20 years later, mystery
of Oyite’s death lingers
By Badru D. Mulumba
KAMPALA – For David Oyite-Ojok, 43, it was a flight of
no return.
The man who led Ugandan troops alongside Tanzanian
troops to overthrow Idi Amin 25 years ago today, would
step out of his Kololo home never to step back alive.
It was Friday, December 1983.
The wife, Becca, was away in Gulu.
The day before, Becca spoke to Maj. Gen. Oyite-Ojok on
phone.
She wanted to return to Kampala; she was sick.
It was Thursday.
Would he send a chopper to pick her; she was sick?
Oyite-Ojok was flying to the bush where a three-year
rebellion raved.
And as he took off in the ill-fated flight, his wife
was taking off from Gulu Airstrip to Entebbe.
They missed each other.
“He was already in the bush [when she arrived],”
recalls Becca. “That is when it crashed.”
Recalls Bec ca: “My sister said that as he went out of
the house, he would go and come back; he would go,
then come back. Then, he came back one last time and
only said, “Kampala good bye.”
Kampala is Oyite-Ojok’s youngest son.
Becca waited for her husband.
The day shifted into sunset.
Oyite-Ojok was not yet home.
Sunset became 8pm – the time many people went to bed
those days.
She waited.
Ironically, at the time, her son, Kampala reportedly
was playing games.
“He was shouting, ‘they are burning, they are
burning,” she says.
“Then, I said: ‘Kampala, you are a wizard. I don’t
want that kind of thing’,” Becca recalls.
“The day David announced the overthrow of Idi Amin was
the day that I gave birth,” she explains the choice of
name. “So [former] president Obote said, he wanted his
name to be given to the boy, but let the boy be called
Kampala Falls.”
Then 8pm became 10pm.
Becca still waited.
Every body else was in bed.
Ten o’clock became midnight. She trembled.
“I started panicking,” she says. “I rang Nile
Mansions. Nothing.”
Then, Mr Paulo Muwanga’s secretary rang her.
She could not immediately recall his name.
“He is the one who told me,” Becca recalls.
“When he called me, I just started crying. Screaming.
People kept coming home. Some good people came. The
whole place was filled with people.”
It was twenty years ago, last December since her
husband’s death.
But for Becca Arach Oyite-Ojok, plot 42, Windsor
Crescent, Kololo still enamors her.
It brings back memories – terrible memories.
Six months after Oyite-Ojok stepped out to the
welcoming jaws of death, her eldest son would step out
too.
Never to return alive.
“When we came, things were okay,” says Becca.
“We were happy. Then, all of a sudden, he [Oyite-Ojok]
died. We didn’t feel safe any more. We w ere confused.”
Oyite-Ojok’s body was laid in parliament for a week.
A sense of foreboding gripped the nation, possibly
because Oyite-Ojok was regarded as the real man who
kept Obote in power.
Therefore, it was safe, it seemed, to conclude, that
Obote’s government was coming unstuck.
*****
Indeed, Obote fell within a year and half of
Oyite-Ojok’s death.
But 20 years later, the nation apparently remains as
divided as to the actual cause of the plane crash – as
it were then.
A mechanical fault?
Or an inside job?
The latter seems to carry favour with the public.
Government called it a chopper accident – and closed
that chapter. No investigations.
Has the family ever tried to establish what caused the
crash?
“There is no reason we should,” Becca says. “We don’t
want to. It would raise a lot of dust on the face.
That is political.”
That is the closest Becca comes to revealing that< BR>there might be more to the death of her husband than a
mechanical accident.
In fact, the family’s behaviour since then offers
strong clues to suggest that ‘intentional friendly
fire’ brought down Oyite-Ojok’s plane.
Possibly, the strongest clue was that Becca wanted to
take her family out of the country immediately after
her husband’s death.
Oyite’s family hunted
She told Obote as such.
“We were falling in trouble,” she recalls. “I didn’t
tell him the whole thing.”
Possibly, Obote did not see the urgency of taking the
family outside.
