upon it’s independence in 1962] and the Blacks took over, hundreds of Asians swore they would be going back to India. But they didn’t. As a student at Makerere University in 1972, judging by the reaction of my peers to the Expulsion order, the vast majority of educated, and reasonable-minded Black Ugandans were actually very supportive of Amin’s decision. Every night when the countdown for Asians to get out was updated at the end of the evening news, cheers went up. Blacks needed more of a chance to do their own thing. That such a “chance” would most certainly materialize once the exploitative Asians had been booted out. Black African servants where the only link that Asians had to African culture. General Idi Amin was actually the catalyst who finally caused the time-bomb to explode, a time-bomb that was initially planted by the British and then, in many ways nurtured by the Asians ourselves. All the time that bomb was ticking away, we never thought of Uganda as home. But once ousted, many of us cried bitter tears of fury for the so-called “homeland”. It took an expulsion for Asians to start claiming Uganda as home.”
The above words are from an Asian who had first hand experience, and knew how her people felt about Africa.
To this day, many indigenous Ugandans still find it incredible that British Asians came back to reclaim what they had already been fully compensated for by President Amin. However, Asians are known to be opportunistic in financial matters. I am told that’s what makes them successful businessmen. And that’s partly why leaving for Britain was their obvious choice once they were offered the options by the Ugandan leader in 1972. They celebrate in secret and cry crocodile tears in public They had never expected to be freely flown to first world Europe aboard British passenger jets, experiencing the take off and jet lag, snowfall, Buckingham palace, and custard pudding for the first time in their lives. All with their hefty compensation already being wired by Amin to their new British bank accounts. What better Diwali celebration than that ever?
One British Asian lady S. Hassam wrote; I was sad at first but happy to move Canada.” Another male responded saying: “Amin was the best thing to happen to us.”
In Uganda, the ordinary citizen can be regularly found saying: “Amin is the most patriotic president Uganda ever had”. “Amin opened our eyes”. “Amin is the only president who had the country and its citizens at heart”.
So why is it that Ugandans speak that way if the British slander against the Ugandan leader was true? Aren’t Ugandans the very people they say he killed? For any keen observer, something just isn’t right.
I who lived with him, can’t help wondering where these stories of blood and cannibalism came from.
I grew up and studied in this country. My fellow school mates in different schools are around. Where did 500,000 people die in Uganda and we neither saw nor heard about it?
The only such number of deaths we can see even today, are in Uganda’s Luweero district. Victims of the infamous ” Museveni bush war” that happened for 6 years (between 1980 and 1986) after Amin had left the country.
500,000 skeletons and mass graves can be found everywhere in the region, and all Ugandans know those responsible. Some are living on government housing and other stipends in the UK. Many have become British citizens as well. It appears they got military support including training and weaponry from Britain during that genocide. Nothing like the Luweero disaster ever happened in Uganda before.
The same people killed hundreds of thousands of Ugandans simply because they were from Amin’s ethnic group. They went after thousands more because they shared the same faith as Idi Amin. Where is the concern at the documented killing of innocent civilians. Everyone knows the Ombachi massacre (1982). It was part of a well orchestrated campaign to exterminate everyone in Amin’s home region. Where is the global concern at loss of life?
In my quest to establish the truth about Amin, I took the time to contact Amnesty International in 2014. They are the source of the numbers of people they say Amin killed. I asked them where they got their numbers and gory tales from, and what was their actual evidence?
It turns out they simply sat in hotel lobbies in London and Nairobi, then literally created the numbers from thin air. This they did together with the so-called “Ugandan exiles” who were hoping for a few dollars in exchange.
It is sad that an organization can appropriate for itself a noble cause (human rights), but they then use it for ulterior supremacist agenda’s. I was shocked to learn that they were once caught working with Al-Qaeda terrorists in the Middle East. What kind of human rights organization is that?
Yet other foreign and independent journalist came on the ground in Uganda st the time, and toured the country. None ever saw any killing take place in this country under Amin. Plus the around 5000 exiles who returned to Uganda with the Tanzanians during the 1979 war, are the very people who allegedly “disappeared”. This is what I found from my own research during which I met all kinds of people from all sides of the topic.
If they claim that Amin killed all those people then where is the ruling of that judgement, and where is the justice for those people?
The sole reason neither exists is because the accusations are just bullshit.
As a person who was raised by Amin, talked to him every day, and lived with him, I can look at people lying about him in broad daylight and just shudder at the level of hypocrisy and lies vested in some
humans.
Amin was no murderer. Not a single gunshot was ever fired at home.
He was no cannibal either. We had our regular Ugali, Matooke, chapati or rice for supper, and nobody’s head was ever kept in our fridge. I would have known since I was there.
They then said he had eaten one of his own sons. Yet my brother in question is alive and well to this day and recently got married.Indeed politics is a very dirty game. That is what my father also used to tell us.
However it is quite boisterous for someone out there to try to tell me what was happening in my own home, yet they never even lived there and I did. That is the stupidity I encounter almost everyday. But it is not their fault. They believe white media more than they would believe their own mothers.
On the national level, unlike the situation that is common today in Uganda, Amin never once deployed the army against the Ugandan people, and never carried out any assault against civilians. He was a soldier and the only people he fought were the rebels who were known to deliberately attempt to terrorize the Ugandan people in an effort to grab power for themselves. Ugandans know them, and they themselves actually confess publicly about their actions and intentions these days. Some of the most dishonest people on earth are those who were against Amin. But all Africans who were there in the 70’s will tell you that Idi Amin was an African hero.
He supported all the liberation struggles on the continent. Their fighters had training camps in Uganda. He offered them Ugandan passports for their mobilization trips abroad, and catered for their welfare. Even contributing weapons and funds on behalf of the Ugandan people. That is how I came to meet Joshua Nkomo, Jonas Savimbi, Robert Mugabe and the freedom fighters from Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique and Angola. From UNITA to SWAPO, to South Africa’s ANC, they all found sanctuary in Uganda under President Idi Amin. In the 70’s, especially from 1975 when he was chairman of the OAU, the single most vocal person against Apartheid on the African and global scene was Idi Amin. That is why upon his release from prison, Nelson Mandela never forgot to thank him for his great effort to liberate the indigenous people of South Africa from Apartheid.I doubt if any youths today know Amin as a staunch pan-africanist. Most are clueless about all this because the media deliberately tells them the other stories that demonize a man who actually fought for oppressed black people everywhere. He even took a stand against the racism and discrimination endured by black Americans in the United States. That was the true Idi Amin they don’t want any African to remember. And the media has been busy flooding the youths with lies, mockery and ridicule instead.
Even their stories about how he came to power is a lie. They won’t tell you that he was forced at gun point. Luckily those involved have recently started to speak out.
