Upc and National-Democratic Liberation in Uganda

By Yoga Adhola

This is the first book length study of the Uganda Peoples Congress ever. The book does for UPC and Uganda as a whole what no other book has done for both so far. It employs three sets of theories: the theory of national-democratic liberation; the theory of modes of production; and, the theory of social identities to analyse the Ugandan situation. Through the use of these theories it succeeds in unravelling issues which have remained unexplained so far. Such issues include why there have been a contradiction between Buganda, on the one side, and the rest of the identities/nationalities/tribes of Uganda on the other. The book explains that this contradiction arose from the fact that Buganda has been a dominant power/identity in the region since around 1600. The book also reveals in great details how British intelligence masterminded the 1971 coup which brought Idd Amin to power. It does a searing analysis of Obotes nationalisation measures of the late 60s, denying the socialist claims about them and showing the measures to be nationalistic as well as progressive. It treats the eruptions of the mid 60s which ended with the abolition of the monarchies as aspects of the national-democratic liberation. It has a chapter which takes a swipe at the National Resistance Movement. At the end of the book is an appendix which gives a critical analysis of the position of Marxists, particularly Professor Mahmood Mamdani on UPC.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503599369

Yoga Adhola

Yoga Adhola hails from eastern Uganda. He went to school in Kisoko Boys’ School for his primary school; moved to Kachong’a Junior Secondary School. For his O’levels he went to King’s College, Budo and for his Higher School Certificate, Nabumali High School, from where he went to the University of Nairobi. At the University of Nairobi he was elected Students’ Union President, 1969-70. He spent the Amin days in Dar es salaam, Tanzania. When Amin fell in 1979, he became the main liaison between the UPC President and the party in the National Consultative Council, the parliament at the time. From 1980 to 1985 he was the Editor-in Chief of the UPC paper, The People. following the coup of 1985, he went into exile, first in Kenya and later the US. During this period he was a regular contributor to the press in Uganda. He is recognised as the leading ideologue of UPC.

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Rev. date: 10/19/2015

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CONTENTS

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1

FORMATION OF THE UGANDA PEOPLE’S CONGRESS (UPC)

Chapter 2

THE SOCIAL BASE OF THE UGANDA PEOPLES’ CONGRESS

Chapter 3

TOWARDS INDEPENDENCE

Chapter 4

FROM INDEPENDENCE TO THE REVOLUTION

The Uganda People’s Congress Youth League

Kabaka Mutesa’s Election as President of Uganda

The Identity Crisis of the Baganda

The Lost Counties Issue

The Gulu Conference, 1964

Chapter 5

MOVE TO THE LEFT

Chapter 6

THE 1971 COUP IN UGANDA

Chapter 7

FROM MOSHI TO OBOTE II

Chapter 8

UGANDA PEOPLE’S CONGRESS AND NATIONAL RESISTANCE MOVEMENT

MARXISM AND THE UGANDA PEOPLES’ CONGRESS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my father.

He was a great Congressman.

He deified Milton Obote.

Unfortunately, he did not live long enough to know

His son became one of the high priests…

very close to his deity.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A number of people have played roles in the writing of this book. The first and foremost is Milton Obote. He availed himself to me to ask any question that I desired. He sometimes volunteered explanations of things I had not even thought of. If he did not readily have the answers, he directed me to where I could get them. I still remember when I was asking him questions about his stay in Kenya. He found my questions rather too detailed and then told me to go and talk to Dennis Akumu, the former leader of COTU. He told me Akumu was rich and had a car and would drive to all newspapers where they had published articles on trade union activities.

Milton Obote also allowed me to reach him and get to know how he operated. There is hardly any person in UPC who knew or knows the political machine which was Milton Obote the way I do. It is as a result of this knowledge that we had a curious telephone conversation several days before he died. When he picked up my call, he began talking by saying: It is as though you knew I was going to send you an e-mail tomorrow. I replied: You and I do not need gadgets like telephones and e-mail to communicate anymore. He then made a gesture to indicate I should say more, but I changed the topic. About a week later he had died.

Secondly, I would like to acknowledge my debt of gratitude to Akena Adoko. Without Akena Adoko, there is no way I could have got that close to Milton Obote. Whether on instruction or not, Akena Adoko used to take me to Obote’s residence in Musasani in the outskirts of Dar es Salaam where the three of us would have long chats. Although he was never as easy and available as Milton Obote, Akena Adoko also answered a number of my questions. A lot of history flowed from his conversation.