The eldest son, Michael Simba had been confiding in
his mother’s sister that he thought some people were
following her.
Apparently, the mother did not take seriously that
threat.
“When he was shot dead, is when I realised that this
was serious,” she recalls, the look in her eyes
depicting a deep sense of perhaps loss, perhaps
regret, or even anger.
The official version however was that Oyite-Ojok’s son
shot himself.
Then, Arach was in West Germany.
She got the news through the Ugandan embassy in
Germany.
At her request, Sunday Monitor is keeping a detail of
what happened immediately after her son’s death out of
this story.
“If he shot himself, wouldn’t soldiers at the gate
have heard?”
At the time he was found dead, Simba lay facing
upwards at an uncle’s home.
Tragically, the uncle, himself a major in the army,
died with Oyite-Ojok in the ill fated plane crash.
Oyite-Ojok had taken him along.
“He was shot with [a gun fitted with] a silencer. The
people guarding the gate could not hear. He died in
bed. He didn’t shoot himself. The window was found
open. So the bullet just touched his heart.”
A gun was reportedly found in his arms, laid across
his chest.
If indeed the soldiers guarding the gate didn’t hear a
single shot, it is safe to conclude, like she has,
that her son was shot with a gun that had a silencer
to muffle the sound.
Inexplicably, no investigations were done,
strengthening the view of apparent haste by government
to convince the world that the son shot himself.
What is not known is whether the apparent cover up was
merely an effort to make the family feel safe, or part
of a bigger plot to protect the killers.
Time for exile
After that death, Becca knew that time had come to go
into exile.
She told Obote that her family did not feel safe.
It would appear that Obote tried to convince
Oyite-Ojok’s family that it was safe in Uganda.
“Whether you accept it or not, our lives re not safe
here,” she recalls telling Obote.
Obote shifted her to Britain.
He also enrolled her children in Dover and Kent – very
expensive private schools.
In a way, the move from calm to confusion to chaos
within the Oyite-Ojok f amily reflected the country’s
transition at that time.
A year later in July 1985, Obote was overthrown,
ushering in perhaps the most chaotic time this country
has seen.
Becca moved to Nairobi in 1986; Britain was too
expensive, now that Obote was out of power and she
could not count on state support.
“I kept a very low profile in Nairobi,” she recalls.
Soon after, she crossed over to Tanzania.
“I went to visit [late Julius] Nyerere only because
Nyerere used to call David his son,” she says.
She only needed to introduce herself.
The presidential press service immediately whisked her
to Nyerere.
“So, they allowed me to stay,” she recalls. “He
[Nyerere] is the one who told Mwinyi to get me where
to stay.”
Then, Ali Hassan Mwinyi was president. Nyerere was
still chairperson of the ruling party, Chama Cha
Mapinduzi.
In 1989, Mwinyi gave her a house in Arusha. But many
people were contesting the house. She declined it.
Instead, she bought one in Arusha; she still owns it.
Clues to the murder
There was the rumour that Oyite-Ojok had in a veiled
warning told Obote that he was the reason the former
president was still in power.
In a way, Oyite-Ojok was the David Tinyefuza of his
times.
Like Tinyefuza did to the Lord’s Resistance Army in
1992, by the time of his death, Oyite-Ojok had beaten
back Museveni’s rebellion to near extinction.
Oyite-Ojok reportedly had ambition, military skill,
and in an army full of illiterates, was well educated
and trained.
It was revealed in Kenya last month that Raila Odinga
met Oyite-Ojok to seek support for former Attorney
General, Charles Njonjo's failed coup against Daniel
arap Moi in July 1982.
Oyite-Ojok reportedly gave the coup plan 80 percent
chance of success and reportedly was the coup
plotters’ link to Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere.
Surprisingly, Obo te, was reportedly ignorant about the
plans.
When he found out, he reportedly warned Odinga that he
was putting himself in danger because if Moi knew
about it, he could easily be assassinated.