But Amin was right on many issues, and it hurt many people in western capitals that he stood against their exploitative agenda’s on the African continent.
The Saudi’s told us he was too honest for politics. And indeed Amin himself once declared; “I am a soldier. Not a politician.”
My father was an honest person who was constantly trying to help people. He was religious and could sometimes get up at 4am and make the 80km journey simply to pray in the holy city of Mecca and then drive back home. His advice to us was always about hard work. He used to tell us that the two kinds of people he never wanted near him were liars and thieves. He also tried to make sure we got an education. He knew that it was necessary even if he himself never got the opportunity. All Ugandans know him for being the one president who never allowed corruption, and never enriched himself from state funds.
From his home in Zambia, it is Amin’s main political enemy in Uganda, Sir Apollo Milton Obote, who once said: “In all the people who have led Uganda, the only person I can respect as a President, the one who truly had the country at heart, is Idi Amin.”
In brief, the biggest “Fake News” of the century on this planet is the media reports about Amin.
In conclusion, the whole 1972 deportation of the British and their imported cronies in Africa turned out to be a win-win for both the indigenous Ugandans and the British Asian deportees. They got the free opportunity to become British citizens and now live in first world Europe.
Hundreds of thousands of African, Arab and Asian migrants are dying in the Mediterranean sea everyday to get that opportunity.
Meanwhile the British Indians from Uganda watch their dead bodies on British satellite TV and UK cable news. And every year they joyfully celebrate Diwali (the Indian new year) in Trafalgar square. The Mayor of London today is a British Asian. Thanks to Idi Amin.
He is also standing shoulder to shoulder with world leaders in the fight against terrorism, and publicly refusing to respond to taunting tweets from Donald Trump junior.But the real disgruntled looser in this whole British Asians saga, the people who caused it all in the first place, is Britain. If anything, their recent Brexit decision, which is fueled by “Britain First” anti-immigration ideology and related terrorism that killed humanitarian MP Jo Cox last year, is testimony to their state of anger.
I however, call on all Ugandans to remain vigilant. We and the Indians still have some accounts to balance after the deportees returned to Uganda in recent years and reclaimed properties that they had already been compensated for by Amin.
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Brief history on the Asians question and how the Indians chose British passports over Ugandan citizenship: http://minorityrights.org/
minorities/ east-african-asians/ UK Parliament debate on the subject in August 1972. Note the arrangements the British government already had for deportations even before Amin was President: http://
hansard.millbanksystems.com /lords/1972/aug/07/ uganda-future-of-british-as ians)
Hussein Lumumba Amin
the gang shot and killed a boda boda rider
Police and the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI) are investigating whether some top police officials and soldiers were engaged in the recent spate of robberies and murders in and around Kampala.
Most of the officers under investigation, The Observer has learnt, were implicated by low-ranking soldiers and policemen arrested during operations in December and January.
Speaking to The Observer during the parading of suspects at police headquarters Naguru on Wednesday, Fred Enanga, the police spokesman, said if investigations establish a link between the senior army and police officers to the robberies, “the accused officers will be arrested and prosecuted because no one is above the law.”
“When murders and robberies escalated in Kampala and other areas, security made joint operations to have the culprits arrested…,” said a high-ranking security officer.
He said the crackdown was carried out by teams from the police, Internal Security Organisation (ISO), Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI), and Special Forces Command (SFC).
In interviews, security officials who declined to be named said during the joint operations, most of the arrested suspects were police and army officers.
“We have so far arrested 10 suspects but four are police officers and three army officers and only three are civilians but who have knowledge of guns,” one detective attached to CMI said.
“When these suspects were seriously interrogated, they revealed to us that they have been working on orders from top security bosses who they mentioned,” another source from the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) at Kireka said.
“These [implicated] officers are of high ranks and if we mention their names, they can interfere with our investigations and eventually kill the whole file,” the source said.
In interviews at Naguru on Wednesday, some of the suspects paraded at the police headquarters confirmed working on orders from high-ranking officers who they declined to reveal.
“I was lured into this business by my boss who has a high rank in police and I was handing all the money to him and he was paying me only 20 per cent of the collected money,” Corporal Tito Lutwa said.
He said his boss even gave him an extra gun and 60 rounds of ammunition. Lutwa, however, said that his boss warned him that in case he is arrested, he should never tell on him.
“I gave you the weapons but in case you are arrested in the act, you will carry your own cross,” Lutwa quoted his boss as saying.
He said by the time he was arrested, he had been involved in robberies for close to six months.
“I have earned money close to Shs 80m and have constructed a house, bought four plots of land, one special hire [vehicle] and three motorcycles,” he said, adding that he made over Shs 300m for his boss.
In an interview on the same day at Naguru, Enanga said: “It is true that since November last year robberies and murders in Kampala have increased and people have lost their lives and properties.”
He said the secret joint operations have yielded good information about the robberies and lots of properties have been recovered. He said 10 suspects had been arrested, including four policemen; Corporal Lutwa Tito, PC Ochom Isaac, PC Ojok Michael and PC Ahimbisibwe Bernard alias Pastor.
Others are Alibun Ismail, Hajji Umar, Okabo Lowela, Mulongo, Tumukunde Geoffrey, Abusa Manisoor and Basiri Paluku, among others. Enanga said they have recovered an AK47 gun with 1,100 rounds of ammunition, phones, military shoes, TV screens and cutting materials, among others.The police is also investigating whether the robberies and murders are politically motivated to instill fear and panic among people. He said the suspects face charges of murder and aggravated robbery.
CITED ROBBERIES
Enanga said armed gangsters dressed in military uniform on November 15 at around 11pm in Kawempe robbed six people including a pharmacy, mobile money shop and over Shs 3m.He said on January 3, the same gang killed Stephen Kasirye before taking his motorcycle. On January 4 the gang also robbed Mugisha Umar, a businessman in Kawempe, of Shs 10m.
Enanga also said the gang shot and killed Darius Tukwase, a boda boda rider in Kazo, on the same night after he refused to surrender his motorcycle. And on February 4, the same gang robbed one Tumuhimbise of Shs 24m and two phones in Bukoto.
contradiction within the NRM
The NRM has always been a revolutionary organization, aiming at four principles: patriotism (non-sectarianism and no gender chauvinism), Pan-Africanism, social-economic transformation and democracy.
