| Twenty years after the murder of political activist Andrew Kayiira, nothing has been heard of the fate of his murderers. Is there any hope of bringing them to book?
On March 7, 1987 Dr Andrew Lutakome Kayiira was shot dead at the home of a friend, Henry Gombya, at Konge, Makindye on the outskirts of Kampala.
18 years later, mystery still surrounds the gruesome murder of the former guerrilla leader Minister of Energy and president of the Uganda Freedom Movement (UFM).
In fact, there are more questions now than there are answers; not only do we not know who killed Kayiira, but there are also doubts that the Scotland Yard report on the murder will ever be made public.
Born in Nkokonjeru on January 30, 1945, Kayiira attended primary school in Nsambya, a suburb of Kampala. At 15 he was admitted to Namilyango Secondary School. He then went on to study at the Department of Mathematics at Makerere University College.
He however chose to enter the Uganda Government civil service as a cadet officer trainee. After his training in 1966 he was appointed assistant superintendent of Uganda Prisons.
In 1968 the Uganda go
vernment
awarded Kayiira a scholarship in appreciation of his work, for further studies in Great Britain, where he was awarded a diploma in criminal justice. Soon after he returned to Uganda in 1969 his intellectual abilities were noticed by representatives of the U.S government, who awarded him a scholarship to the University of Southern Illinois, where he earned his Bachelor of Science degree in criminal justice in 1971.
Kayiira did not return home for the next eight years; the political situation in Uganda after Amin took power forced Kayiira to go into self-imposed political exile. He stayed in Albany, the capital of the State of New York, where he worked and also obtained an M.A. and a Ph.D. in criminal justice.
In 1979, he became minister of Internal Affairs in the first post-Amin government of Prof Yusuf Lule. After the instability that followed a few months later, Kayiira founded and became the military leader of the Uganda Freedom Movement (UFM) which participa
ted in
the struggle for the restoration of political sanity in Uganda.
Despite being a freedom fighter Kayiira was often accused of having tribal tendencies.
A passage in Francis Bwengyes book The Price of Freedom describes him as being accused of being arrogant because of coming from the dominant Baganda ethnic group, and because of his academic excellence.
Tribal ties
Kayiira has never been too shy to talk about being a Muganda, and the importance of the Baganda as an ethnic group in the countrys politics and economy.
He always argued that the Baganda had been politically and economically exploited by other Ugandan ethnic groups for a long time.
His non-hypocritical and open stand had earned him great admiration and popularity among his fellow Baganda. His federalistic disposition earned him bitter enmity from many who were opposed to his stand on key issues, especially concerning Buganda.
By the time Tito Okellos military junta was toppled in 1986 by the NRM/A, Kayiira and his armed group had control of various parts of Kampala, including Ggaba, Konge, Muyenga and parts of Makindye.
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| MURDERED: Dr. Andrew Kayiira addresses a rally at City Square. He was shot and killed by unknown gunmen at the house of a friend in 1987. Although Scotland Yard detectives concluded the investigations into this case, the findings were never made public. File photo. |
He was given a ministerial job to entice him into stopping his military campaigns and absorbing his fighting force in the government.
A close friend who served with him but is now in exile says: His stubbornness on controversial issues such the return to multipartism and the question of federalism, challenging the very government that he served, created a problem for him, as he was making these demands when the whole country had not even been secured. He was very popular and some people in government were scared of him. They could have hatched a plan to cause his death.
Though his fighting group was in the process of being assimilated into the mainstream NRA, a section of his commanders were arrested on the suspicion that they were planning to overthrow NRMs government.
Eventually on October 7, 1986, Kayiira, then Minister of Energy, was arrested for allegedly planning to overthrow NRMs government. He was arrested with two cabinet colleagues.
The
government claimed to have tape recordings featuring him talking to some Baganda army officers on a plot to overthrow the Government.
Missing evidence
However, according to witnesses present at the time, the tapes were never produced in court; the government had only made the allegation that such evidence was available on tape. The presiding judge tossed out the tape exhibit because in the morning the witness who claimed to have recorded the conversation produced a black tape, but after the lunch recess returned with a grey tape.
And so Kayiira was acquitted for lack of evidence, a move that apparently did not go well with some highly placed government officials.
Upon his release and fearing for his life, Kayiira moved into his friend Gombyas house. Francis Bwengye explains it all in his book The Price of Freedom.
He alleges that prior to the day Kayiira was killed, a commander nick-named Suicide Brewery and his killer squad set up a surveillance unit at his house so that Kayiira would not escape, in case the whole plan had been leaked.
It was too late; t
he plot
to kill him had been leaked already and one intelligence officer of the 19th battalion at Lubiri Barracks had discussed with his fellow Baganda soldiers and resolved to defend Kayiira; they did so by sending two soldiers to tell Kayiira to run.
Unfortunately the messengers were delayed by public transport; they arrived at the scene after the whole place had been surrounded. The messengers were arrested and the killers moved into the house, showering Kayiira with bullets and killing him.
