Milton Obote, Ugandan political leader, Died at 79

  Politician

Apollo Milton Obote on the 10th of October 2005 at the age of 79, he was a Ugandan political leader who led Uganda to independence in 1962 from British colonial administration.
Born at Akokoro village in Apac district in northern Uganda on the 28th of December 1925.
He was the son of a tribal chief of the Lango ethnic group. He began his education in 1940 at the Protestant Missionary School in Lira, and later attended Gulu Junior Secondary School, Busoga College and eventually university at Makerere University.
Having intended to study law, a subject not taught at the university, Obote took a general arts course, including English and geography.
At Makerere, Obote honed his natural oratorical skills; he may have been expelled for participating in a student strike, or alternatively left after a place to study law abroad was not funded by the protectorate government.
In January 1964, a mutiny occurred at the military barracks at Jinja, Uganda’s second city and home to the 1st Battalion of the Uganda Army.
There were similar mutinies in two other eastern African states; all three countries requested the support of troops from the British military.
Before they arrived, however, Obote sent his defence minister Felix Onama to negotiate with the mutineers.
Onama was held hostage, and agreed to many demands, including significant pay increases for the army, and the rapid promotion of many officers, including the future president Idi Amin.
In 1965, Kenyans had been barred from leadership positions within the government, and this was followed by the removal of Kenyans en masse from Uganda in 1969, under Obote’s guidance.
On the 27th of July 1985, Obote was deposed again. As in 1971, he was overthrown by his own army commanders in a military coup d’état; this time the commanders were Brigadier Bazilio Olara-Okello and General Tito Okello.
The two men briefly ruled the country through a Military Council, but after a few months of near chaos, Museveni’s NRA seized control of the country.
Obote settled in neighbouring Tanzania, where he maintained a small émigré army under the generalship of Tito Okello, an Acholi.
This army aided Tanzanian forces in deposing Amin in 1979, and Okello was able to secure Obote’s election to the presidency after Obote’s return from exile in May 1980.
As president, Obote solicited foreign aid in an attempt to raise Uganda’s economy from the ruin of the Amin years, but he did nothing to prevent Acholi and Lango soldiers from conducting a campaign of murder and pillage in the south and in Amin’s home district. In 1985 Obote was forced out of office by Okello.
By July 1985, Amnesty International estimated that the Obote regime had been responsible for more than 300,000 civilian deaths across Uganda.
Abuses were particularly conspicuous in an area of central Uganda known as the Luweero Triangle.