We started by conducting, successfully, two wars of resistance (1971-79 and 1981-86). We won those wars because we had a correct ideology, strategy and a just cause. Since 1986 we have successfully defended the revolution against a whole spectrum of counter-revolutionaries and terrorists, many sponsored by external forces. We, therefore, as in the resistance wars, used bullets to successfully defend the Revolution. Since we were in the open society by this time, we had also, through democracy, to defend the Revolution using ballots. In the election for the CA (1993), the General Elections of 1996, 2001, 2006 and 2011, the people, working with the NRM, successfully defended the Revolution. Even in the present exercise, again, the people of Uganda, so many petty contradictions notwithstanding, have stood with the NRM to defend the Revolution. We have won a resounding victory of about 65% in the Presidential elections and 282 NRM MPs elected. We have delivered a knock-out in spite of the evil-minded falsehoods and demagoguery of the opposition. I say 65% because many of the 455,175 invalid votes were NRM votes. How did I know this? I knew this because at Mafudu, the Late Wapa’s place, my young brother Mbabazi beat me by 5 votes. Yet 45 invalid votes were all mine. How were they invalid? It was because my supporters ticked on the symbol (the bus) or even on the candidate. The intention of the voter would be clear.
This was due to not sensitizing our agents and even the election officials. This ended up taking away about 5% of our votes. This, however, is not a new phenomenon. Even in the past elections, we got these types of losses for NRM, probably not on the same magnitude. Without this organizational weakness, our vote should be around 65% for the President in this week’s vote. Even then, that should not have been the vote we should have got given the work NRM has done, especially in the area of infrastructure (roads, electricity, schools, health centres, piped water, etc.) and also in the area of peace and security. We should have got 80% in my opinion. However, that potential high score was undermined by some mistakes of some of our leaders. One long standing mistake has been poor supervision of government services e.g. health care and the stealing of drugs from health centres. Wherever I went during the campaigns, the youthful population of our children and grand-children was complaining about this – stealing of drugs by health workers, absenteeism by the same workers, negligence and even asking for bribes. In Kassanda Health Centre, these accusations were confirmed when I sent, subsequently, an investigation team. We were about to arrest the health workers but the public forgave them. This is all due to poor supervision by both the technical staff (PS, CAO, Gombolola Chief, Town Clerk, etc.) and also by the political class. Why should it be difficult to check on the drugs even by the political class in the area? The argument that health workers are poorly paid is nonsensical because the workers in private hospitals are paid less than in government hospitals. Yet they work efficiently. This irritates the public alot in spite of their support for the NRM. Dr. Diana Atwiine’s Unit has arrested 227 health workers. The problem, however, is the leniency of the Courts. They release these people. I have talked to the Chief Justice about this.The other contradiction within the NRM was on account of the Primaries. There was alot of alleged rigging by some of the actors. To compound this problem, our Electoral Commission did not get time to exhaustively investigate and rectify these allegations. Sometimes, it would involve the misuse of the security forces or bias by the RDCs. I, personally, investigated two situations and provided some remedy which stabilized the political situation in the two areas. One situation was Kanungu (especially Kinkizi West) and the other situation was in Bukono Constituency of Namutumba. In Kanungu, it was clear that the Primaries’ results of the MP candidate for Kinkizi West and the LCV Chairperson had been altered in favour of other people because the winners were thought to be “pro-Mbabazi”. This was very wrong. How were they “pro-Mbabazi”? The allegation was that during the day, they are pro-NRM but during the night they are pro-Mbabazi. Even if that was the case, this was not the correct way to handle it. The correct way would have been to patiently investigate these allegations and, if confirmed, discipline those leaders, including expelling them from the Party – transparently and openly. Any other approach is wrong and clique-formation. I caused Tanga- Odoi and some other people to investigate and establish the truth. Josephine Kasya and Kaberuka had won the primaries and were, therefore, the flag-bearers. The good vote we got from Kanungu has confirmed the correctness of this truthful approach.
My first rally in the Busoga area was at Kibbale Primary School, Kibbale sub-county, Bukono Constituency. As I was departing from the rally, the flag-bearer, Micheal Saire, told me that “a woman” who had stood in the primaries had caused a section of the constituency to boycott the rally that had just ended. I did not pay much heed because the rally was, in any case, massive as most of our rallies were. It was only some days later that somebody else told me that “the woman” that had caused a section of the constituency to boycott my rally was my own daughter, Namuganza, that had been one of my most loyal youth cadres for a long time. On account of that, I had appointed her Deputy RDC, Luwero. I, however, did not even know that she had resigned the Deputy RDC-ship. When I addressed my very first campaign rally at Zirobwe, I had searched for her in the crowd by looking around (Kurondesa amaisho) without seeing her. I thought that she may be sick or something and did not think much about it. Only now to hear that she was “the woman” that had ‘Kujemesa’ people (make people boycott) from attending my rally at Kibbale Primary School. I, immediately, looked for her and she came to see me in Jinja only to tell me of stories of bias by the concerned officials and even Police arrests of her supporters, etc. To complicate matters for the Kaliro – Namutumba area, there was also the issue of the Kyabazinga where some of our leaders in the area had taken sides in that non-political issue. The area had become very hostile politically to the NRM on account of the mistakes of our actors. The rally I addressed at Kaliro on the 24th of December, 2015, was the worst of the whole campaign. Probably, only 5,000 people attended – almost similar to the one of the IK people in Kaabong where there were only 2,051 voters. I sat with Namuganza and we talked. Eventually, she brought me all the youth that had been alienated (their leaders) and the royal councils of Busiki and Bukono to whom I explained that the NRM never involved itself in the issue of whether there should be traditional leaders in any area and, if so, who? These were none of our business and have never been. It was for the wanainchi of the concerned areas. They only needed to follow the law. These groups, whom I met while in Masindi, were satisfied and went back to clarify the situation. Our recent scores in Namutumba and Kaliro of 81.86% and 70.14% respectively, were a direct result of this. Namuganza had been told by some persons in the NRM that if her group wanted to go away, they can go away. The NRM will continue, without them!! Why should any NRM person alienate anybody because of the selfishness of the individuals? This is not acceptable.
The other mistake is the selfishness and dishonesty of some of the NRM leaders. When money is sent to do political work, these leaders steal it. The money that was sent to help the Village Committees to buy stationery was stolen by some leaders. The masses come to know about it and they, really, get annoyed. Those who stole that money must refund it or be arrested. It is not only the dishonesty; but there is the attitude of only undertaking missions for money. No money, no mission. This mercenary attitude is un-NRM and not acceptable.No sooner had I pacified the Namuganza group than the youth that had remained loyal to the NRM started complaining as to why I had met the “bad” group, etc., etc. I had also to meet this group and talk to them about winning back anybody that may be disgruntled or even the ones who had never supported us before.
That is the correct politics: “unite the many, to defeat the few and isolate the enemy to the maximum”, Mao Tse Tung used to say. Yet here in Uganda, some groups seem to say: “alienate as many as possible and remain with a few”. I reject that mistaken view. I am for the Maoist principle of uniting the many.
