A leader ahead of his time
The death last week of the former Ugandan president Godfrey Binaisa marks the start of the end of an era in Ugandan politics dominated by politicians who were born in the early 1900 and shaped the character of post-independence Uganda.
It is an indication of how the times and attitudes have changed that in the media, largely controlled by youthful professionals, the death in April 2007 of the Secretary for Defence, Brig. Noble Mayombo, should have attracted continuous, hour-by-hour media coverage than the death of Binaisa, one of the historic figures of independent Uganda.
Binaisa, who died at 90, was very much a 20th century man. He was shaped by most of the same upbringing, education, religion, ethnicity, professional career and attitude as most enlightened Ugandans who attained young-adulthood between 1940 and 1950.
This period was marked by young adults raised to aspire for formal, white-collar, clerical jobs and a middle class lifestyle. Politicians were the people that society most looked up to.
Uganda was still a British colony and proudly so. It was a Christian country, designed to be run by western-educated men and women.
At independence in 1962, Binaisa was also one of a few Baganda elite of the period who went against a tendency commonly associated with them: that of putting their Ganda identity, sentimental attachment and loyalty to the kingdom above their loyalty to Uganda, the country.
Among the prominent Uganda-first-Buganda-next Baganda public figures were Paulo Muwanga, Emmanuel Lumu, Benedicto Kiwanuka, Jaberi Bidandi Ssali, Kintu Musoke and a few others with a Republican-leaning outlook.
Many of the non-monarchical Baganda had typically studied in secondary schools or worked in districts outside Buganda; many of them often were married to non-Baganda ; they usually might have studied in Kenya, India, Tanzania or Britain; some saw duty during the Second World War of the 1940s; and had a strong Pan-African conviction.
Binaisa attended King’s College Budo, the secondary school that during colonial times was the presumptive training ground for many of Uganda’s future leaders, and qualified as a lawyer in Britain in 1955. He returned to Uganda in 1956 and plunged into the nationalist politics of the period. He became Secretary General of the newly formed Uganda National Congress.
He became attorney general during the first UPC government of the 1960s and it is he, and two others who over one night drafted a new constitution in 1966 that was then delivered to members of parliament in their pigeon holes, thus the nickname “pigeonhole constitutionâ€.
That constitution paved the way for the transformation of Uganda into a republic and eventually the abolition of the historical, traditional kingdoms. This was the constitution that made Prime Minister Milton Obote the president and gave him what many viewed as dictatorial powers.
Binaisa fled into exile during the regime of Idi Amin Dada who was president from 1971 to 1979. This period of frustrating waiting and hoping that the military government of President Idi Amin would be overthrown in a coup yielded nothing. Finally after skirmishes along the Uganda-Tanzania border in late 1978, Tanzania invaded Uganda.
In March, the Tanzanian government organised a conference in the town of Moshi that brought together over 20 groups of exiled Ugandans from various parts of the world.
That Moshi Unity Conference, as it was called, soon revealed something disturbing; the extent of disunity, bickering, intrigue and power play among Uganda’s political, intellectual and military elite.
The conference formed a government-in-waiting called the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF) and elected Yusufu Lule, a former Principal of Makerere University College as the future president, at a time it was becoming apparent that the Amin government was about to collapse before the advancing Tanzanian army and armed Ugandan forces.
When President Lule was voted out of office in June 1979 after only 68 days in office, Binaisa was installed. Binaisa rose to the presidency at a time of much national uncertainty. He was a man few in the general public knew in 1979.
Alarm spread through Uganda when Binaisa was named President. Lule had been from the old intellectual and social tradition that viewed Uganda as a conservative Christian nation rooted in and mapped after British tradition.
Binaisa was part of that tradition, but he also had the same radical Socialist and pan-African outlook that Obote had. Many Baganda did not support Obote’s aligning Uganda with what they regarded as the Communist, atheist Soviet bloc countries.
So once Binaisa became president, the only things that were certain about him were that he was occupying State House in preparation for the return of Obote and two, that he did not have real powers.
Like Lule, Binaisa proved to be an interim president. He might have been the first East African head of state who was perceived by the public from the day he took office as basically occupying his office in preparation for another.
Many political analysts, politicians and in the news media concluded that their worst nightmare was about to come to pass: Obote was being prepared for a second term as president.
It could be argued with the hindsight now that the installment of Binaisa as president was the start of the civil war that would follow the 1980 general election.