But that Obote, seemingly didn’t have a plan to
replace Oyite-Ojok would strongly seem to rule him out
amongst those who would have wanted Oyite-Ojok out of
the way.
That Oyite-Ojok’s family confided its fears in Obote
seems to strengthen that view.
But there are other motives that could offer clues to
Oyite-Ojok’s death.
Tanzania is also where the first theory about who
might have had a motive to kill Oyite-Ojok is
traceable.
Oyite-Ojok had been in exile in Tanzania for eight
years when in 1978, war broke out, after Idi Amin
bombed Tanzania’s Kagera region.
According to Becca, the Tanzanian government said:
“David and his people should join the war.”
Becca remembers the date as sometime between October
and November.
Becca, then pregnant with Kampala, was also training
as a nurse.
She was in Muhimbili Hospital in Dar es Salaam.
One weekend, Becca returned home only to find
Oyite-Ojok’s chit.
It read: “We shall meet in Uganda.”
Thus, Oyite-Ojok joined the war effort – picking many
enemies along the way.
It is well known that the Okellos – Bazilio Olara and
Tito Okello were fighting for army leadership.
What is not well know though, is that Mr Paulo
Muwanga, the head of the Military Commission and later
Obote’s vice president was not comfortable with
Oyite-Ojok, according to one source close to the
events of the time.
Mzee Daudi Semyano, arrested in 1987 for plotting to
overthrow the Museveni government, offers this
perspective.
His other son, one Michael Miiro joined Andrew
Kayiira’s rebels.
Kayiira deserted his fighters when Oyite-Ojok
intensified the offensive against the rebels and
shortly, g overnment announced that there were no more
rebels.
Government also advised any who were in exile to
return home.
Miiro was arrested at the Kenyan border.
According to Mzee Semyano, Miiro was imprisoned
together with Balaki Kiirya and one, Sabiiti.
Kirya reportedly told the son: “You are young. You
will save us from Oyite-Ojok. Tell him that, ‘we, the
young ones get guns from Bazilio Okello’ why are you
imprisoning us instead of them.”
Balaki Kirya reportedly helped Miiro draft a memo to
Oyite-Ojok who immediately visited the prison to
interview Miiro.
Mzee Semyano says that during the ill-fated flight,
Oyite-Ojok was going to continue a purge of the army
of the Okellos’ group, mostly Acholi. He was
reportedly to transfer Tito Okello and Bazilio Okello
to Gulu.
“The infighting between the Acholi and the Langi
intensified,” he says.
His son would later quote Oyite-Ojok saying: “Let me
go to Lu wero, and chase the Acholi’s who are there”.
He adds, “That is when the Acholi shot the plane.”
Semyano’s son was released when NRM came into power.
He has since died.
But a person who closely worked with Paulo Muwanga
says Oyite-Ojok’s death was the culmination of a long
struggle for power.
A decade long fight for power culminated in the death
of a life that forever changed the direction of the
war.
On one side were Paulo Muwanga, and a few others
(names withheld).
On the other were the Rwakasisi and Luwuliza Kirundas.
According to this source, Muwanga conspired to have a
bomb on the plane.
Muwanga was reportedly at loggerheads with Obote over
the appointment of Oyite-Ojok to the position of chief
of staff.
At the time the Okellos were fighting to control the
army, Muwanga had also apparently been fighting to do
the same.
He reportedly fronted Maj. Gen. Francis Nyangweso, who
had served in the Am in army up to the last day.
In fact, after Oyite-Ojok’s death, according to this
source, Muwanga again fronted Nyangweso.
Consequently, the infighting meant that the army would
not have a chief of staff for nine months.
Obote finally named Smith Opon Acak.
Unfortunately, all – Muwanga, Ojok and Opon Acak are
now dead.
Significantly, when asked how she could have felt safe
requesting Museveni to return when the man who her
husband died fighting was in power, Becca says: “By
then, the people who were after us would have given
up.”
But more significantly, Becca requested to return to
Uganda hardly two years after Museveni – the man who
her husband almost successfully executed the war
against – came into power.