It is some of the leaders that demand money. The wanainchi walk to and from the rallies on foot. They demand nothing; they stand in the sun while the leaders are in hired tents. Of course, we could not manage tents for everybody. What is interesting, however, is that the masses are hungry for the word of the NRM while some of the leaders are hungry for money. To show that the masses are hungry for the word of the NRM, even the rallies that were held on Sundays, were massively attended. The thirst by the leaders for money through politics needs to be rejected totally. In a few cases, we need money if the distance is far; no more than that. Politics is about mission, not money. It is voluntary association of people who share the same mission. It is not employer-employee relationship. We must be sisters, brothers or comrades-in-the struggle for the mission of patriotism, Pan-Africanism, social-economic transformation and democracy. This, indeed, was the spirit during the bush war and soon after. Our people would work voluntarily because they could see that we were working voluntarily – we, the leaders. This spirit was undermined by the ego-centric MPs that were misusing their presence in Parliament and the vague Constitution of 1995 on the issue of remuneration for Public Servants to award themselves huge salaries. This selfishness and short- sightedness transformed the MP job from being a mission – oriented job to being a rewarding job for the individuals involved. This caused the others, the generality of our membership, to say that if politics is for personal gain, we need our own share. This mercenarism must be wound backwards, starting with the leaders.
Nevertheless, there is need to use production to cater for the welfare of our long serving cadres and leaders at the local level, the army veterans as well as the Luwero war civilian veterans. The Secretary General should take the lead in this as should have been the case in the past. The districts are now, mainly, small: Lwengo, Kalangala, Buvuma, Kyankwanzi, Kiboga, Buyende etc. The Aruas, the Kaseses, the Mubendes etc. are few. There is an Administrative Secretary, fulltime party worker, in each district. Why does not this Administrative Secretary have the record of these long time mobilisers, party workers and local leaders (especially the past ones) so that wealth creation programmes are organized for them and, if necessary, they are guided in those programmes. With the lists, the Administrative Secretaries should work with the Secretary-General who should, in turn, work with the Wealth Creation department to engage all these leaders and party workers in gainful production. The disgruntlement of many of these party workers also ate into our support. This should not be the case.
Then, there is the problem of selfish leaders who undermine fellow Movement leaders from their common areas so as to remain “the only bulls in the kraal” so that they have better chances of becoming Ministers. This is not a good sign in leaders. You should not think about your own promotion but about the mission and all those who support that mission you regard as your comrade – in- arms. If you come from the same constituency, you should have peaceful competition championing the same mission. You tell the voters that you share the same mission but they can choose whoever they think can better execute the mission. This should be in the primaries. Whoever is chosen in the totally free primaries, should get all your support. You should be totally neutral among all the other contenders in the primaries in your area and only support the flag-bearers chosen transparently.
Then, there is the practice of some individuals trying to be King-makers in their zones. They divide our Movement people by taking sides among individuals and trying to force candidates on the electorate. This is very wrong. It is the NRM members who are electing their flag-bearers – not you. Neither in public nor in private should you ever express a preference. As long as they publically declare loyalty to the Movement, you welcome all of them. That is the cut-off point for you – loyalty to the Party, publically declared. No other consideration should enter your assessment of our members.
The issues of “efficiency”, “morality”, “presentability”, “reliability”, should be none of your concerns as a senior leader in the area or a co-leader. Those aspects are for the public to determine – not you, not me. Our only yard-stick for the NRM members should be loyalty publically declared. The rest should be for the NRM membership. Once the membership have made their choice, you should, unreservedly, support that choice.
Above, we have dealt with governance, organizational and ideological issues. There are, however, social-economic issues that also affect the politics. There are, in particular, two issues that the opposition, opportunistically, exploits. These are the issues of poverty and jobs for the youth. The NRM has for long had answers to these two problems. The problem was that in the past, we did not yet have the basics, the foundation, to tackle decisively these two problems. We did not have the infrastructure (the roads, the electricity etc.) that was a necessary pre-condition for more private investments, that would, in turn, widen the tax base that would generate more revenue for the Government to tackle some of those problems.
By our correct policies, our tax collection now stands at Shs.13,000bn which is about US$4bn. This is a decent level of resource mobilization. It is not like in the past when we had to depend on the donors for the whole of the development budget. With the increasingly more decent level of revenue collection, in 2006, I insisted on prioritizing electricity, the roads, education, health and defence. It is this decision that has won the recent General Elections. Although the opposition, supported by the Aga Khan’s Monitor newspaper and NTV television, would do everything to paint a bleak and deteriorating situation in Uganda, the population, with our explanations, would, instead, see hope and progress.
If the tarmac road has reached Oraba, Moroto, Bundibugyo, Kisoro and the electricity has reached all the 112 districts of Uganda except four (Kaabong, Nwoya, Kotido and Buvuma), things people never dreamed of, surely other problems will also be addressed. That was, indeed, my message. The eight words: unity, strength, peace, development, wealth, skills, jobs and political stability. Had the political class been more focused on the issue of the wealth funds, our task of winning by 80%, instead of the present 65%, would have been very easy. In the new budget, we must, therefore, ensure the Shs.1000bn for NAADS (wealth creation), Shs.234bn for the Youth Fund, Shs.234bn for the Women Fund, Shs.180bn for Micro-Finance and Shs.500bn for the Innovation Fund. This is, in addition, to the present level of funding for the roads Shs.3,400bn, Shs.2,900bn for electricity, etc.
We were able to give a knock-out on the first round to the opposition, as we always do, because of, mainly, four factors: promoting unity among the people; peace; electricity; and the new tarmac roads in areas that had never seen much development. These gave hope to the people that even what is not done will be done. Hence, the 65% support for the President and 70% support for the NRM MPs and NRM leaning independents. The huge masses of our children, our grand-children with our great- grand children in tow that I addressed in 305 rallies and 290 constituencies, plus a few elders in attendance, were, on the one hand, happy with these factors: unity, peace, tarmac roads and electricity. On the other hand, however, there were problems of the corruption of Government accounting officers, poor supervision of schools and health centres, badly managed primaries, greedy politicians trying to be warlords and hijack the authority of the people to elect leaders of their choice, the moneylessness in many families, the lack of jobs for the university graduates that did Social Sciences and the poor communication by the NRM Secretariat, the RDCs, the Ministry of Information, etc. In some areas, there was the question of cattle compensation for cows lost in the wars, veterans pensions and the chasing of hawkers from selling at the road sides without an alternative. It is these weak points that reduced NRM’s support from 80% to 65% – 70%.