Dr David Anyoti was the moving spirit of this book. He always talked to me about the necessity to write such a book. The most pregnant statement he made was one day when we were walking somewhere in Nairobi. He said to me that the Uganda People’s Congress had done everything correctly and that the only thing which was left was to explain scientifically what it had been doing. That is the spirit which has guided the writing of this book. The first issue Dr Anyoti’s statement presented to me was: how could Congress do things correctly without being grounded in scientific theory? I make this statement because Milton Obote was not a Marxist. This question vexed me until I came across Fredrick Engels’ lucid statement: It does the commune the greatest honour that in all its economic measures the ‘driving spirit’ was not any set of principles but simple, practical needs. And therefore these measures were not at all in accordance with the spirit of Proudinism, but certainly in accordance with the spirit of German scientific socialism. (Marx, K & Engels, F. 1973: 86; quoted in Brutents, K.N. vol 1977 K.N. 219) Rather than being driven by theories, in a majority of cases Milton Obote was driven to make the right moves by simple practical needs.

I also spent a lot of time talking with Bidandai Ssali. Without realizing it at the time, he contributed to the nurturing of my mind about UPC. The same applies to Kagenda Atwoki or Charles Atwoki Kagenda as he calls himself these days.

Then there were all those elders to whom I talked about UPC. I will mention some: Peter Oola, Sam Odaka, Karyegesa, Gurdial Singh, Otema Alimadi, etc. With regard to Peter Oola, I need to mention one incident which stands out in my mind. One day I walked into Alex Lobidra’s office at the UPC Headquarters. Peter Oola was in the office talking to Lobidra. At a certain point, he talked of having come to Kampala accompanied by his Secretary. At this point curiosity took the better part of me and I asked who his secretary was. With humility, he answered: Aah, Milton Obote. This was in the early 80s and Milton Obote was then the President of Uganda!

Both Mahmood Mamdani and Dan Nabudere played big roles in introducing me to Marxism. In his very subtle way, Mamdani guided my initial development. I benefited greatly from reading his book, Politics and Class Formation in Uganda which I first read in its manuscript form when he honoured me with a copy of it in the early 70s. In many ways, much as I have a lot of disagreements with aspects of it, his book acted as a model for my writing. Nabudere’s strong advice that one must read Marxism from the original is a fundamental doctrine I have operated upon.

I should also mention Dr Chaponda from Malawi. I met him in the late 80s when he was Deputy UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Nairobi and I was a refugee there. Dr Chaponda was instrumental in getting me to the US. I had no plans of leaving Nairobi, but he one day called me to his office and told me they were relocating me and where did I want to go. I told him Canada and he said, No: US. That whole conversation lasted less than three minutes and I ended up in the US. The significance of this is that I have, while in the US, had access to the library facilities which I would not have had anywhere else. This book has also been written while I am in the US.

Then there is my family. Normally when emigrants come to the US, they do so to make fortunes and live the American dream. To do what other emigrants do, I needed to improve my job skills and then compete for the jobs. Instead, I spent my time studying politics. And worse still, I did this without seeking any certificates which could have advanced me jobwise. To my family it appeared as if I was wasting time. This caused them a lot of frustration. I wish to honestly acknowledge their endurance of my folly.

My gratitude to my family in the USA extend to my cousin in Uganda, Professor Laban Erapu, who has painstakingly edited this book and attended to the fine details of language that we hope have made the book more readable.

I would also like to record my gratitude to Phylis Johnson, the widow and executor of David Martin’s estates for permission to use a substantial portion of David Martin’s book, General Amin. As I point out in Chapter 5 David Martin had highly privileged access to sources for his book and nobody can ever better his writing on Idi Amin.

I am also grateful to Professor Nelson Kasfir for permission to use his table of ethnic distribution in secondary schools and Makerere Univesity I used in chapter 2.

Last but not least I would like to record my heartfelt gratitude to Michael Aggrey Okoth of Vancouver, Canada and Kidera, Padhola for the financial assistance which enabled me pay for the publishing costs.

INTRODUCTION

I was introduced into politics by my late father. He was a middle peasant in the Village of Oyameri, eleven miles on the new Jinja-Tororo road in eastern Uganda. My father was active in local politics and many people who were politically active used to come to our home. Our home was beehive of political activity. The most prominent politician who ever came to our home was Balaki Kirya, who later was Minister in the Obote I government. I was then a little boy in Primary Five but I remember that Kirya arrived on a motorbike, accompanied by Yakobo Malaba from Samia. That was in 1958 and he was at the time campaigning for a seat in the Legislative Council (Legico) elections.

