{UAH} My Brother Gwokto, Here is Why You Should not Get Worked Up! Employing Amin's son Lumumba
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Employing Amin's son Lumumba
Amin arrives at one of the public functions. The writer notes that when Amin's children left Kabale Preparatory School in 1979, the school was depopulated by a factor
By Conrad Nkutu
Posted Sunday, May 5 2013 at 10:11
In Summary
The fall of Amin. In our series on the Idi Amin published in the Saturday Monitor and the Sunday Monitor, Amin's son Jaffar Remo narrated their dramatic rescue from Kampala preparatory school as the liberations forces cut off Kampala access. Conrad Nkutu was one of the pupils in that school and in the following article recounts the events of that day, what it was like studying with the president's children oblivious of the fact that his father was one of the first victims of Amin's government.continued from yesterday.
Twenty six years later, I bumped into Remo Amin as we called him then, when he visited the Daily Monitor offices to see a friend, while I was still managing director there several years ago. We exchanged a polite nod but did not speak to each other.
Soon thereafter, however, my objectivity was tested more substantively when Monitor's human resources manager, Ms Martha Elimu, and the 93.3 KFM radio programmes controller, Mr Peter Kabba, made a nervous entry into my office, carrying a blue employee recruitment approval form and a job application letter plus a C.V.
KFM, which I led as managing director, was recruiting a production executive for advertising commercials and Peter and Martha weren't sure I would approve the recruitment of the candidate who had by far emerged best in the interviews, with other interviewees far behind him in the scores.
I asked what the problem was and a nervous Martha just handed me the papers without explaining. Her eyes were on the floor. The scores showed that the best candidate was one "Hussein Lumumba." For a moment, I couldn't understand why they were questioning whether I would approve his recruitment until I looked at his education history and saw the very familiar name of Kabale Preparatory School.
I realised immediately that the top candidate was my former school-mate, Lumumba Amin (as we knew him then), who was a few classes behind me in primary school. I gently chastised Martha and Peter, who knew that Amin had killed my father, for thinking that I could visit the sins of the father (Amin) on the son (Lumumba), whose good work at Capital Radio I heard about.
I immediately signed off my approval of the recruitment, asking that he start work right away.
Hussein Juruga Lumumba (as he was now known, having dropped the father's name at the time) did excellent work for KFM and is undoubtedly one of the best radio professionals in Uganda.
He was clearly unaware of the terrible tragedy his father had visited on my family and Martha and Peter managed things in such a discreet way that Lumumba never got to know that there had been any questions about whether he'd get the job.
Months later, however, in January 2005, Daily Monitor and New Vision both ran a lengthy same-day front-page story carrying my family's announcement that retired grave diggers of the Mailo Mbiri Cemetery in Jinja town had revealed to our family, the secret mass grave where, in January 1973, they were put at gun-point by Amin's security forces who ordered them to hurriedly and secretly bury the body of my dad, former cabinet minister Shaban Kirunda Nkutu (Obote 1 Minister of Works, Housing, Transport and Communications and UPC MP for Busoga South East).
The seven grave diggers were threatened with death if they revealed the burial place, took an oath of silence and held their secret for 32 years. But now, the newspaper stories revealed details of how my late father was abducted by Capt. Issa Habib Galungbe, Military Intelligence Chief of Jinja's Gadaffi Garrison, the brave fight for his life put up by dozens of unarmed civilians as an attempt was made by five soldiers to put him inside a car boot, his arrest by the army and his having been last seen alive in the office of the Garrison Commander, Col. Hussein.
The story reported the dumping of my dad's body in the River Nile, where it was found floating face-down in the water with two bullet wounds to the head, and its retrieval by government security forces ahead of his secret burial on the orders of President Idi Amin.
It was a trying day for me because I had to preside over a previously scheduled all-staff Monitor meeting the morning on which the story came out on the front pages of the two main national dailies but I was able to remain composed and focused on management priorities as I addressed the hundreds of Monitor employees, many of whom were looking on with expressions ranging from shock, curiosity and sympathy as they read the newspaper stories during the meeting.