The opportunistic and unserious opposition could not realize that their demagoguery would be seen through by the wanainchi. The NRM won in the following zones: Karamoja – 91.4%; Bunyoro-76.4%; Ankole – 74.8%; Sebei – 72.8%; Toro/Rwenzori – 69.7%; Busoga – 64.9%; Kigezi – 64.6%; West Nile – 63.5%; Bugisu – 55%; Bukedi – 53.2%; Buganda – 52%; Teso – 52% and Lango– 50.7%. It only lost in Acholi – 41% against FDC’s 42%. By solving the residual problems, the opposition will be deposited where it belongs – the dust-bin of opportunism. The masses could see the irreversible steps achieved. Why could not the elite of the opposition do the same?
In this article, I talk of moneylessness, rather than poverty. This is because the poverty statistics are not easily understood by the public. Drawing the poverty line is done scientifically, especially biologically. They ask the question: What is the necessary calories intake per person per day? They then, add education, health access etc. and monetize those elements. Obviously, food in Uganda is not such an absolute unavailability. Yes, there is stunted growth not because there is no food but because people do not know what to eat because of the lethargic Ministry of Health. Otherwise, the food is there or can be there. That is absolute poverty, scientifically defined, as at 56.4% in 1993 in the whole country and at 19.7% today. The problem, therefore, is moneylessness. That is what people call obwavu, obwooro, can- not lack of food – nutritious or otherwise.
Social – political – economic poverty means lack of money. The poverty line of the IMF and the Ministry of Finance is a biological categorization. The NRM has established a strong base. The people saw that base, recognized its importance and supported the NRM, not just in the Presidential vote but with a whooping number of 282 NRM MPs and scores of NRM leaning Independents.
There is also the question of land grabbing by some thieves and blind landlords that collude with some authorities to evict bibanja owners. This problem has two sides that must be handled correctly. First of all, nobody should get land illegally. The five legal ways of getting land are: being allocated a kibanja by the mailo-owner or his agent (omusigire); buying a kibanja from the one who got it from the first method; the bona-fide occupants that were on that land by 1983 or before; being the first to settle on the public land (kutembuura) or buying from the one who did that; and having a leasehold or milo title. The leasehold could only be acquired on uninhabited land. A lease hold should not be acquired on a piece of land that is occupied; unless the occupants are few and, on a willing buyer-willing seller basis, are ready to accept compensation. If you do not fall in these categories do not tell lies. We can look for other ways of helping you legally – e.g. a soft loan to buy a few acres, etc. Myopic and opportunistic politicians must be warned about encouraging people to invade any land illegally. During the campaign, for instance, I had two pieces of land that had been occupied by people. One was the National Housing Corporation land at Kasokoso. This is easier to deal with. NHC got this land in September, 1966 but did not develop it on account of the chaos in the country. Meanwhile, the wanainchi came and settled there, built permanent houses etc. Nobody was there to restrain them. NHC is a public corporation. The Government could assist to compensate them so that they get other land to go on with their projects. There is, however, the question of the railway land that people settled on. We have much less room for manoeuver here. The country must have the railway. Nobody who claims to be Ugandan should, either in public or privately, think that Uganda should not have a modern railway because people illegally encroached on the railway land and they “are our voters”. “Our voters” or those who “vote for the opposition” must be the first to realize that Uganda needs a modern railway. Anybody who does not see this, is an enemy of Uganda’s future. If there is no other route for the railway, then the encroachers must leave. Some assistance can be given to them if feasible. These people should, however, have been talked to and even the timing should have been agreed to and discussed with them.
As far as the Forest Reserves are concerned, they fall into two categories: the ecologically sensitive that may be protecting rivers or part of the high rain forest or the ones that were just gazetted for producing fire-wood and timber. The latter are easier to deal with – a compromise should be found with the bona-fide encroachers. However, the ecologically sensitive forests must be protected.
Nevertheless, no politician should encourage or cover up illegal land-grabbing because endangering security of legal owner-ship of property is a great disservice to Uganda. It will discredit Uganda internally and internationally. Our present success and strength is, precisely, due to a good business reputation. When we returned the 4000 properties of the Asians, Uganda gained a good reputation internationally. The infrastructure funds, the Wealth creation funds and the Social action funds (health, education, pay for the elderly) are possible because of these taxes. Anybody who endangers this potential is an enemy, knowingly or unknowingly.
The NRM Secretariat must be very active in sensitizing our masses.
We have the capacity to resolve the residual problems, one by one. That is why the opposition in Uganda is an endangered species.
Yoweri K. Museveni
CHAIRMAN NRM, PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF UGANDA
It all started a few months ago when Malac hosted friends, Embassy officials, diplomats and government representatives at her residence in Kampala during her welcome party.
Malac, who arrived in Uganda a few weeks to the general elections, invited President Museveni for the function.
It was Vice President Hon Edward Ssekandi who appeared at the residence for the ceremony.
Interestingly, before Ssekandi gave his speech, Malac blasted the Ugandan government for abusing human rights, suppressing civil liberties and failure to tackle corruption among other things.
“Most of us who attended this function were embarrassed. Malac had not even spent a month in the country but she was already berating its leadership,” said a diplomat who attended the function.“It appears she arrived in Uganda with a preconceived attitude towards government.”
The source, who preferred anonymity so as to speak freely, said Ssekandi did not respond to the accusations but chose to read from the prepared speech.
“If it were in other countries, Malac would have faced a barrage of criticism from government. She has expressed determination to order government on what to do which is not acceptable here,” a source at the Foreign Affairs Ministry told ChimpReports on Monday morning.
It is understood that while in Liberia before being posted to Uganda, Malac was being consulted by the heavily-donor-dependent country on most of its major decisions.
“When Malac came to Uganda, she did not fully appreciate the background of the country’s leadership and how things run here. We have taken steps to educate her and improve relations but it appears our efforts are not paying off,” the concerned official added.
Uganda’s ties with U.S. were further strained during and after the elections.
After the February 18 polls, Malac attended the Post-Election Symposium on Youth, Democracy and Governance where she blasted government’s actions against opposition.
“The social media shutdown, the detention of opposition figures, the harassment of media – all of these things combined with the poor organization of the election have weakened Uganda’s democracy and tarnished Uganda’s image as a strong democracy in a turbulent region,” charged Malac.
She added: “We have spoken out because we believe that the Ugandan people deserve to live in a country where every voice is heard and matters. That can only happen when citizens have a say in how their country is governed. It can only happen when government is held accountable. It is the democratic process that we support…”
In her conclusive remarks, Malac hit the nail on the head: “But the bottom line is that you must do something and take the responsibility upon yourselves to make things happen. I challenge all of you today to try and put your ideas into action, because by simply accepting the status quo, you only guarantee that things will remain the same.”
Government officials protested the remarks which they said bordered on interfering with Uganda’s internal affairs.