When Uganda People’s Congress was formed, my father joined it. He would never miss any of Milton Obote’s rallies that were held within a radius of 50 miles from Oyameri. He used to bring home newspapers as well as UPC documents. That is how I first got acquainted with the subject of this book.

My father had high quality aspirations for his children’s education. His ambition was to educate his eldest son to the standards of chiefs. In spite of his limited resources, he took me to the best possible schools. That was how in 1962 I was enrolled at Kings College Budo. The yearly school fees in Budo at the time stood at 600 shillings (about US$ 100). As a matter of fact, since the 1961 cotton crop failed, he could not at all afford the school fees for the first term. It was his brother who gave him a cow to sell in order to get the money with which he took me to that most prestigious of schools in the country.

Budo was particularly instrumental in sharpening my membership of the Uganda People’s Congress. As the reader will find in the book, UPC was at the beginning an organization of minority identities/nationalities/tribes set to redress the social domination of the Baganda. At Budo those of us who were non-Baganda got teased a lot because of our respective identities/nationalities/tribes. Munyoro, for example, in those days did not simply mean someone of the nationality of the Banyoro for it had connotations of an inferior being. Those from western Uganda were derogatorily referred to as Banyarwanda even though they did not come from Rwanda. Those of us from Tororo northwards were known as Badokolo.

At the time I did not really understand these things and I suffered them quietly, in the same manner Jommo Kenyatta said he suffered colonialism: Suffering without bitterness, the title of one of his books. I do not even remember feeling ridiculed by being called a mudokolo. This is how I belittled the insult. At the time we used to be given three exercise books for Mathematics. However, the teachers never took them for marking. So in the space for names I used to write Mudokolo. The other method of my resistance consisted of the refusal to speak Luganda from then up to today. I should point out that while in Junior Secondary School at Kachong’a, in Bukedi District, we had this enlightened Headmaster called Tom Mugoya. He made us have two lessons a week in Luganda although we were not examined in the subject. Because of this introduction to Luganda, as I was going to Budo, I was determined to sit Luganda for my O’Levels; however, the way my identity was treated at Budo made me refuse to speak or study Luganda as I had intended.

In 1966, after my O’Levels, I transferred to Nabumali High School for my A’Levels. 1966 was the year there were serious political upheavals in Uganda. I discuss the upheavals in great detail in the book. During the discussion of the 1967 Constitution, I wrote a letter to the editor of The People newspaper which was published. My long term friend and then classmate, James Kalebo, formerly of Uganda Management Institute, read the letter and raised an objection with me. He argued that I did not have the necessary facts to write a letter in support of what was going on. He was right, but like most UPCs I was acting on sentiments. To this day many UPCs still act on the basis of sentiment rather than rationality and it is one of the objectives of this book to assist them explain as well as approach issues rationally.

From Nabumali High School I went to the University of Nairobi where I got elected President of the Students Union, a position which greatly politicized me. I also read virtually every available book of Julius Nyerere I could find in the University Library. I attempted to read Karl Marx but I could not make head or tail of anything in his writings. At Nairobi I attended classes in Politics in my first year. We were taught by Professor Colin Leys. In one of his lectures on Uganda, I challenged him on the 1966 question and he gave me the class to teach the next time. I have to admit I did not perform well at all; indeed I was very poorly equipped. However, I consoled myself by carrying a copy of the 1967 Constitution into the class. How I wish I was then as informed as I am today!

When the Amin coup took place in 1971, I refused to go to Uganda and instead went to Tanzania. Tanzania was the hub of activities against Amin. Obote was living in exile there. However, the ideological atmosphere in Dar es Salaam was unique. It was extremely left wing compared to Nairobi or Kampala, both of which I was used to. Furthermore, my contemporaries, such as Museveni, were talking a different kind of political language. These guys had gone to the University of Dar es Salaam and had been imbued with a left-wing ideology. The University of Dar es Salaam at the time was teeming with left-wing teachers as well as Marxist literature.

I quickly realized I had not had the advantage these contemporaries had had by going to the University of Dar es Salaam. I began to self-teach myself. I would take out books on these ideologies from libraries and read them avidly. I also bought books from bookshops and made trips to the University Bookshop once in a while. In due course I caught up with my contemporaries.

Among the most popular readings at the time were the writings of Franz Fanon and those of Regis Debray. Franz Fanon is well-known and does not need any introduction. Regis Debray on the other hand is not that well-known. He was a French philosopher who went to teach Philosophy at the University of Havana soon after the Cuban revolution. While there he got very close to Fidel Castro as well as Che Guevara. Regis Debray eventually left Cuba with Che.

