A Fighting Man , livre ebook

A Fighting Man: A Political Life of Museveni, Volume I, c.1944-1986
A Fighting Man A Political Life of Museveni Volume I, c.1944-1986
Xavier Ogena
First published in 2021 Driberg Books Limited, P. O. Box 100566, Kampala, Uganda dribergbooks@gmail.com
© Xavier Ogena, 2021
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism or review, no part of this publication may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing of Driberg Books Limited.
ISBN 978-997-067-500-5
For my wife, Winnie, and our children, Patience, Silas, Dylan, and Eloise
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements
Chapters
1. Childhood and Schooldays
2. The Young Radical
3. GSU Agent?
4. Into Exile
5. Preparing for Guerrilla Warfare
6. Accidental Hero
7. ‘Tragedies and Mishaps’
8. To the Front Line
9. Minister of Defence
10. The December 1980 General Elections
11. ‘It Comes to Mosquitoes’
12. The Visit to Kenya, Libya, and Britain
13. Fighting off Obote (I)
14. Fighting off Obote (II)
15. The Luweero Triangle Killings
16. The Nairobi Peace Talks
17. ‘A Fundamental Change’
Selected Bibliography
Preface and acknowledgement
Numerous books, papers, and articles have been written about “Museveni’s Uganda”, that is, Uganda under President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni. These have been, more often than not, written by his enemies and detractors than by his friends. But precious little has hitherto been written about Museveni’s life, which is now in its eighth, eventful decade. Whatever little information is publicly available on the subject comes mostly from Museveni’s highly-influential ‘autobiography’, Sowing the Mustard Seed: The Struggle for Peace and Democracy in Uganda (1997, 2016). The rest of the information comes from the occasional article or speech by him, which is published in a national newspaper or the odd book. There has also been the odd article, which is often written by an ‘independent’ journalist. This usually assumes the form of a partly-abridged interview-article with allegedly long-forgotten, contemporary witness or witnesses to an incident, which is adjudged by its author to be absolutely pivotal in Museveni’s early biography, which purportedly provides previously-unavailable material, which complements, or, more often than not, contradicts, if available, Museveni’s version of the incident in question to the thinly-disguised delight of its author.
The sheer paucity of the literature on Museveni’s life seems attributable to the sheer lack, or perhaps more accurately, inaccessibility, of reliable sources of information on the subject. This is because Museveni reveals unambiguously precious little about his life in his autobiographical narrative and other writings. It is also because his close friends and colleagues are extremely reluctant to reveal, if at all, any information about his life, especially if they might appear to rival Museveni’s own version, as set down in the autobiography and elsewhere. This is nothing unique. Samuel Johnson:
The necessity of complying with times, and of sparing persons, is the great impediment of biography. History may be formed from permanent monuments and records; but lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing everyday less, and in a short time is lost forever. What is known can seldom be told immediately; and when it might be told, it is no longer known’. 1
Besides, even the little that Museveni apparently unambiguously discloses about his personal life in his autobiography is not always completely unproblematic: his autobiography is much more of a memoir than an exercise in historical ‘objectivity’.
But we should not despair. Museveni’s memoirs, and indeed his other writings, which must, for good or ill, remain the starting point for any exploration of his life, seem, upon more consideration, to reveal—with any ‘revelations’ requiring to be qualified with hedging locutions, which flag up their ultimately speculative nature—more about Museveni than he seems to intend. This is through the things that he has said. This is also, perhaps more importantly, through the things that he has left unsaid. It is thus that the present book has largely been possible.
**
I have set out to accomplish two things in this volume of my political biography of Museveni. First, present sufficient information for the reader to reach his or her own judgement (my own, for what it is worth, notwithstanding) on the political abilities and activities of Museveni during his early years: from his birth in c. 1944—through his formal education in Uganda followed by Tanzania, where he became politically radicalised; his employment in a rather dubious capacity in the Obote (First) President’s Office; his dogged struggle against the Amin regime; his changing fortunes in the immediate, post-Amin dispensation; his reluctant participation in the rigged general elections of December 1980; and his ‘protracted’ war against successively the Obote and Okello regimes—to his triumphant accession to power in the dry season of 1985-86. Second, leave the reader with a clear and distinct impression of myself as a biographer of Museveni, to borrow the words of Samuel Johnson, ‘without malevolence, who thought it much his duty to display beauties as expose faults; who censored with respect, and praised with alacrity’. 2 The result is before the competent reader. He or she must now decide if, and how far, I have succeeded in achieving these aims.