Plan B
Sources said government is considering bypassing Malac and the U.S. embassy in Kampala in its dealing with Washington.
“We shall have to deal directly with Pentagon on defence issues and White House on matters to do with foreign policy,” said a high ranking official.
“Malac will end up being isolated and inconsequential. We will make her deal with junior officials because of her attitude towards us,” the source confirmed.
Government spokesperson Ofwono Opondo said in a statement that since the publication of the Uganda Presidential Election results, none of the observer groups has come with credible evidence to challenge the results posted by Electoral Commission.
“We therefore wish to ask them to either adduce evidence or keep their peace for good. Otherwise, we know that some groups in the US and EU, including diplomats accredited to Uganda, funded and are still funding opposition elements in Uganda to cause government change outside the constitutional framework but are disappointed this hasn’t been successful as yet,” warned Opondo.
“The U.S., which uses raw power to project its influence and interests around the world, is the least competent to ask other nations for democratic accountability. Uganda’s democracy is progressing well and we are satisfied with both the pace and achievements registered so far.”
In reference to accusations of interference, Malac recently observed:” Let me reiterate, however, what we have said before: We respect the sovereignty of the government of Uganda, and we do not support any one individual or political party.”
She added: “We have spoken out because we believe that the Ugandan people deserve to live in a country where every voice is heard and matters. That can only happen when citizens have a say in how their country is governed. It can only happen when government is held accountable. It is the democratic process that we support.”
U.S. spends millions of dollars every year on Uganda’s healthcare system.
You all know that my father Dusman Okee who was in many ways also my mother died on 3rd January 2016.
His 74th birthday celebrations were planned for 5th January 2016. By the time he died he had remarried more than once. Hence the title of this tribute. So now my current mother is my father’s surviving widow.
She’s from Serere. She is the matriarch at our family home in Bukaya, Njeru, Buikwe. I pay tribute to her today because she is the one holding fort at home and makes our family house a home. She gives warmth to the cold steel, brick and mortar of the house.
These days those who come to see me get surprised that I have an English-Ateso dictionary on my living room table. Though my current mother is fluent in English she is not able to speak Luo fluently.
So I want to meet her half way by learning some Ateso. After all in 2011 during my presidential campaigns the Itesot credited me for being like a burglar proof for my people in terms of defending human rights, land rights and peace. They named me Ekirigi – or something like that. Loosely translated as a strong impenetrable door.
But I am digressing. Let’s me start from the beginning. My biological mother only looked after me for eight months. Naturally that is on top of the nine months she nurtured me in her young seventeen year old womb. When I was about eight months, my father who was then in the army, returned home from work and found me all alone in the house. I must have cried, slept, cried again and slept again, soiled myself over and over. He looked around and my mother was nowhere to be seen.
My mother, Christina Bitwababo, had decided to leave. If she had carried me along perhaps I would have grown up in her home village of Ngarama in Bukanga, Isingiro. Maybe my story would have been very different from what it has been so far. Maybe I would have been a Kadogo in the NRA etc etc. Sometimes I think about all these things.
So my father cleaned up his first born son and considered his options. Given how close my father and I were, we have discussed these matters in detail including my early years and why my mother left. Both those and more will be detailed in my book which will likely come out next year if and when, God willing, I clock the half century mark next year!
The next day, my father put me in his Volkswagen Beetle and we started the journey to Gulu. One day as we talked about my early years he confessed to me that he stopped the car at Karuma Falls bridge and considered letting the torrential waters of the River Nile end what in his view was a life likely to end in a few months. In those days infant mortality rate was very high.
But he reconsidered and we continued the journey to Lacor in Gulu where my grandmother, Yunia (an anglicized Luo version of Eunice) Lakop, a widow by then lived. The year was 1967. I used to joke with my father that if it was God’s will that I live the waterfall would have lifted me instead of drowning me and depositing me safely like the Nile waters guided Moses to safety. The only difference is that unlike Moses I would not be in a basket and would be entirely at the mercy of the elements.
So from the cutting of my umbilical cord to the time my mother and I parted was about eight months. As I grew up in the care of my grandmother assisted by my uncle’s wife, Regina, the mother of Rt. Hon. Dan Kidega, I obviously wondered who my real mother was. I concluded that it was my grandmother. After all she suckled me.
I have made some inquiries as to whether an old woman’s breasts can produce milk and the answer astounded me. I used to think I was probably contented with swallowing my own baby saliva while purporting to be suckling but I have since been told that the mammary glands of a woman of advanced age can actually be stimulated to produce milk. My father and I used to joke that we were like brothers because we suckled the same breasts!
So today I pay tribute to my grandmother who in many ways was my mother. I also pay tribute to Regina Oballim Agol who used to take me to her house to feed me with porridge. The milk from my grandmother’s breasts needed to be supplemented.
When I came of school going age, I was taken to the village of Bwobo some seven miles west from Gulu. There I lived with my aunt Christine Amoo Lalela Obwona. She was a tough one, that aunt of mine. N
o nonsense in every sense. But extremely loving. She is the one woman who is responsible for looking after me in my early formative years. She taught me hard work, discipline and the value of education. Together with my grandmother, they always told me, “…education is your mother, education is your father”.
That became my mantra. I excelled so much in my primary school that the teachers used to pick me from my P3 class and take me to the P5 class to solve mathematical problems to the great embarrassment of my seniors.
I wasn’t even tall enough to reach the blackboard well so I would stand on a stool. Eventually the school saw that I was spending too much time in the P5 class and decided that I may as well join the P5 class for real. So that is how I leapfrogged to P5 from P3.
My aunt, my mother, believed in a good fight. One day a bully had clobbered me and I came home crying. She was not sympathetic at all. “Aren’t you a man?”, she exhorted me, “You have to fight back”. I gave the matter serious consideration and came up with a radical solution. In fact the solution was rather too radical. It almost got me expelled from the school. Suffice to say that the bullying stopped. I have occasionally told that story. More will be in the book.
So today I pay tribute to my aunt, my mother. She still lives in Bwobo, Gulu. A widow of great moral courage, character and intelligence.
Jinja
As I grew older my father felt that I should now start spending time in Jinja where he was now working having left the army (saying he left the army is actually an understatement because the circumstances which I’ll narrate in the book are more complex). In Jinja, actually Bukaya, there was another mother. Yudaya Namiiro, daughter of Hajji Saad Kizito of Ruti, Mbarara. I don’t call her step mother because she was a real mother to me.
As I grew up my confusion about my maternal origins also mounted. In Gulu the local kids whispered that my mother was dead. Others said I was just some abandoned Munyankole kid my father picked up from a rubbish pit in Mbarara! All these confusing thoughts were boiling inside me like a volcano.