Guevara was captured in Bolivia in October 1967. Debray had also been arrested earlier on 20th April 1967 in the small town of Muyupampa, also in Bolivia. Convicted of having been part of Guevara’s guerilla group, on 17th November 1967, Debray was sentenced to 30 years in prison. He was released in 1970 following an international campaign for his release mounted by notables like Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Malraux, General Charles de Gaulle and Pope Paul VI. Debray sought refuge in Chile where he wrote The Chilean Revolution (1972) after interviews with Salvador Allende. Debray eventually returned to France in 1973 following the coup in Chile staged by Augusto Pinochet.

After I studied the writings of Regis Debray and Che, I got persuaded that the strategy Museveni was advocating for the struggle against Amin, and which was based on the writings of Regis Debray, was correct. I therefore joined Fronasa, the forerunner of the NRM/NRA. I was not the only one who was so persuaded; however, after further study I got to realize that Museveni’s political line was incorrect. This was particularly so when I read the book, New Theories of Revolution by Jack Woddis. It was then that I went back to UPC.

Before my return to the Uganda People’s Congress, I had met Milton Obote for the first time when I was a member of the Fronasa delegation which had gone to see him at his residence at Musasani in the suburb of Dar es Salaam. Unknown to me that night, that meeting would change my political career irrevocably. At one point in the course of the extremely acrimonious discussion, I actually yelled at Milton Obote. My screaming caused the room to go completely silent for some moments until Milton Obote himself broke the silence. He said: That young man should realize we are all as concerned as he is about Uganda. It took me several months to grasp the significance as well as the meaning of that statement.

During the greater part of my stay in Dar es Salaam, I enjoyed a very special relationship with Akena Adoko. He was not only Obote’s cousin, but someone whose views Obote took very seriously. Akena used to entertain a group of Ugandans at bars where he would buy beer in crates. However, somewhere in the day he would shake off the large crowd and then drive with me to Musasani where we would have long chats with his cousin. During those chats I got the opportunity to learn a lot about the Uganda People’s Congress and Uganda from Milton Obote.

Later on, after Amin fell, I became the main liaison linkman for the UPC at the National Consultative Council (NCC), the interim parliament from 1979 to 1980 and the UPC President in Dar es Salaam. This position placed me in an extremely advantageous position to know what happened between 1979 and the return to Uganda of Milton Obote in 1980. The knowledge I acquired then has been very useful to me in writing what in this book is now Chapter 7, From Moshi to Obote II. I was also able to gain insight into both Obote and the UPC.

It was also during this period that I concluded that Obote was not going to write any memoirs. I had been urging him to do so, but it was during this period that I gave up advising him on this. It was not because he couldn’t write, as Kirunda Kivejinja has intimated in his book. I know it for a fact that Obote was an excellent writer. He found writing very easy and often simply dictated what was to be written. Such a person could never fail to write. He simply chose not to leave memoirs. But he never explained why.

Since I knew how he works, I later on decided to make him write indirectly. He was meticulous at editing so I decided to write a long history of UPC. It appears in the UPC website under the title, The Roots, Emergence, and Growth of the Uganda People’s Congress, 1600-1985 and hand it to him for editing. By correcting the facts in the essay, he would have indirectly written it himself. When I handed it to him, I never got any response. However, when George Okurapa – the Administrator of the UPC website – sought his permission to have the essay included on the UPC website, he told me that he approved it without any changes. Later, when Kagenda Atwoki suggested that the essay should be withdrawn from the website, I received a private e-mail in which Obote said: The removal of the Adhola essay from the UPC website will rob the website of all its credibility.

I later submitted the essay to Fountain Publishers to be considered for publication. They reviewed and wrote me a long proposal on how to improve and expand the paper for publication as a book. This book is the outcome of the effort to expand and improve that original essay.

Chapter 1 is on the formation of UPC. As Obote used to say, the Uganda People’s Congress is an outgrowth of Uganda National Congress (UNC). That chapter begins by tracing the formation of UNC and then goes to detail the splits that went on in UNC. It also recounts the events that led to the merger of the Uganda Peoples Union (UPU) and UNC to form UPC.