I could see that many of them were not paying attention to what I was saying as MD and were instead reflecting on the horrific details of my father's abduction, murder and secret burial.
The story also revealed that the former First Lady, known as Mama Maryamu Kibedi Amin, who is my paternal cousin, had fled Uganda and gone into exile in Britain following my father's murder.
Our grandfather, Haji Ausi Kirunda and other relatives besieged the First Lady with news that her husband had killed her paternal uncle and secretly buried his body, which they continuously but unsuccessfully asked her to persuade President Amin to release to the family for proper burial.
The story reported that Mama Maryamu's brother, the young lawyer and Jinja politician Joshua Wanume Kibedi, who had been very close to Amin, had resigned as Foreign Minister and fled the country, denouncing his brother-in-law, the President of Uganda, as a murderer in the international media, following the killing of Shaban Nkutu.
Battling their father's murderous reputation
Soon after the all-staff Monitor/KFM meeting ended that morning, KFM's controller, Peter Kabba, came to my office and reported with a shaky voice that Hussein Lumumba Amin had read the newspaper story in shock and collapsed in Kabba's office.
Kabba sought guidance on what to do as Lumumba had somewhat recovered but was weeping inconsolably and all the KFM staff were discussing the matter after realising that Lumumba was Amin's son and that I had knowingly employed the son of my father's killer.
Lumumba had asked Kabba if I was willing to see him in my office to enable him to express regrets for what had happened to my dad. I consented and he walked into my office trembling and weeping uncontrollably, supported to stand upright by Peter Kabba, and, if recall well, Joseph Beyanga, the station's Head of Production. Lumumba attempted to say something to me and mumbled a vague "I'm so sorry..." but had lost his voice and was inaudible as well as pretty incoherent.
I got the sense that while he had obviously grown up surrounded by press reports describing his late father as a killer, he was living in denial and had possibly never been confronted with a detailed murder case involving his father as the orchestrator. He was in a very bad emotional state and we were all very sorry for him.
I asked Peter to get a company car to take him home and later asked Martha to assure him that I held no grudge against him and he could take a few days off to recover from the shock then return to work. Unfortunately, but perhaps understandably, Hussein Lumumba Amin did not return to work at KFM and did not send in a resignation letter. We understood his dilemma and did not pursue him though we remained sorry for how he had found out and KFM missed his good work.
Revisionist history at play
When I left Monitor and KFM in 2007 and was transferred to Nation Media Group head office in Nairobi as Group Business Development Director and later Managing Director of the Nation Broadcasting Division, I called my colleague Charles Obbo and told him about a website I'd just come across, set up by Remo and Amin's other children to clean up his reputation as a killer of his political opponents.
The most prominent article posted on the website was a declaration by Amin's daughter Mayi, also a former Kabale Prep schoolmate. I am paraphrasing her words from memory since that website now appears to be non-existent.
According to Mayi Amin, her father's government "never killed anybody except the Late Hon. Shaban Nkutu, who was an Uncle to our mother, Mama Maryamu." The article claimed, incredibly, that when the army came to arrest him, "Nkutu's supporters were armed with guns and shot at the soldiers sent to effect his arrest and unfortunately Shaban Nkutu was shot dead in the cross-fire..." i.e. his death was unintentional! The website article expressed much regret for the fact that my dad had met his death at the hands of an army commanded by his in-law, Idi Amin.
The "killed-in-cross-fire" version was a poor and unsuccessful effort at repackaging history by my former Kabale Prep school-mates because it has been widely reported that on the day the body was discovered at the river, President Amin, under family pressure from his in-laws to surrender the body, announced on Radio Uganda that former Cabinet Minister Shaban Nkutu had fled to exile in Tanzania, was a wanted person and there would be a huge reward for his capture.
