{UAH} THE MURDER OF BRIGADIER PIERINO OKOYA

Murder of Brigadier Pierino Okoya

On 25 Jan., 1970, the commander of the army’s Second Infantry brigade, Brigadier Pierino Yere Okoyo and his wife Anna Akello Okoya were shot dead outside their home at Layibi, just outside Gulu town by unknown assailants.

Brigadier Okoya was buried together with a sheep. Okoya had been one of the most vocal in criticising the army commander Idi Amin for fleeing the scene of 19 Oct., 1969 assassination attempt on President Obote at Lugogo in Kampala. As soon as news of the attempt on Obote’s life became known, Brigadier Okoya drove from Jinja, 80 km from Kampala and gave orders for the army to remain in the barracks and restrain themselves. Okoya accused Amin of being a coward and wanted disciplinary action taken against the army commander.

He went on to suggest that Amin might have had something to do with the assassination plot. At the time Okoya was shot dead, Amin had been flown to his hometown of Arua toward the border with Sudan by an Acholi pilot. Obote ordered an inquiry into Okoya’s murder. The first suspects in the Okoya murder were four men Captain Frederick (“Smutts”) Guweddeko, an Air Force officer; Patrick Mukwaya, a businessman; Siperito Kapalaga, also a businessman; Fred Kyamufumba, a flight technician; and two other men, Kalule L. Lutalo and Sebastiano Lukanga.

These men were allegedly paid to murder Okoya. Two young women Milly Nantege and Mary Kajjansi, who were girlfriends of two of the accused, were also arrested and tortured to obtain confessions since it was assumed that they would know something about the plot.

President Amin appeared before the panel investigating the murder of Okoya on 15 May, 1971, less than four months since coming to power.

Speaking before Justice Richard Dickson, Amin said he did not ask Captain Guweddeko to recruit civilians to assassinate Okoya. On 16 June, 1971, an 86-page report by Dickson was published in which it was stated that the killers of Okoya remained unknown to that day. According to Guweddeko speaking in 1972, he had been arrested at a barber’s shop in Wandegeya, a trading centre just outside the city.

He said a police C.I.D officer tortured him continually in order to force Guweddeko to admit that ‘it was General Amin who gave them the money to hire people to kill Brigadier Okoya,’ The People newspaper said. Investigations following the crime revealed that the kind of bullets that had been used to kill the Okoya couple were to be found in only two sections of the security forces, the army barracks in Mbarara and the General Service Unit intelligence agency.

This brings two scenarios. The first thinks that the person who ordered Okoya’s murder was either connected in some way with both the army in Mbarara and the General Service Unit or one of them. The other scenario thinks that the master planner behind the murders used people in the army based in Mbarara or agents in the General Service Unit. It is the combination of Mbarara and the General Service Unit that makes the picture more interesting.

To add pepper to salt, The People newspaper, owned by the UPC party, quoted a government statement issued on 13 April, 1972 in which the government explained reports of missing people allegedly murdered by the military regime:

“Most of the people reported missing, the statement says, are from [the southwestern Bantu and Hamitic] Ankole and Kigezi districts, which districts were areas of concentration for recruitment to the defunct General Service Unit.” (The People, 14 April, 1972).

This is the UPC paper speaking, mind you. We get from it we get credible and independent proof that the General Service Unit intelligence agency was not dominated by officers and agents from Obote’s northern Nilotic Acholi and Langi tribes as most people think but by agents mainly “from Ankole and Kigezi districts.”We had some well known characters in General Service Unit (GSU) from the west in the shape of Michael Micombero- Mpambara from Kigezi and the Yoweri Museveni from Ankole. Okoya was murdered in Jan. 1970, at a time that Museveni would have still been a student in Tanzania. So how could he feature in the killing of Okoya unless I am telling nice fairy tales?

You see you must always know how a tricky man thinks. Museveni was not like you and me. It seems he grew old before his time especially in matters to do with state security and the workings of the government system. While most of his classmates were leading ordinary lives and harbouring ordinary career ambitions, Museveni was different. Too different! By 1966 he was already aflame with the passion of African revolution. He followed news events in Uganda keenly and behaved much older than his age.

On 30 July, 2005, in Mbarara, Museveni told a bridal giveaway party (“Okuhingira”) that he had first planned to wage war against the Obote government in 1967. “I was to start the war against dictatorship when I was still a student at Ntare School in 1967 when Obote abrogated the constitution, but Mzee [James] Kahigiriza advised me not to because it would cause more problems,” Museveni said. The date he referred to there was actually Feb. 1966 not 1967 if you have seen his explanation in Sowing the Mustard Seed. By this age, Museveni had developed an understanding and appetite for armed struggle and political violence. It is common knowledge that Museveni as a student at Dar es Salaam not regular in the time he spent at campus. He had visited the guerrilla-held areas of Mozambique in 1969 where his encounter with the FRELIMO guerrillas made a deep mark on him.

Even more important but which Museveni does not refer to it publicly, he had joined the intelligence service earlier than he openly admits. This had happened while he was still a student at Ntare School. In the chaos atmosphere following the attempt on Obote’s life in 1969 the young Museveni who is so cunning calculated that Okoya’s death would inevitably bring the blame on Amin.