Chapter 2 deals with the Social Base of the Uganda People’s Congress. It confronts Museveni’s erroneous theory that the UPC and the DP are sectarian. Museveni wrote in his book, The Mustard Seed: the struggle for freedom and democracy in Uganda as follows: . . . pre-capitalist polarization based on identity rather than rationality can be quite injurious to a country (Museveni, Y 1997: 187 also quoted in Kassmir, R. 1999: 654) This is not accurate. We know that developed capitalist countries have identity issues. Canada has the problem of its French-speaking citizens who occupy the Quebec Province of Canada and who have tried many times in vain to break away from English-speaking Canada. We also know that Belgium has serious identity issues to the point where it once went without a government for four years. We could quote more instances, but we shall sum it all up in the words of Professor Gitlin who argued: This logic is more than a way of thought. Identity politics is a form of self-understanding, an orientation toward the world, and a structure of feeling which is characteristic of developed industrial societies. (For purposes of this discussion I beg the juicy question or whether it is characteristic of human societies altogether.)" . . . What Professor Gitlin is saying here is that identity politics is not just limited to pre-capitalist societies. In fact, as far as he is concerned, identity politics is an issue of developed capitalist countries; he simply wonders whether it is not also found in the pre-capitalist societies. (Gitlin, T. 154)

Chapter 3 deals with the period just before independence. This was an extremely intense period full of events. It was a period when the kingdom of Buganda wrestled with the possibility of losing its dominant position in Uganda affairs. The kingdom made a series of moves in attempt to shore up its dominant position. And it is these moves which triggered the merger of UPU and Obote’s wing of UNC to form UPC.

Chapter 4 covers the stormy period from Independence to the Revolution. This was an extremely intense period full of events. It was a period when the UPC managed to define itself as a national-democratic liberation movement. This definition came through some very fierce struggles within the party. It was also the party carried out a national-democratic revolution in the country. The UPC found itself locked in a running battle with its political ally – Kabaka Yekka. The alliance between the two parties that took Uganda to independence had soured over Buganda’s trying to gain the upper hand behind the ceremonial Head of State, Kabaka Mutesa II, while the UPC fought for a national-democratic Uganda behind the Prime Minister, Milton Obote.

Chapter 5 is about what Obote called the Move-to-the-Left. While this has been portrayed as a socialist move, in this book we are treating it as a national-democratic one instead. The use of the concept socialism and even the declaration that Uganda was going socialist is explained as just a posture of national-democrats all over the world. When they are talking about socialism, they are simply being anti-imperialist.

Chapter 6 is about the 1971 Coup. It has a lot of facts which have not yet been fully aired in Uganda. Most people believe the 1971 coup was carried out by Idi Amin. Far from it! The 1971 coup was carried out by the British and the Israeli and they only used Idi Amin. The chapter does reveal that Obote was right to argue that perhaps he was the only African leader who was not afraid of a coup. Beverly Barnard, the man who masterminded the coup on behalf of the British, clearly admits this. Apart from this admission by Barnard, the chapter also reveals him as very experienced in overthrowing government. The choice of Barnard does reflect the seriousness with which the British took the coup. It was not something to be left to rookies.

Chapter 7 From Moshi to Obote II deals with the period from the Moshi Conference to the return of Obote to Uganda from exile and his eventual resumption of government. The chapter reveals how the British were instrumental in installing Lule as the first President of Uganda after the fall of Idi Amin. It seems Nyerere acquiesced to British demand knowing that in due course they would find a way of easing him out. It took only 68 days for Lule to fall off on his own. Both the organizers of the Moshi Conference as well as Lule’s government were full of anti-Obote and therefore anti-UPC people. However, UPC was able to reverse this situation in due course and even eventually win the elections in 1980.

Chapter 8 UPC and NRM is on the relations between the National Resistance Movement (NRM) and the Uganda People’s Congress (UPC). Museveni went to the bush against UPC. By the time of the 1985 coup, he had been defeated and had even sought asylum in Sweden. We even know where he was working at the time. It is therefore not correct for Museveni and his NRA to claim they defeated the UPC. The truth is that they defeated the Okellos. They also tell a lot of lies that it is the NRA military pressure that caused the 1985 coup. Far from it!

As a matter of fact, it is the defeat of the NRA that led to the coup. A number of senior UPCs who had been opposed to prosecution of the war to the end were some of the main instigators of the coup. They feared that should the war come to the expected conclusion, they would have to account for their positions. Some even knew that because of their position during the war, they were not likely to be in the next government.

I have added an appendex, Marxism and the Uganda Peoples Congress. It is my strong belief that Marxists, particularly followers of Professor Mamadani are going to play significant role in Uganda politics. Besides Professor Mamdani is the most prolific commentator on Uganda politics. His writings are also taken very seriously. For those reasons I found it necessary to give a UPC position on what Marxists (and particularly Mamdani) have said about UPC.

Chapter 1

FORMATION