The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
Other people he met there included David Sterling, the founder of Special Air Service who was also known for setting up and running private military companies and another person named Andrew Nightingale, who Aliker believes was using a pseudo name.
Sir Coutts is the man who handed the instruments of power to Apollo Milton Obote in October 1962 and stayed on as governor for one more year before the election of Sir Edward Muteesa as president of Uganda.
The veteran dentist, politician and businessman quotes Sir Walter Coutts as saying: “The situation in Uganda is intolerable. The country that we know and love is being destroyed. A benefactor has offered 10 million Pounds to secure a change in the regime…”
According to Sir Coutts, the plan to remove Amin had been discussed with the full cooperation of the Kenyan government at the time.
The meeting discussed strategy and tactics and a military training camp was established in northern Kenya. The plan, according to Aliker, was abandoned in October 1978 when Amin invaded Tanzania and the war, which would end his rule on April 11, 1979, started.
Mackenzie dies
By the time the details of the training got underway, however, Bruce Mackenzie was already dead. On May 24, 1978, Mackenzie flew from Nairobi to Uganda for a meeting with General Amin. On his way back, his plane crashed in Ngong Hills near Nairobi and killed all on board.
There are reports that a bomb was planted by Amin’s agents on the plane as revenge for Mackenzie’s role in helping Israel during the July 4, 1976, military raid on Entebbe. This account is supported, among others, by Major Bob Astles in his 2012 book “Forty Tribes: A life in Uganda”.
In early 1979, when the war entered another phase and it became clear that the Amin government would fall within weeks, Uganda exiles under different fighting groups gathered in the northern Tanzanian town of Moshi to discuss the post-Amin Uganda. It was at the Moshi Conference – held from March 24 to 26 – that the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF) was born. The different fighting groups were merged to form the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA) which would become the national army after the fall of Amin.
The fighting groups that formed UNLA included Kikosi Maalum led by Milton Obote and commanded by Tito Okello Lutwa and David Oyite Ojok; Front for National Salvation (FRONASA) led by Yoweri Museveni; Save Uganda Movement led by Akena p’Ojok, William Omaria and Ateker Ejalu; and Uganda Freedom Union with Godfrey Binaisa, Andrew Kayiira and Olara Otunnu as its leaders.
Okello approaches Aliker
On page 124 of his book, Aliker says that while at the Moshi Conference, Okello walked up to him and said: “When we reach home, we – the fighters – want you to be the president of Uganda.”
Aliker says that he declined the offer after careful thought, the key reason being, that he knew his parents would not have approved of it. Up until this time he had avoided playing a direct role in politics.
His elder brother, Daudi Ochieng had entered politics at an early age, becoming a Member of Parliament in 1962 on the Kabaka Yekka ticket, and playing a key role in the events that eventually tore the country apart in 1966. It was Ochieng who moved a motion in February 1966 to have Obote, then army commander Idi Amin and several ministers investigated for their role in plundering mineral resources in Congo.
On May 24, 1966, Obote sent the army, commanded by Amin, to attack Muteesa’s palace at Mengo. The president, also Kabaka of Buganda, escaped into exile in the United Kingdom where he died three years later.
Ochieng, meanwhile, was pronounced dead on June 1, 1966, just a week after his closest friend, Muteesa, was exiled. Aliker says Ochieng had been battling cancer of the stomach, but the cause of death, at that particular time, was questionable and it left their parents devastated.
It was on this consideration that Aliker politely turned down Okello’s request.
“What happened to Daudi had left them (parents) devastated and Ugandan politics was a dangerous game,”
Aliker says he proposed to Okello that Professor Lule should become president of Uganda after the fall of Amin. While Okello agreed, Aliker says Lule was reluctant. “It took me two days walking the streets of Moshi with him to persuade him to accept the job. At the conference I was his strong supporter,” he writes.
This would create long-term enmity between Aliker and Paulo Muwanga, who too wanted to become president. “Muwanga had bought a military uniform and appeared in military fatigues. He never forgave me for pointing out that he had done no fighting.”
It was partly because of this reason that Aliker ran back into exile shortly after the 1980 elections in which he says he was robbed of victory in Gulu in favour of a Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) candidate.
After the fall of Amin, Lule invited Aliker to join his government. In a 2013 interview with Dr Sue Onslow from the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, Aliker quotes President Lule in a conversation between the two: “What do you want to be?” And I said, “I just want to help you. And so I stayed with him in State House, in Entebbe, as his advisor.”
In the book, however, he explains that he was also appointed to run the Libyan Arab State Bank in Kampala as well as going on different missions in the United Kingdom to lobby for funding for the new government. While in London on one of these lobbying trips, Aliker got the news that the Lule government had fallen, only 68 days after becoming president.