Everything in Uganda after this point was shaped by the speculation and dread that Obote --- hated by most Baganda and resented by many non-UPC politicians --- had become the most divisive figure in Uganda’s post-independence history, more divisive even than Amin.
Binaisa must have known this.
He must have known that he had been selected to be president, not elected, had no political base to speak of, was surrounded by powerful former guerrillas like David Oyite-Ojok and Yoweri Museveni and that his only hope of gaining and protecting that power would be to appeal to the influence of Tanzania’s President Julius Nyerere.
However, he tried bravely --- some might say naively --- to exercise his executive powers.
Being from the aforementioned generation of nationalistic-minded Baganda, Binaisa sought to forge a sense of national unity and goodwill. He relied on goodwill and hoped for goodwill to prevail in the chaotic wake of the end of the Amin regime.
Binaisa felt that the only healing Uganda could hope for was for the planned September 1980 elections to be held under a common front in which all shades of political opinion could be represented.
This “umbrella†idea was indeed what was needed. But just as the Moshi conference had been dominated by squabbling among politicians, these same politicians rejected the idea of parties under one umbrella and insisted they would contest the general election under separate political parties.
The umbrella idea, it can also be argued, was a pioneer in Ugandan politics of the idea of cooperation across party lines, a forerunner to the post-1986 “Movement†system in Uganda and the Inter-Party Cooperation today.
His attempt to re-shuffle his cabinet in may 1980, transferring the powerful Minister of Defence and Vice Chairman of the Military Commission of the UNLF, Yoweri Museveni, and appointing the army Chief of Staff, Brig. David Oyite-Ojok as ambassador to Algeria resulted in his removal from office.
He was to discover, as Lule had before him and as many successive Ugandan politicians and opposition figures have discovered over the past 30 years that Uganda remains a state where the military has the final word.
It must have shocked and puzzled many of these idealistic educated Ugandans when, even after the fall of Amin’s regime, a wave of violent robberies, murders of prominent Ugandans and shooting at night suddenly erupted.
Because it has been assumed since 1971 that all the darkest and most barbaric deeds in the country’s history had been perpetrated by Amin and his dreaded State Research Bureau intelligence agents, the first reaction to the post-Amin violence was that these were remnants of Amin’s army and State Research Bureau.
It soon became clear that this was not the case and to this day, that two-year period in Ugandan history remains a closed chapter. It is a closed chapter mainly because there are no answers to the many puzzles of that time.
Some analysts and historians believe that the wave of murders at gunpoint of prominent Ugandans in 1979 was intended to portray Binaisa as too weak to contain the deteriorating security situation and so force his early exit from office.
Others claimed that these acts of violence were by the UPC or parts of the army loyal to Obote, hoping to emphasize the point that without Obote, Uganda could not hope to stabilize.
A bulky, bald man, Binaisa had an alert mind, was quick-witted and humorous and very much the British-educated African.
Binaisa is quoted have having expressed distaste for Idi Amin partly because Amin spoke broken English. Thus, Binaisa, in those remarks about Amin, betrayed the mentality of the earlier Ugandan elite, influenced and hypnotized by British culture, dress, tastes and smugness.
Amin once said the reason so many intellectuals in Uganda were so bitterly opposed to him was because he was a Muslim. Binaisa was of that era.
Had he committed to authoring a book, it most likely would have been a worthy read and would have added key details to our understanding of Uganda’s turbulent history.
In his later years, having returned to Uganda in 2001, he had, sadly, been reduced to a figure of fun in the eyes of Ugandans, especially after he married a Japanese woman, Tomoko Yamamoto, as one of many coupled wedded via satellite link up by the Unification Church, also known as the Moonies.
Even though he had a keen intellect, he did not author any widely-known book and has left the world with little beyond his many quips, jokes and humorous observations.
He delivered a speech at the 1979 Non-Aligned Movement summit in Havana, Cuba that was so long, news magazine photos at the time published photographs of journalists asleep in a heap as the Ugandan president spoke.
In that speech he praised the restoration of peace and the rule of law to Uganda by the Tanzanian army and stated that Tanzanian soldiers were now even dating or marrying Ugandan girls, much to the amusement of the assembled delegates.
Had he not been appointed president, he would have remained obscure in the pages of Ugandan history as just one of many well-educated, internationally connected Ugandan intellectuals of no particular distinction.
Subscribe to this comment's feed