Museveni is not believed for being easily forgiving of
former adversaries, the way Oyite-Ojok was.
But his relationship with Oyite-Ojok’s family seems
warm. She says that she meets him most times t hat he
goes to Lira.
“When I go to him to ask for anything he gives it me,”
she says. “It is only me who doesn’t want to ask.”
For instance, Becca flies as a VIP.
“Museveni has given us the VIP status,” she says.
But she didn’t meet Museveni in Dar.
“He was teaching in some school in a different town
with Omara Aliro,” she says.
Did she meet him when they returned?
“Of course, remember he was the minister of Defence.”
Upon her return in 1990, Museveni reportedly placed
her under Ms Amelia Kyambadde, the private secretary
to the president.
She seems to have struck a rapport. When Kyambadde
reportedly discovered that Becca was from Gulu, she
started speaking Acholi. Becca’s father was Acholi;
her mother a Madi. Years later, Becca discovered that
Kyambadde was her ‘old girl’ from Sacred Heart.
Possibly, Oyite-Ojok’s relationship with Museveni was
closer than it is widely thought. For, apparently,
nothing explains why a family of a man who lost his
life while hunting down Museveni would be so close to
Museveni.
In fact, Becca’s frantic reaction when her husband
took long to return should tell us that she had a
foreboding something wrong was afoot, possibly from
within.
Interestingly, she says Oyite-Ojok didn’t tell them
anything.
Did he tell others – may be?
“I don’t know if he did,” Becca says.
“But you know, when things are about to happen, God
tells you.”
The family used to go to Silver Springs in Bugolobi on
Sundays.
“So, one weekend, we went there,” she recalls. “He was
really happy. There were traditional dancers,
traditional music, western music and religious music.
So he really danced. He sang. The last song was Stand
up, stand up for Jesus. Then, he said, ‘Let’s go.’ And
on Friday he flew to the bush.”
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Next Sunday: A peep i nto Oyite-Ojok’s home
of Oyite’s death lingers
By Badru D. Mulumba
KAMPALA – For David Oyite-Ojok, 43, it was a flight of
no return.
The man who led Ugandan troops alongside Tanzanian
troops to overthrow Idi Amin 25 years ago today, would
step out of his Kololo home never to step back alive.
It was Friday, December 1983.
The wife, Becca, was away in Gulu.
The day before, Becca spoke to Maj. Gen. Oyite-Ojok on
phone.
She wanted to return to Kampala; she was sick.
It was Thursday.
Would he send a chopper to pick her; she was sick?
Oyite-Ojok was flying to the bush where a three-year
rebellion raved.
And as he took off in the ill-fated flight, his wife
was taking off from Gulu Airstrip to Entebbe.
They missed each other.
“He was already in the bush [when she arrived],”
recalls Becca. “That is when it crashed.”
Recalls Bec ca: “My sister said that as he went out of
the house, he would go and come back; he would go,
then come back. Then, he came back one last time and
only said, “Kampala good bye.”
Kampala is Oyite-Ojok’s youngest son.
Becca waited for her husband.
The day shifted into sunset.
Oyite-Ojok was not yet home.
Sunset became 8pm – the time many people went to bed
those days.
She waited.
Ironically, at the time, her son, Kampala reportedly
was playing games.
“He was shouting, ‘they are burning, they are
burning,” she says.
“Then, I said: ‘Kampala, you are a wizard. I don’t
want that kind of thing’,” Becca recalls.
“The day David announced the overthrow of Idi Amin was
the day that I gave birth,” she explains the choice of
name. “So [former] president Obote said, he wanted his
name to be given to the boy, but let the boy be called
Kampala Falls.”
Then 8pm became 10pm.
Becca still waited.
Every body else was in bed.
Ten o’clock became midnight. She trembled.
“I started panicking,” she says. “I rang Nile
Mansions. Nothing.”
Then, Mr Paulo Muwanga’s secretary rang her.
She could not immediately recall his name.
“He is the one who told me,” Becca recalls.