**
Museveni’s active participation in politics has spanned about 60 years now. It all started in the 1960s. This was when he became a ‘sympathiser’ of the DP. He has since been, among others, radical student leader; UPC functionary; guerrilla leader (twice); party leader (for the second time now); Minister of Defence; Minister of Regional Corporation; Vice-Chairman of the Military Commission; and, for the last 35-odd years, President of the Republic of Uganda.
Museveni’s membership of the DP had been motivated by a sectarianism, which had been passed from parent to offspring. But he had, by the middle of the 1960s, developed a profound sense of ‘revulsion’ at sectarianism. This was in its manifestation in the contemporary politics of Ankole, which itself represented in microcosm that of the wider Uganda. Museveni has since persistently fought sectarianism through political education. He has also fought it through forging alliances across sectarian cleavages: ethnic, cultural, religious, political, military, regional or national. This started with his group of five young men at Ntare School, in which his native Ankole’s antagonistic ethnicities were all represented. It was followed by USARF, FRONASA, UNLA/UNLF, UPM, PRA, NRA/NRM, Uganda, and East Africa and beyond. Museveni’s early anti-sectarianism was part and parcel of his youthful idealism. This also propelled him, not only into the Protestant sect, Scripture Union, at Ntare, but also the radical ‘study group’, USARF, at the University of Dar es Salaam. But Museveni’s idealism has always had a hard and expanding edge of pragmatism. This has, in the fullness of time, for better or worse, all but edged out idealism.
Museveni is a man of considerable courage, resourcefulness, mobilisational acumen, and staying power. This was abundantly exhibited successively during the anti-Amin and anti-Obote struggles, especially the latter, which culminated in his NRA becoming, not only the first internally-based, guerrilla organisation in Africa to overthrow an indigenous government, while relying largely on internal resources, but also one of the only two ‘revolutionary’ organisations—the other being the Chadian Front de Libération Nationale du Tchad, FROLINAT—to seize power in post-independence Africa.
He was magnanimous in victory. He abhorred revenge on the vanquished Obote, Okello, and Amin forces, and indeed their respective ethnicities, as had hitherto been customary in post-colonial Uganda. But this only lasted until those very forces re-mobilised and embarked on an armed rebellion against him. He then proceeded to use against these, and indeed their suspected sympathisers, the very counter-insurgency methods that he had rightly condemned when they had previously been used by both Amin and Obote against his own guerrilla organisations and their suspected sympathisers. There have also been occasions when he appeared to glory unabashedly in the massacres by his much superior forces of unarmed, or poorly-armed, insurgents.
Museveni has never been sufficiently forthcoming about certain episodes from his early years. These include the precise nature of his employment in the Obote (First) President’s Office, and the nature and scale of the human rights abuses in the former Luweero Triangle by his NRA insurgents. The latter has rendered impossible any meaningful reconciliation between his Government and the former UNLA forces, which he has always blamed, if increasingly implausibly, for virtually all the human rights violations in the former ‘Luweero Triangle’ during the civil war.
Museveni’s passion and facility for languages, especially African languages, know no bounds. This has meant that, like no other Ugandan politician to date, he always uses the indigenous language, or generously intersperses his speech in English with expressions from the indigenous language, of wherever in Uganda he happens to be. He has co-authored a particularly well-received Runyankore-Rukiga thesaurus. He is well-known for his striking use of image, metaphor, and simile. He does this: to inform, to persuade, to warn—perhaps most memorably when he picturesquely compared physical assault on his supporters to the insertion of ‘a finger in the anus of a leopard’—and to