In a book published in 1976 to explain the Israeli side to the 1976 hostage crisis at Entebbe, the deputy editor of the Israeli airforce magazine, Y. Ofer, revealed details that appear to spare Amin of Okoya’s murder. The book titled Operation Thunder: The Entebbe Raid: The Israeli’s Own story, mentioned this detail on page 60. You may find the said book and read it yourself:

“One day when a Ugandan brigadier-general named Okea [Okoya], a member of the Acholi tribe, had been murdered, President Obote planned to exploit the assassination to oust Amin, and he started the rumour that the [army] Chief of Staff had been involved in it. Idi Amin was then in Cairo…[The Uganda minister of defence, Felix Onama… investigated the matter and learned that Obote was planning to detain Amin on his return to Uganda on the trumped-up charge of having assassinated the brigadier-general.”

Ugandans should bear in mind that Mr. Museveni had secretly been acquiring arms in 1970 and hiding them at Salaama. Who can rule out the chance that he might have at least hired out guns in Jan. 1970 for the assassination of Okoya? Big evidence linking Museveni’s possible role in Okoya’s murder came in Aug. 1985 shortly after Obote was overthrown for the second time. The elderly father of the late Okoya told a tribal meeting in Gulu that his son had not been murdered by Amin.

Even more surprising speaking also in Gulu nine years later in 1994, the former Ugandan head of state General Tito Lutwa Okello told a public gathering that Amin did not murder Okoya. Tito Okello had escorted President Museveni on 1 Feb., 1994 for the opening of the Koch Goma health centre in Gulu. Okello was a Lieutenant-Colonel in the 1960s army under Obote and knew enough about the army and Uganda‘s politics to know what he was talking about. Speaking in Luo language in Gulu that day to his own tribesmen the Acholi, Okello added something intriguing.

He said, “There are some people who up to now know who killed Okoya but they are quiet. Okoya was killed in the same way that Colonel Omoya was killed… right now you have started to gang up again under the system and the people who killed your sons.” Who was Okello referring to when he said the people who murdered Okello were in Uganda at the time he spoke, in 1994? This was a political murder. Okello did not mention people by name. He could only have remained silent about their identity if they were influential within the Acholi community and he did not want them to be shunned by their tribesmen, or the killers were in the government at the time and he did not want to invite their wrath. It was one of the most puzzling statements made by a political leader during the 1990s.

Okello criticised the Acholi for ganging up “under the system and the people who killed your sons.” Was he referring to the Acholi rebel leaders like Alice Lakwena and Joseph Kony? If that is the case their rag-tag armies and rebel groups were a joke and you could not say they were a “system.”

By early 1994, both of these Acholi rebel leaders had come to be regarded as too weak to seriously threaten the Museveni government and so it was pointless for Tito Okello to bother about cautioning the Acholi over these rebel leaders. Okello said also that the Acholi had “started” to gang up under the system that had brought suffering to them and killed their sons. By stating that he could only have been referring to the National Resistance Movement government under President Yoweri Museveni.

An Acholi-led military coup and government headed by Okello himself had ruled Uganda six months before Museveni came to power and the Acholi supported that. For 30 years, the Acholi had given their support to the UPC and DP governments of Milton Obote and Benedicto Kiwanuka. So they could not have “started” giving their support to a system and got Tito Okello’s criticism, unless he saw them as supporting a new system that they had historically not supported or known. Tito Okello’s 18

An intriguing statement in Gulu in Feb. 1994, clearing of Amin’s role in Okoya’s murder by the Israeli airforce magazine boss in 1976 says that it was not Amin.

Because the bullets which shot Okoya and his wife came from the GSU or from Mbarara barracks makes one to believe that it was Yoweri Museveni who killed both Brigadier Okoya and Colonel Omoya in 1970. You see when the Acholi hate Museveni for 20 years we can wonder if there can be smoke without fire! Acholi have shunned Museveni with more rebel groups than all other tribes and this can make one to wonder if maybe they possibly know that Museveni killed their Acholi military sons.

On 7 Oct., 1970, President Obote, President Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, and President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania went to Makerere College in Kampala to attend a ceremony in which it was to be officially made a university; the University of East Africa. The heads of state were applauded. But when Amin was introduced, he received a standing ovation and cheers from the students assembled for the occasion.

On 11 Jan., 1971, President Obote summoned Amin to his office and told him that the army had overshot its budget by 2,691,343 Pound Sterling. He also told Amin about the report into the killing of Okoya. Five days later on 16 Jan., 1971, Amin called a news conference and said that Obote planned to have him arrested using intelligence agents. Sincerely why should Amin do this, addressing a press conference charging that the commander-in-chief was planning to have him arrested, an action in breach of army discipline? Amin was definitely aware that the climate in Uganda had turned too political than usual. By addressing a press conference, he tried to appeal for support directly from the public where, he must have known he enjoyed sympathy to make such a direct charge against the President worth the risk. Honestly none of us has conclusive evidence on whether Mr. Museveni killed Okoya, but why hasn’t he come out to give his side of the story?

EM         -> {   Gap   at   46  } – {Allan Barigye is a Rwandan predator}

On the 49^th Parallel          

                 Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja and Dr. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda is in anarchy"
                    Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
"Pamoja na Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja na Dk. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda ni katika machafuko"