Author: Karoli Ssemogerere. PHOTO/FILE
Last Friday, mum and I along with other guests were fortunate to witness the dedication of a new Learning Centre in my father’s name at St. Mary’s College Kisubi, that my father attended between 1949 and 1953. The lengthy 19-page citation was read by Mr Charles Okoth Owor.
Even by the standards of our very private lives, there are some details that surprised me. It is true my father in the aftermath of the May 1996 election went to pray as he did every Sunday after his death at Rubaga Cathedral. Mum and I, supported by Michael Mabikke, a former Member of Parliament, the late Evaristo Nyanzi and his wife Aireda Nyanzi a former Member of Parliament were holed up in Kabuusu IPFC headquarters receiving upcountry reports on what had transpired in the 1996 elections. The young militant UYD members kept panting up and down waiting for instructions to go to the bush, which never came.
On Tuesday, I sat down for coffee with Edith Byanyima, daughter of former DP National Chairman Boniface Byanyima after a long time. Edith and her father drove from Mbarara distraught that their three ballots, hers’ and her parents Boniface and Gertrude had not even been tabulated in their Ruti polling station. That was an insult to their intelligence. She added a new detail, Prof. Patrick Rubaihayo and nine members of his family who had also voted in Rukungiri faced a similar fate when their votes registered zero. So were the stories from Northern Uganda, the difference between his supporters like Hon. Yafesi Okullo Epak had in some cases overwhelmed the riggers.
In short, UPC supporters of my dad also found themselves on the receiving end of rigging! I joked with Edith, about the confidence and affection our parents had for each other. In 1984, her mother had picked me up from Lubaga and we rode in a bus to Mbarara for a two-month holiday, something mothers of today would find very difficult. We woke up every working day to attend their family shop, Muyogoma Stores, with her sons. She was driven in a 1970s issue, authoritative, yet very kind.
Ensuring we had a very political discussion with Edith, a politician in her own right, a former National Youth Leader in my father’s party. I pointed out a fact to her that Ugandans had not been able to freely elect their leaders since independence. In this game were the canny British, who got the better part of Muteesa II. The Americans who made cold calculations in the cold war. Their fall out with Obote in 1969 after the Move to the Left, his return in 1980, negotiated on similar or even more favourable terms. I told her of my father’s Allegheny classmate Harry Blaney III, a US foreign service officer whom I met in 2018 and told me of how risky it was to do politics of the kind my father espoused in the cold war era.
In all this brother and sister talk, we laughed about the chaos that we describe as normal in our everyday lives. Edith, now a senior citizen, does not look a single day over 45! I would be her older brother, even though she is nearly 20 years my senior. The answer to the political logjam remains. On Friday as Mr Okoth read the citation, our family rapporteur quickly texted me, stating he had accidentally sanitised the 1980 election.
I think, in 1980, Uganda had a computer-age election, Boeing versus Airbus in which one team, DP made a number of tactical mistakes that were difficult to recover from.
In 1996, I wrote a short memo two days before the election laying out NRM’s plans to cushion their numbers. On election day, voters’ cards were liberally distributed in rural areas to drive up the margins. Mr. Museveni who in private correspondence with my father acknowledged he had lost the 1980 elections and DP had won, had been so traumatised by that event. It was never to happen again. The same forces that have kept him in power, and the syllabus that informed the big power plays in Uganda remains.
We parted our ways, quickly, 1980 style with my sister, no return address till our next meeting. Her focus in the city, my eyes to the Lancaster Conference where the final bargain was made.
Mr Karoli Ssemogerere is an Attorney-At-Law and an Advocate. [email protected]
