Towards the end of January 1986, depending on your location at the time, the NRA/M armed rebels, but in former president Milton Obote’s words, “bandits and gangsters,” stormed state power structure taking over government in Kampala, climaxed by the swearing-in of Yoweri Kaguta Museveni as president of Uganda.
Location mattered because the people of the immediate Luwero Triangle, NRA/M, were already part of their lives by mid-1983. For Toro, Kasese, Ankole, Kigezi and Masaka it was after the 27, August 1985 military coup of an illiterate junta led by Gen. Tito Okello Lutwa military, when NRA/M declared self-governance in the areas it occupied and took control, even collecting taxes.
When, as young university students, we were taken to the makeshift, grass-thatched, school of political education first in Wakiso, then transferred to present-day Kyankwanzi in 1987, to be detoxified from reactionary, and in Lt. Col. Kizza Besigye’s terminology “obscurantist,” ideas. Yet in old DP and UPC classification, it was to be “brain-washed” into regressive communist ideology”.
Maj. Nuwe Amanya Mushega (Deputy Minister of Defence), Col. Kahinda, Otafiire (Internal Affairs), Besigye (NPC), and NRA political commissars Capt. Kale Kayihura, Lt. Col. Serwanga Lwanga, Maj. Ondoga ori Amaza, Maj. Kakooza Mutale, and Lt. Noble Mayombo led the assault on ideology which left an everlasting mark on many of us to-date. Apart from political mobilisation, our major task was to distribute scarce and rationed ‘essential commodities’ of sugar, salt, soap, soda and beers to Makerere university community.
We were taught that the love for soft life, amassing property, wealth, and engaging in trade and businesses were reactionary, and therefore counter-revolution. Now, distinguish ‘amassing’, from creating wealth. But in the few urban areas especially Kampala and Jinja, our new comrades were taking over, sometimes forcefully, residential buildings formerly occupied by state officials of the recently-gone by governments of Idi Amin, UPC and Lutwa’s military junta which had so swiftly and violently changed hands.
To rationalize, soon (1991-93), government pool houses except for army, police and prisons, then so dilapidated, saddled with huge and unsustainable utility bills were offered to government employees who were the sitting tenants, but most without the money to buy them. Top civil servants like permanent secretaries, directors, commissioners and ranks below them took over multiple estates for a song at prices of their choosing, determination, mode and duration of payment because they were the ones who knew the location and physical state. The new revolutionary soldier-officers in town mostly took up upper-scale leafy Kololo, Nakasero, Luzira and Bugolobi areas. A junior officer, but with a senior officer relative or from their village, took up property in Kololo, the much-coveted place. Those properties have since changed hands on a commercial basis because the new owner-village boys couldn’t measure up to high urban life. So, don’t be surprised if you see some of them or their families still living in these places, and not in Nalya, Najjera, Bulindo or Namugongo which were still then forest thickets.
While change of ownerships, and new acquisitions were underway, many of us, especially serving in the army, intelligence and political ideological schools were told it was reactionary to acquire property and wealth. But in any case, we would not even know what was available for the taking since they were not put up on public advert. Kampala only covered Kololo, Nakasero, Makerere, Mengo, Namirembe, Lubaga, Mulago, and Kibuli hills.
With hindsight, if they had put to the public offer, the NRM revolution wouldn’t have traveled this far. They were clever but selfish. At work, apart from knowing each other’s name and area of study, we did not ask for origin, tribe, or religion because they were neither needed nor relevant for the tasks at hand. Today, we are here asking everyone to engage in production and productivity with calculation for profitability.
