{UAH} On this day: Just For Your Information

History: As we remember this day April 11th 1979.

Picture (in link): View of Kampala city exactly 39 years ago today. Picture taken the very day President Idi Amin left the capital city of Uganda to Libya and then Saudi Arabia.
Taken from Sheraton hotel by journalist Adarsh Ayar, his caption to this photo said; "Of the three East African capitals, Kampala had the most beautiful landscape."
The reporter had just arrived with the Tanzanian forces and the notorious ill-disciplined, barbaric UNLA armed group of the Milton Obote's, the Museveni's, the Lule's, Binaisa, Paulo Muwanga, Oyite Ojok, Basilio Okello, Olara Otunnu and the Tito Okello's of this world.
For the record, President Amin was among the last of his soldiers to leave the city. On this day, as he was on his way out of Kampala, Amin was stopped at a roadblock manned by Tanzanian forces. He rolled down the car window. When the Tanzanian  soldiers saw him, they stood back, saluted, and let his convoy through. Why they did so?
He says "Only God knows".
However history deliberately forgets that starting from this very day, Uganda went through an entire decade of the worst calamities, total mayhem and the most unfathomable human catastrophies whose traces can still be found in certain area's today. That decade of hell included 5 coups in 6 years, multiple sectarian rebellions across the country, tribalism, torture, massacres, a completely collapsed economy, summary executions and extra-judicial killings in the streets every day and night, mass poverty, hunger, rampaging corruption, a failed state with at least three genocides (including the Luweero killing fields, West Nile and lastly in Acholi), and over 2 million Ugandans dead since 1979 at the hands of these criminals and corrupt rebels who called themselves heroes and liberators, while squandering decades fighting amongst themselves for power with total disregard for human life and property of the people of Uganda.
There are reports that even in Eastern Uganda, every village between Mbale and Soroti district has an undocumented hidden mass grave that only the locals know about, and these macabre graves date from that decade of hell and still scare their children whenever they play nearby or at night when it is time to sleep.
From the Mbarara massacre, to the Ombachi massacre, Luweero genocide, Mukura massacre, Acholi genocide, Karamoja upto today's Kasese massacre.
Let's be clear. What we see happening in Libya after Ghaddafi, is exactly what happened to Uganda after Amin. Period.
From this day April 11th 1979, the people of Uganda spent the next decade crying "Uganda efudde. Kasta Katonda gyali" (loosely meaning "Uganda is dead. But God will not forsake us).
Historians have failed to explain why.
It is only after the 1996 general elections that some change began to occur. Because even in 1994 when I returned for the first time in Uganda, I found no electricity yet nobody knew loadshedding under Amin. The schools, hospitals and companies that we left functioning in 1979 were rotten and crumbling, gun shots in the middle of every night by military and LDU patrols, and their victims never to be seen again. Kampala city center was dead quiet from 7pm and all shops barricaded for the night. There was no entertainment except small dark bars (kafunda) with a singoe tiny kerosene lamp (taddoba) and scarce warm drinks since no electricity for the fridges if they had any. All vehicles, taxi's and lorries were in dangerous mechanical condition and everyone now dressed in second hand clothes. Something that never existed back in the 70's.
In my assessment, our historians and political analysts suffer the inability to look objectively at the bigger picture, and properly evaluate the harrowing consequences and results of the 1979 war and it's actors. An estimated 2 million Ugandans dead at their hands since 1979 is something that no sane person should be trying to brush under the table. It is their history.
Meanwhile, todays young Ugandans need to quickly record the stories of their parents and grandparents about the true history of this country as they personally lived it themselves. In this era of digital technology and social media, it is an easy but very important thing to do and discuss openly, rather than keeping it lost from the public debate. And with social media, everyone can now speak out without the mainstream media's cunning censorship and distortion of our true history.
There are enormous untold social, economic and nationalist political developments by an incorruptible Idi Amin for the people of Uganda. And these remain the tangible reasons why to this day the average Ugandan who suffered tremendously after Amin's departure as explained here, was able to look at all the outstanding development and nationalist policies he emberked on for the benefit of the ordinary people of Uganda in only eight years of his presidency, and they compare that with all his successors' achievements in the last 40 years, and come to their own conclusion that President Idi Amin is actually the most patriotic president Uganda ever had.

Hussein Lumumba Amin
11th/04/2019
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https://www.facebook.com/576971762/posts/10156241908066763/?app=fbl

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