“When he called me, I just started crying. Screaming.
People kept coming home. Some good people came. The
whole place was filled with people.”
It was twenty years ago, last December since her
husband’s death.
But for Becca Arach Oyite-Ojok, plot 42, Windsor
Crescent, Kololo still enamors her.
It brings back memories – terrible memories.
Six months after Oyite-Ojok stepped out to the
welcoming jaws of death, her eldest son would step out
too.
Never to return alive.
“When we came, things were okay,” says Becca.
“We were happy. Then, all of a sudden, he [Oyite-Ojok]
died. We didn’t feel safe any more. We w ere confused.”
Oyite-Ojok’s body was laid in parliament for a week.
A sense of foreboding gripped the nation, possibly
because Oyite-Ojok was regarded as the real man who
kept Obote in power.
Therefore, it was safe, it seemed, to conclude, that
Obote’s government was coming unstuck.
*****
Indeed, Obote fell within a year and half of
Oyite-Ojok’s death.
But 20 years later, the nation apparently remains as
divided as to the actual cause of the plane crash – as
it were then.
A mechanical fault?
Or an inside job?
The latter seems to carry favour with the public.
Government called it a chopper accident – and closed
that chapter. No investigations.
Has the family ever tried to establish what caused the
crash?
“There is no reason we should,” Becca says. “We don’t
want to. It would raise a lot of dust on the face.
That is political.”
That is the closest Becca comes to revealing that< BR>there might be more to the death of her husband than a
mechanical accident.
In fact, the family’s behaviour since then offers
strong clues to suggest that ‘intentional friendly
fire’ brought down Oyite-Ojok’s plane.
Possibly, the strongest clue was that Becca wanted to
take her family out of the country immediately after
her husband’s death.
Oyite’s family hunted
She told Obote as such.
“We were falling in trouble,” she recalls. “I didn’t
tell him the whole thing.”
Possibly, Obote did not see the urgency of taking the
family outside.
The eldest son, Michael Simba had been confiding in
his mother’s sister that he thought some people were
following her.
Apparently, the mother did not take seriously that
threat.
“When he was shot dead, is when I realised that this
was serious,” she recalls, the look in her eyes
depicting a deep sense of perhaps loss, perhaps
regret, or even anger.
The official version however was that Oyite-Ojok’s son
shot himself.
Then, Arach was in West Germany.
She got the news through the Ugandan embassy in
Germany.
At her request, Sunday Monitor is keeping a detail of
what happened immediately after her son’s death out of
this story.
“If he shot himself, wouldn’t soldiers at the gate
have heard?”
At the time he was found dead, Simba lay facing
upwards at an uncle’s home.
Tragically, the uncle, himself a major in the army,
died with Oyite-Ojok in the ill fated plane crash.
Oyite-Ojok had taken him along.
“He was shot with [a gun fitted with] a silencer. The
people guarding the gate could not hear. He died in
bed. He didn’t shoot himself. The window was found
open. So the bullet just touched his heart.”
A gun was reportedly found in his arms, laid across
his chest.
If indeed the soldiers guarding the gate didn’t hear a
single shot, it is safe to conclude, like she has,
that her son was shot with a gun that had a silencer
to muffle the sound.
Inexplicably, no investigations were done,
strengthening the view of apparent haste by government
to convince the world that the son shot himself.
What is not known is whether the apparent cover up was
merely an effort to make the family feel safe, or part
of a bigger plot to protect the killers.
Time for exile
After that death, Becca knew that time had come to go
into exile.
She told Obote that her family did not feel safe.
It would appear that Obote tried to convince
Oyite-Ojok’s family that it was safe in Uganda.
“Whether you accept it or not, our lives re not safe
here,” she recalls telling Obote.
Obote shifted her to Britain.
He also enrolled her children in Dover and Kent – very
expensive private schools.
In a way, the move from calm to confusion to chaos
within the Oyite-Ojok f amily reflected the country’s
transition at that time.
