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Ear to The Ground
By Charles Onyango-Obbo |
Another president flees; how safe are Uganda�s rulers?
March 3, 2004
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If there is an African leader who has overstayed his welcome, he should look to what happened to ousted Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to realise that times have changed. Aristide, once a promising and popular leader (they all start out that way, don�t they?) on the weekend fled to the Central African Republic after a few weeks of opposition protest and armed rebellion. He was a good man, who is accused of turning corrupt and unleashing torture in his Caribbean country. Aristide left after the US, French, and several other governments said he should go in order to end the conflict. Not surprisingly, Aristide claims the Americans abducted him and spirited him out of the country. This seems to be the new trend. Last August, Liberia�s strongman, Charles Taylor left in a similar manner. Besieged by a rebellion, and with US President George Bush telling him to leave, Taylor was eventually flown into exile in Nigeria. In November 2003, protesters broke into the Parliament of Georgia and the presidential palace, again forcing the country�s president Eduard Shevardnazde to flee. As Aristide weighed his options, in Uganda where you have some mix of the conditions that forced Taylor out of Liberia, and now Haiti, former president Godfrey Binaisa said in an interview aired on Monitor FM that the political agitation in the country and the presidency-for-life project could provoke a military coup. I don�t share Binaisa�s view that Uganda could face a military coup soon, and therefore that President Yoweri Museveni might be chased from his job by soldiers. But coming at a time of the events in Haiti, we cannot help but wonder how the Museveni presidency, when it finally comes to end in two, 12, or 17 years� time, will happen. The only guide we have on that question, is how previous presidencies ended. Mutesa fled as only a royal with a love for hunting could � on foot, through the bushes. His escape is our country�s best documented and most dramatised presidential flight. There are accounts by supporters of Mutesa battling lions and snakes, and tackling treacherous rivers as he made his way to Rwanda. Mutesa�s own description of his escape is not as colourful. When Milton Obote was in turn overthrown by Amin in 1971, the UPC leader was at a Commonwealth Conference in Singapore, so he didn�t have to flee as such. Amin, whose escape I witnessed, took off toward the east then eventually made his way to the North and into West Nile. And from there flew to Libya. Many of Amin�s troops, however, ran away through Luwero in the face of the advance of the combined Tanzanian People�s Defence Forces and Ugandan exiles in 1979. Prof. Yusuf Lule, the first post-Amin president lasted only 68 days in power before he was voted out of office by the Uganda National Liberation Front that took power after Amin. He was bundled on to a plane by what he later said were his Tanzanian captors and flown out from Entebbe airport to Dar es Salaam. There, he was to be admonished by Tanzania�s President Julius Nyerere, and kept under house arrest in a guest house for some weeks before he was allowed to fly to a life of exile in London. Lule became the first, and so far last president, to exit office through Entebbe. His successor, Godfrey Binaisa didn�t travel far when he was overthrown by the military in 1980. He actually enjoyed the most luxurious conditions a prisoner in Uganda has ever received. He was kept in State House for some days under house arrest, allowing him to continue sleeping on the presidential bed and dining on meals fit for a king. When he eventually left the country several months later, he had long ceased to be president and thus the manner of his departure need not detain us. And so in came Obote, after a disputed election in December 1980. Obote was again to be overthrown in July 1985 by his army led by the Okellos (Tito and Basilio). As the mutinous soldiers, exhausted by five years of a bitter war against Museveni�s National Resistance Army rebels advanced from the North where they had assembled, Obote and his henchmen scampered eastward into Kenya by road. The Okellos too took off eastwards as the NRA defeated their forces in Kampala in January 1986, and on to the North. It was the same route Amin took. Basilio made his way eventually into southern Sudan. A couple of things could happen to Museveni. He might retire peacefully to his farm in Nyabushozi, who knows? But if he were to leave hurriedly and in desperate circumstances, and he didn�t want to risk taking the escape route of any of his predecessors, he has several choices. The eastern road route is overused, so he might want to avoid that. Mutesa did the Rwanda one, and Lule Entebbe. The virgin escape routes are mostly westward. He could take off through Kasese into the Democratic Republic of Congo. There is the Mutukula border point into Tanzania, which has not been touched. And there is the truly adventurous one � over Lake Victoria into Kenya. Uganda is a very small country by any measure, yet it is still big enough for our rulers to find a safe escape route before they are cornered by a mutinous army or rebels. l Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
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