I wondered what to believe. So when I reached Jinja, I thought finally I had been reunited with my biological mother. But soon I knew that she was not the one. I could also overhear her telling her relatives who I really was. The relatives treated me adoringly. “He’s a beautiful child”, they would tell my mother.
From this I realized that my biological mother was still somewhere out there. Still, this mother of mine was a real mother in every respect. She spoke Luo fluently, of course with the accent of her mother tongue. One day she came to visit in Gulu and saw my condition in the village. It was normal for the village kids to have lice in their hair.
She found it abhorrent and told my father that I should immediately be placed under her care. She started the care immediately by giving my head a clean shave leaving the lice with no sanctuary. Then we boarded the train to Jinja and then the Victoria Nile Bus Town Service to Njeru.
She was a bundle of energy. She demanded that we worked hard. No loafing in bed in the morning. Many as we were in our double decker beds, she ensured that beds were made properly and bed wetters reprimanded and punished. We nicknamed her “Inspector”. We thought she was behaving like the Marine Corps Drill Sergeants in the movie “Full Metal Jacket”, but now we credit her for making us who we are.
She seemed to have eyes in the back of her head. Nothing escaped her eagle eyed vigilance. She taught us housework. Indeed she had no choice. We the older children were all boys. We mopped the floor, washed dishes, washed clothes and ensured the food did not get burnt. At an early age we learnt how to make porridge.
But she was also a community person. She would frequently send food to others in the neighborhood. She would gather young people and they would dance traditional dances. Those were the days I first encountered the Kiganda dances and the language. One day I overhead her sending one of the kids to go and bring Gitta.
I thought she meant a guitar! So I waited to see the traditional dancing metamorphose into a jazz festival but nothing changed. The Kiganda dance continued. Later I asked my younger brother Jimmy about the guitar that was supposed to be brought and what had happened to it. He burst into laughter and told me that Gitta is a Kiganda name. Talk about learning the hard way. I had lost sleep waiting for a guitar that never came.
So today I pay tribute to Yudaya Namiro. I learnt Luganda thanks to her. She disciplined me and taught me self reliance. I remember during Amin’s time, when sometimes our father would be taken away for days and weeks. She would ensure that at least we had one hearty meal. Things would become clear when she would say during a late lunch “muliire ddala”, meaning this is a once and for all meal for the day.
Eventually our father would return and normalcy would return in terms of regular meals. We had our arguments with my mother but never did I answer her back disrespectfully. As the urge to rebel, which is a characteristic of adolescence, took over there were tense moments. One time I even fled home for two weeks and became a full time gambler playing cards in a bid to raise money and buy a train ticket to Gulu. Of course that episode ended in an interesting way but the details have to wait.
When I became Makerere Guild President in 1990, she prevailed upon my father to host my entire cabinet and core campaign team members to a massive feast at home. She sent a coaster to ferry us to Jinja. Upon graduating with a law degree she threw me the mother of all parties at Crested Cranes Hotel.
The cake must have had about two dozen tiers shaped like law books with the subjects written on. It was big. An all night affair. In her speech she said my siblings now had no excuse to say they don’t have a role model. They had to excel in whatever field they choose.
Her death saddened me extremely. By then I was in parliament. I did all I could to keep her alive but eventually she succumbed. I made sure she had a befitting send off. She lies at Lacor next to her husband, my father. To date she is the mother I talk about most.
Biological mother
Now back to the tale of my biological mother. Through twists and turns and the pressure I mounted on my father eventually he was persuaded to take me to see my mother. We got into his Land Rover Defender 110 and headed to Isingiro. I was eighteen and a student of Namilyango.
We got lost a number of times, taking wrong turns in the hills of Isingiro but men never forget the paths they tread in the heat of young love. They know where the women who once quickened their pulses reside. We reached my grandparents home. It was very different from Gulu, Bukaya, Bwobo.
The language was also different. My mother hugged me. She broke down in tears saying she thought I was dead! I felt awkward. Here was the woman who carried me in her womb for nine months and later walked away. I could have crawled to the fireplace getting fatally burnt, I could have crawled outside and been overran by a vehicle, anything could have happened.
My heart and mind were in turmoil. But like one of my professors used to say, ‘text without context is pretext’. Who was I to judge my mother! What would I have done in her shoes? I found the grace, courage and compassion to tell my mother how grateful I was to see her finally and that I was doing fine thanks to the kindness of so many mothers and other people. I told her I understood.
She looked relieved. Fear and guilt was drowned by forgiveness and the joy around us. She introduced me to everyone as her long lost son. Then she sat down and symbolically carried me on her lap rocking me like a baby. Tears flowed freely from her eyes. That is how I found the courage to forgive my mother and make meaning of a phase in my life that had been a puzzle.
I gave my mother one last hug because we had to leave. As we left Isingiro late afternoon, I tried to make sense of it all. I had met my biological mother. What disturbed me was that there was no real glue between us beyond the fact that she had carried me in her womb, delivered me and cared for me for eight months.
Today I pay tribute to my mother. My biological mother. My real mother. She was only seventeen when she met my father. She remarried and had other children. I have so far managed to trace three of the children from my mother’s womb. I traced one of them all the way in Baghdad, Iraq and finally got to see him when he returned from his tour of duty. I encourage them to come home whenever they can. I love them because they are the only link I have with my mother who died about thirteen years ago. God bless your soul mother.
So, again, Happy Mothers Day! I mean it. All men are a work in progress. Ask your mother, or sister or wife. Every calendar day should be Mothers Day.
Justice dismissed this application with costs, stating that the constitution protects the sitting president from being subjected to any proceeding before any court of law, except during the time when he/she is running for the office, which case can only be heard by the Supreme Court.
Justice Musota ruled that if the applicants were not contented with Museveni’s age, they should have challenged it earlier during the campaigning period which they didn’t.
“This is a case with no merit which is aimed at wasting court’s time and abusing court’s process,” he said.
The judge added that interim orders are issued only when there is a main suit pending but in this matter once it is issued it will appear like a final ruling since there is no pending suit.
“Being a lay person shouldn’t be a basis to abuse court process, I summarily dismiss the matter with costs,” ruled Musota.
On receiving the ruling, President Museveni’s lawyer Kiryowa Kiwanuka applauded Justice Musota for being just and thereby warned all people against abusing court processes in disguise of being lay people
Bigirwa and Kizza who represented themselves in court said that after being let down by court now they are going to mobilize Ugandans to defend their constitution.
“We have enough evidence to prove that Museveni is above 75 years of age and since constitution provides us with an option of defending our rights we shall utilize it
It seems Ugandans had different reactions to the appointment of Beti Olive Namisango Kamya-Turomwe, also known as Betty Kamya and Beti Kamya as Dictator Yoweri Museveni’s Minister.