A year later in July 1985, Obote was overthrown,
ushering in perhaps the most chaotic time this country
has seen.
Becca moved to Nairobi in 1986; Britain was too
expensive, now that Obote was out of power and she
could not count on state support.
“I kept a very low profile in Nairobi,” she recalls.
Soon after, she crossed over to Tanzania.
“I went to visit [late Julius] Nyerere only because
Nyerere used to call David his son,” she says.
She only needed to introduce herself.
The presidential press service immediately whisked her
to Nyerere.
“So, they allowed me to stay,” she recalls. “He
[Nyerere] is the one who told Mwinyi to get me where
to stay.”
Then, Ali Hassan Mwinyi was president. Nyerere was
still chairperson of the ruling party, Chama Cha
Mapinduzi.
In 1989, Mwinyi gave her a house in Arusha. But many
people were contesting the house. She declined it.
Instead, she bought one in Arusha; she still owns it.
Clues to the murder
There was the rumour that Oyite-Ojok had in a veiled
warning told Obote that he was the reason the former
president was still in power.
In a way, Oyite-Ojok was the David Tinyefuza of his
times.
Like Tinyefuza did to the Lord’s Resistance Army in
1992, by the time of his death, Oyite-Ojok had beaten
back Museveni’s rebellion to near extinction.
Oyite-Ojok reportedly had ambition, military skill,
and in an army full of illiterates, was well educated
and trained.
It was revealed in Kenya last month that Raila Odinga
met Oyite-Ojok to seek support for former Attorney
General, Charles Njonjo's failed coup against Daniel
arap Moi in July 1982.
Oyite-Ojok reportedly gave the coup plan 80 percent
chance of success and reportedly was the coup
plotters’ link to Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere.
Surprisingly, Obo te, was reportedly ignorant about the
plans.
When he found out, he reportedly warned Odinga that he
was putting himself in danger because if Moi knew
about it, he could easily be assassinated.
But that Obote, seemingly didn’t have a plan to
replace Oyite-Ojok would strongly seem to rule him out
amongst those who would have wanted Oyite-Ojok out of
the way.
That Oyite-Ojok’s family confided its fears in Obote
seems to strengthen that view.
But there are other motives that could offer clues to
Oyite-Ojok’s death.
Tanzania is also where the first theory about who
might have had a motive to kill Oyite-Ojok is
traceable.
Oyite-Ojok had been in exile in Tanzania for eight
years when in 1978, war broke out, after Idi Amin
bombed Tanzania’s Kagera region.
According to Becca, the Tanzanian government said:
“David and his people should join the war.”
Becca remembers the date as sometime between October
and November.
Becca, then pregnant with Kampala, was also training
as a nurse.
She was in Muhimbili Hospital in Dar es Salaam.
One weekend, Becca returned home only to find
Oyite-Ojok’s chit.
It read: “We shall meet in Uganda.”
Thus, Oyite-Ojok joined the war effort – picking many
enemies along the way.
It is well known that the Okellos – Bazilio Olara and
Tito Okello were fighting for army leadership.
What is not well know though, is that Mr Paulo
Muwanga, the head of the Military Commission and later
Obote’s vice president was not comfortable with
Oyite-Ojok, according to one source close to the
events of the time.
Mzee Daudi Semyano, arrested in 1987 for plotting to
overthrow the Museveni government, offers this
perspective.
His other son, one Michael Miiro joined Andrew
Kayiira’s rebels.
Kayiira deserted his fighters when Oyite-Ojok
intensified the offensive against the rebels and
shortly, g overnment announced that there were no more
rebels.
Government also advised any who were in exile to
return home.
Miiro was arrested at the Kenyan border.
According to Mzee Semyano, Miiro was imprisoned
together with Balaki Kiirya and one, Sabiiti.
Kirya reportedly told the son: “You are young. You
will save us from Oyite-Ojok. Tell him that, ‘we, the
young ones get guns from Bazilio Okello’ why are you
imprisoning us instead of them.”