After the death, police arrested five men who they alleged had killed Kayiira. However the Commission of Inquiry into Violations of Human Rights set up by President Museveni and chaired by Justice Oder received evidence in camera regarding interference in the police criminal investigations into the murder by some NRA officers whom it doesnt name, but describes by numbers.
The commission was told that military personnel interfered with five suspects who had confessed to havin
g
murdered the late Kayiira. The suspects, who included one Brain Musisi and a Kakooza, confessed that an NRA officer (number given in the report) had participated in the murder.
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| VOICES OF REASON: Francis Bwengye (left) penned the book The Price of Freedom after his friend Kayiira was killed. The book details how Kayiira was murdered. Col. Kizza Besigye (left) is one of those who have brought up the Kayiira investigations during their election campaigns. File photos. |
Cover up?
Other NRA officers also tried to cover up the fact that the guns used to kill Kayiira came from the Army. The investigations were muddled up; Brian Musisi escaped and three other suspects were seized by the army, accused of being deserters and taken for disciplinary action. Nobody knows what happened to them.
However , an NRA officer speaking on behalf of the army at the Commission, who was by then working with Internal Security Organization (ISO), dismissed the evidence as baseless allegations. The witness said that he was not aware that Musisi implicated an NRA officer, or that he made such a confession. He thought that the allegation was untrue and that the government had no hand in the killing of Kayiira, even though he had been arrested on allegations of plotting against the governmen.
Another army officer who was a senior officer in the Mobile Brigade at the time of the murder, told the Commission that the army had been
co-operative in trying to find the killer, and even helped the police in carrying out the investigation. He said he was briefed about the murder, after which he then went to Henry Gombyas house in Ggaba. There, he met a police officer and started investigations.
Co-operation
Five days later the Director of the CID, S. Mugamba, informed him of a boy who said he had information about the incident.
Using the information from the boy, they arrested five suspects and handed them over to police for further investigations. The witness also said that the police informed him that after recording statements, they would send the suspects to court.
The witness further said that the allegation by the suspects that an NRA officer had been involved in the killing of Kayiira was not mentioned to him by the police.
His theory was that the killing was a result of in-fighting amongst the UFM members. He went on to say that there were a number of allegations about Gombya having gone to prison to ask why Kayiira had been released. He also claimed that Gombya had received money for UFM that had been a source of the dispute between himself and Kayiira.
More investigation
The witness said that they wanted more investigations done, particularly on the bloodstain found on a jacket and a pair of slippers found in Gombyas house.
This part of the investigation had been done by British police, and the report showed that the blood on the jacket and slipper belonged to one of the suspects.
The witness also said that the British police report conclusively stated that the NRA could not have been involved in the murder of Kayiira.
It would not have been possible, he said, to cover up the fact that guns used to kill Kayiira had come from the army, since they (ISO) had been in close collaboration with the police on this matter.
The witness said that when Brain Musisi escaped, they followed him using information given by an informer about where Musisi was, but Musisi escaped again.
As they were still tracing him they got information that UFM rebels had planned to ambush the cars the
intelligence was using. A man was arrested from the court area in possession of a slip of paper indicating all the registration numbers of those cars.
The suspect confessed that Musisis group had sent him.
The suspect later jumped off a vehicle when he was leading their officers to where he had said the UFM had guns.
With the public increasingly voicing their opinion that the government was covering up the investigations, the government recommended that Scotland Yard carry out independent investigations.
The British police investigators carried out investigations and compiled a report, which has not been released since. Apparently, sniffer dogs that they had used to trace the scent of the killers led the investigators to Lubiri Barracks from Gombyas house, and that was the end of that.
Kayiiras death remains a hot topic. At each presidential election, his ghost returns to haunt those in power.
Dr. Paul Ssemogerere of the Democratic Party broug
ht the
case up during the 1996 election year.
In the March 2001 presidential elections, Kayiiras death became a focal point, with Col. Kizza Besigye issuing a historical challenge to the government to tell Ugandans who had killed Kayiira.
Detailed account
Perhaps the nearest the killers ever came to being known was by reading the book written by Francis Bwengye, who was a close confidante of the deceased. In The Price of Freedom, which he wrote after Kayiiras death, Mr Bwengye gives a detailed account of how Kayiira was killed.
However, not a single copy of that book is available in stores. A special delegation of government officials was sent to bring Bwengye back, hoping to buy all the copies that had been printed.
In an earlier interview with Daily Monitor early last year, Bwengye admitted receiving such delegation to woo him to come back.
But the question still remains; will we see the government ever releasing the Scotland Yard report into the murder of Andrew Lutakome Kayiira?
Will we ever have a detailed report on the reasons that lead his killing? Was it political or internal feuds in the UFM that caused his death? And most importantly, when will his co
nfessed
killers, arrested by the Government t of Uganda, ever be brought to book? |