Daizy Nasamula Kino kinakola oba kwogera bwogezi
Matsiko Confie Cong’s hope rubaga county will benefit much, it has all leaders of Kampala city wish to see those roads worked on.
Sheillah Powers Congrats brave woman
Alfred Baryah The road is round
Osalah Moses Lets wait en see whether thy wl work 4 kla.
Timothy Tindimureka We are expecting a lot from you Maama
Bukenya Edywin As beautiful as her character, i have liked the President’s choice may the Lord help her to serve responsibly in Jesus’s mighty name i pray Amen:
Kabugo Prossy congratulations! now I get the reason why she kept attacking Dr . Besigye after the elections. game well played.
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Ahurra Nicholas Cong’s
Mwondha Peter Good idea that the President considered working with the people who we thought were so critical to him and the system.
Pretty Pat Hope he considers taking their advice (if they intend to offer any) other than xpecting them to dance to his tune!!
Ruryaija Collens Vumilia So da problems dat kamya was fought for wz Government u mean is solved what i see is dat kamya still has a lot to do
Pretty Pat Hope Maureen Kyaalya will b appointed RDC
Mwondha Peter No. Maybe to be included in the coming reshuffle and Dr Bwanika
Pretty Pat Hm Uganda zaabu
Mwondha Peter Congz. madam Betty. Am very happy you were appointed you are very hard working. You will deliver
Ben Mugarura Congratulations Hon Betty Kamya
Asiimwe Nathan Y its only laddies who can manage Lukwago very well
Mwondha Peter It is not all about who can manage who but who can do what and who is kepable of what. We don’t need wars but service and besides these days women have proved to be more hard working and faithful in their way of execution of work than men. Check out and prove it for your self
Asiimwe Nathan Who ever can clear a hindrance in the line of development is a hard working person so if i said she can manage Lukwago who has been a problem to Kampal’s development then i mean she is hard working (Those laddies).Mwondha Peter You are So myopic. You seem not to be knowing what you want and the reasons for people to be in leadership. But you must know that leaders serve people and their interests not the party as FDCs and others think. And in politics the difference between two parties is just ideology not enemities and permanent. So mean those opposition MPs in the house are not serving in the govt.? Now you will say no. There are 3 arms of the govt : Parliament, executive, and judiciary. Here I mean MPs with the opposition inclusive. So for your information Hon Betty is here to serve her people under the nrm using the ideas she is gifted in as other people do like Lukwago, Winnie Kizza etc
Mugenyi Patrick Katemba just
Semugabi Bams Seth #Nathan wht do u mean by managing lukwago? lukwako is just a ceremonial lord mayor,which powers does he posses? his powers were diluted 2 zero,and u keep talking??
Asiimwe Nathan Lukwago and other political failures have always been mobilising people to go on streets and demonstrate and the city comes to a stand still for days. Do u say he has no powers???? He has powers of distraction plz
Semugabi Bams Seth HAHAHAHA
Mugenyi Patrick Besigye bamuwe obwa voice president
Mwondha Peter If only he can accept as you feel for him
Mat Baker Indeed ha own
Jacob Kaguta #Betty_kamya
When a poor jobless widow needs attention from a black spotted god #Leopard,she turns shameless even at the cost of making her husband’s politically upright mind weep to the tears of marrying a money minded lupen,i pity the sorrow his ghos…See More
Mwondha Peter When I read your submission I find none other than the real a sorrowful hopeless ghost call it Satan who is known for being jealous and in a deal all the time planning to let down, bring down all that tend to gain achievements. I likened Satan to you. So hopeless and jealous that you even feel bad about where you are not even concerned and where you even earn anything for for undermining Hon Betty’s achievement.
Jacob Kaguta peter..Am not comfortable with her means of earning that post,dissing fdc!!!no..So think be4 u comment
Natembo Angella @ Osalah Moses not waiting whether Beti Kamya will work for Kampala,live alone ur beef,BETI KAMYA IS A VERY HARDING,COMMITTED WOMAN,just look back the success she gave Rubaga North during her term,I know she’s going to do wonders for kampala and I wish her the best ever,Ameen.
Jacob Kaguta angella,the tactics she used to earn that job is wat got me shaking my head
Moses Lubega They just don’t understand who’s Mr Museveni en what’s capable of????
Daniel Cents hmmmmm
Mwondha Peter Yes she is
Daniel Karts Cong’s
Christine Nantume Thanks museveni 4 not giving a certain lunpen anypost in minister line,
Tonny Atuhairwe Ok!! That is why she was opening her stinking mouth with open nose on FDC party.
David Karame Tricks she used to snick into soup are questionable.
Dickens Okello By The Way, This Is The Time Understanding The True Color Of M7 Can Bit Some NRM Pigs, Let Them Feel M7
Nakakyango Annet congz madam Beatty kamya
Semugabi Bams Seth all of u shd learn a lesson,no permanent friend no permanent enermy in politics(2006) and 2011 Amaama mbabazi of then 2M7 is not the one 2him now,Beti of then,z not of now!so plz esp fdc supporters en yo top master(Besigye)remove that kind of hatred in politics.hating singers,bishops,and katikiro!!!
Tumusiime Mozzy Congs Madam
Stuart Cavendish eniwe she iz juhst tryng to sketch for a living…anti she is a widow!!! She shud mind her business n leave the opposition alone
Mwondha Peter Opposition without a mission. Just to oppose
Pretty Pat Real men and women stand by their words. From fdc she formed Federal Alliance Party where she used to abuse m7 like her life depended on it. She wd rather go into business than allowing to dance to the tune of some dictator she so much despised. #EatingHerVomitIndeed!
Abdul Wahab Muhamad CONGRATULATIONS
Echegem Okia Ridicule ridicule and get
Jacob Kaguta poor sexually starving widow
Robert Wafula Congz, honorable
Naika Charles You earned what you have been longing for after criticising our own pipoz president,exhibiting all your selfish interest and opportunism.Congs for betraying the country.
Johnmary Kibuule Oyo alese mese yenyini
Tumwine Peter Congz Madam Betty kamya
Kisakye Justine Congs my friend God bless I
Kisakye Justine Whether you abuse nothing u can do the lord has chosen her
Tuhairwe Richard Congz mura
George Bossa Luzige Nothing to do she can’t stand on her own I call her undrfeed lion
Mubiru Kenneth Finally late Turyomwe remembered,
Douglas Ainebyoona I knw it she’s so selfish to the point of accusing opposition yet she was planning this? let us see agame
Geoffreybyaruhanga Ntangare Goals and blessings of FDC were gone if they made kamya the vice-president. Twakuwona.
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