Balaki Kirya reportedly helped Miiro draft a memo to
Oyite-Ojok who immediately visited the prison to
interview Miiro.
Mzee Semyano says that during the ill-fated flight,
Oyite-Ojok was going to continue a purge of the army
of the Okellos’ group, mostly Acholi. He was
reportedly to transfer Tito Okello and Bazilio Okello
to Gulu.
“The infighting between the Acholi and the Langi
intensified,” he says.
His son would later quote Oyite-Ojok saying: “Let me
go to Lu wero, and chase the Acholi’s who are there”.
He adds, “That is when the Acholi shot the plane.”
Semyano’s son was released when NRM came into power.
He has since died.
But a person who closely worked with Paulo Muwanga
says Oyite-Ojok’s death was the culmination of a long
struggle for power.
A decade long fight for power culminated in the death
of a life that forever changed the direction of the
war.
On one side were Paulo Muwanga, and a few others
(names withheld).
On the other were the Rwakasisi and Luwuliza Kirundas.
According to this source, Muwanga conspired to have a
bomb on the plane.
Muwanga was reportedly at loggerheads with Obote over
the appointment of Oyite-Ojok to the position of chief
of staff.
At the time the Okellos were fighting to control the
army, Muwanga had also apparently been fighting to do
the same.
He reportedly fronted Maj. Gen. Francis Nyangweso, who
had served in the Am in army up to the last day.
In fact, after Oyite-Ojok’s death, according to this
source, Muwanga again fronted Nyangweso.
Consequently, the infighting meant that the army would
not have a chief of staff for nine months.
Obote finally named Smith Opon Acak.
Unfortunately, all – Muwanga, Ojok and Opon Acak are
now dead.
Significantly, when asked how she could have felt safe
requesting Museveni to return when the man who her
husband died fighting was in power, Becca says: “By
then, the people who were after us would have given
up.”
But more significantly, Becca requested to return to
Uganda hardly two years after Museveni – the man who
her husband almost successfully executed the war
against – came into power.
Museveni is not believed for being easily forgiving of
former adversaries, the way Oyite-Ojok was.
But his relationship with Oyite-Ojok’s family seems
warm. She says that she meets him most times t hat he
goes to Lira.
“When I go to him to ask for anything he gives it me,”
she says. “It is only me who doesn’t want to ask.”
For instance, Becca flies as a VIP.
“Museveni has given us the VIP status,” she says.
But she didn’t meet Museveni in Dar.
“He was teaching in some school in a different town
with Omara Aliro,” she says.
Did she meet him when they returned?
“Of course, remember he was the minister of Defence.”
Upon her return in 1990, Museveni reportedly placed
her under Ms Amelia Kyambadde, the private secretary
to the president.
She seems to have struck a rapport. When Kyambadde
reportedly discovered that Becca was from Gulu, she
started speaking Acholi. Becca’s father was Acholi;
her mother a Madi. Years later, Becca discovered that
Kyambadde was her ‘old girl’ from Sacred Heart.
Possibly, Oyite-Ojok’s relationship with Museveni was
closer than it is widely thought. For, apparently,
nothing explains why a family of a man who lost his
life while hunting down Museveni would be so close to
Museveni.
In fact, Becca’s frantic reaction when her husband
took long to return should tell us that she had a
foreboding something wrong was afoot, possibly from
within.
Interestingly, she says Oyite-Ojok didn’t tell them
anything.
Did he tell others – may be?
“I don’t know if he did,” Becca says.
“But you know, when things are about to happen, God
tells you.”
The family used to go to Silver Springs in Bugolobi on
Sundays.
“So, one weekend, we went there,” she recalls. “He was
really happy. There were traditional dancers,
traditional music, western music and religious music.
So he really danced. He sang. The last song was Stand
up, stand up for Jesus. Then, he said, ‘Let’s go.’ And
on Friday he flew to the bush.”
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Next Sunday: A peep i nto Oyite-Ojok’s home
Gook
"Rang guthe agithi marapu!" A karamonjong word of wisdom
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