I met Apollo Milton Obote only once. At that time, he was well into the fourth year of his second term as President. I was part of a school theatre production in which his son, Tony Akaki, played the role of a guard.

Obote’s good wife Maama Miria was the patron of Namasagali College. At that time, quite a few of the political, military and civil service elite had children studying at the school.

Indeed, the lifestyle of the students and their attitude to studies reflected this. But that is a story for another day. After one of the shows at the National Theatre, she invited us for a party at State House, Entebbe.

Our bus was escorted all the way by security operatives in two black Mercedes Benzes and soldiers on a Land Rover mounted with a 14mm anti-aircraft gun. I remember that when we reached Katabi, the woods near the shores of Lake Victoria, our escort vanished.
I have never been able to tell why but it could only have been for either of two reasons.

To go ahead of us and notify the soldiers at the roadblock or avoid a possible ambush by FEDEMU, who were believed to operate along that road. Anyway, we made it to State House in the early part of the evening.

The party was slow to start partly because the usual suspects were dead sober. We put down sodas, listened to speeches, exchanged small talk and meaningless jokes.

It was a rather dull and boring affair, not quite the riot of a party we were accustomed to. Then a long convoy sped up the road into compound. There was a flurry of activity as security took up various positions in the compound. We sat up straight.

Then Obote walked into the house with some officials and came back to join us in more than an ordinary state of happiness. We all took turns to shake his hand and then told him a bit about ourselves and resumed our seats.

He wondered what kind of party this was with only soda and, before we knew it, beers, then a rare commodity, started flowing. That was it. The music levels went up and soon a fully-fledged dance kicked off.

We left Entebbe at 2:00am. That was unprecedented. In March 1985, Akaki sat for his A’Levels and left shortly thereafter for London. But he soon came back to repeat in the hope of getting the grades required to enter Makerere University. This was not to be.

Then, unlike now, news took forever to reach us. In fact we depended on a poor short-wave signal to access BBC as the most credible source of news. As the term wore on, Akaki seemed distracted by something and did not seem to care much for books.
Then one day he picked a verse from Jeremiah in which the man had prophesied that trouble would come from the north.

Indeed a few weeks later, the Lt. Gen. Bazilio Olara Okello led a mutiny of UNLA soldiers under his command in northern Uganda. They marched on to Kampala and overthrew Obote. He fled the country by road to Kenya, narrowly escaping the approaching forces. Gen. Tito Okello was installed as Head of State and Paulo Muwanga as Prime Minister.

Bazilio took command of the armed forces and remained the de facto leader. His nephew, Olara Otunnu, became Foreign Minister and the chief intellectual strategist.
Akaki stayed behind in school with the rest of us.

Meanwhile, all around us there was mayhem. Locals in Busoga, then a Democratic Party stronghold, went on the rampage, killing known Uganda People’s Congress supporters and destroying their property. In one gruesome incident, they slaughtered a UPC chairman using a hand saw.

One afternoon, a group came to the school to lynch Akaki. They were stopped by the hot-tempered intervention of Rev. Fr. Damien Grimes, the school headmaster.

At about the same time, a Member of Parliament who had stood on a DP ticket and crossed subsequently fled a lynch mob into the school and hid in the headmaster’s ceiling. There were a few other scares about Akaki’s life but he later left safely under an arrangement by the then Prime Minister Paulo Muwanga.

That was 20 years ago. How things have changed. Now that Obote is gone and the people firmly enfranchised, it is time to put that kind of past firmly behind us.

rkabushenga@utlonline.co.ug