How can one reconcile this fact with Nkutu's alleged death in a cross-fire while he was being arrested? Amin's children took their website offline soon after I posted a polite rejoinder about the true facts on the website's feedback page. I do sympathise, though, with the weight of the baggage they were doomed to carry by their father inspite of their innocence as his children.
That is the history of my interface with Idi Amin's children at Kabale Preparatory School and the aftermath of events involving our fathers before and after I joined the school in 1975 as a Primary Three student. Amin's children were good, normal, friendly kids who have absolutely no responsibility for the acts of their father.
I got my first detailed account of what had happened to my father by reading Henry Kyemba's book in 1979 and later speaking to relatives and my family is very grateful to Kyemba for telling us what happened as well as the various forms of support he gave to our family until he himself fled Amin's regime in 1977 fear for his life.
I resolved, in my early teens, to become a journalist and play some role in influencing non-violent political debate and dispute resolution for a more democratic dispensation in Uganda.
Most journalists practicing today, and indeed most Ugandans now of adult age were not born or were too young to recall this dark phase in Uganda's history and many journalists now seem to lack inspiring role models to guide their reporting of Uganda's many governance and economic problems while most voters lament about huge national problems but do not meaningfully exercise their civic power and responsibility.
Great editors like Wafula Oguttu and Charles Onyango-Obbo, who founded Monitor, emerged as leading pro-democracy activist journalists because of that phase in Uganda's history when human rights and freedoms were so extensively abused.
They were very good mentors to younger media professionals and they were an inspiring example for me even when I was in direct competition with them during my tenure as William Pike's deputy at The New Vision.
I believe most of the next generation of good editors and media leaders like Joachim Buwembo, Andrew Mwenda, Peter Mwesige and Onapito Ekomoloit were all drawn into journalism because Wafula, Obbo and Monitor as a newspaper stood up boldly for Ugandan democracy, a stance that is no longer very visible in Ugandan journalism today, irrespective of which newspaper one reads.
Kabale Preparatory School (KPS) still exists and I had the opportunity to visit briefly during the mid-'90s but I am not well informed about how the school is currently faring. The British Missionaries and expatriates have long left.
I was told that KPS is now a government school, operating with all the limitations that come with that framework. It was a great school in the 1970s with almost all students passing Primary 7 with First Grades and we were given what was probably the best welfare available in a Ugandan school at the time.
When Amin's children left KPS in 1979, the school was depopulated by a factor of about 25% and my P7 class was left with only 5 or 6 candidates for the exams. We witnessed great celebration of Amin's overthrow by all the teachers and support staff, who had for years treated Amin's kids with much love and kindness.
Most students were still too young to understand the upheaval and were puzzled because they'd always known President Amin as Head of State, a cool dad who was the father of our friends and generous benefactor of our school.
We now discovered from newspaper and radio reports that the father of our school-mates was a much feared mass-murderer, known as "Kijambiya" (the man with a big knife) by the Baganda.
Years after I left the school, I read somewhere that our wonderful headmistress, Mary Hayward had been awarded the well-deserved honour of an OBE by Britain's Queen Elizabeth for her long and dedicated education and missionary service to Uganda.
During my last term in the school in 1979, a chubby young boy was brought to KPS for admission to Primary One by his 30-something year old father, who was dressed in a cream-coloured Kaunda suit and ankle-length boots. They were driven into the school in the popular 1970s Mercedes Benz model 200.
I later learnt that this slender, balding man with a somewhat unkempt moustache, stern demeanour and an erect military bearing but betraying a visible soft spot for his young son was one of the senior UNLF liberators and was also the new Minister of Defence, Yoweri Museveni.
This was our first time to hear of him. The boy was introduced to fellow students as Muhoozi Museveni, now better known as Brigadier General Muhoozi Kainerugaba.
The writer, a former KFM, NTV and Daily Monitor Managing director is the Chief Executive of Greenewus Energy
Democracy is two Wolves and a Lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed Lamb contesting the results.
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