Though it’s common practice for Africans to gloss over one’s legacy at death, while proclaiming only one’s good record, I will critically assess the twin legacies of Uganda’s Akena Adoko and Tanzania’s Rashid Kawawa, hopefully for the benefit of posterity. Both died in January this year. Having never interacted with them personally, I will not dwell on their personal traits of say being amiable or sociable and so on. My main concern would be with their contributions in the realms of nation building.

Both men lived during, what the Chinese refer to as, interesting times: That turbulent post colonial era when newly independent political elites, without having acquired the required apprenticeship to manage statecraft from a divisive and fleeing colonial master, ended up in charge of the brutal colonial state that reigned over disparate communities.

Inevitably it required considerable political skills and vision to hold together these new countries. Moreover, the new political elite had to do so within a context of locally dependent, underdeveloped economies and an unstable geo-political environment. Indeed, how the Tanzanian and Ugandan political elite responded to these challenges offers interesting case studies of nation building and regional liberation, on the one hand, and of national disintegration and regional destabilization, on the other.

Kawawa and Adoko shared in common, the trait of having submitted themselves to the wills of their political masters from the very start: Tanzania’s Mwalimu Nyerere, in the case of the former, and Uganda’s Milton Obote, for the latter.

If Nyerere, aptly referred to by Ali Mazrui as ‘… a true philosopher, president and original thinker’, was the grand architect of Tanzanian nation building, regional liberation and security, then Kawawa was his trusted, skilled, implementing mason. Kawawa’s imprint is visible for the discerning eye to see in the united Tanzania of today and in the fruits of liberation of the eastern and southern African countries.

Kawawa, an able trade unionist with an humble educational background, was one of Tanganyika’s founding fathers along with Nyerere, who formed the Tanzanian African National Union (TANU). TANU led the Tanganyikans to independence in 1961. Later Kawawa was instrumental in the formation of the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) after TANU merged with the Zanzibari Afro Shazi and UMMA parties, headed by Abeid Karume and Abdul Rahman Babu respectively.

Instrumentally, Kawawa was a longstanding secretary general of both TANU and CCM respectively. This was not accidental. It was by design. For he was an intelligent, loyal and hard working party cadre. Indeed, when in 1963 Nyerere temporarily resigned as prime minister in order to devote time to party building, it was Kawawa whom relinquished the mantle to. Kawawa never failed the people of Tanganyika, for he ably held the fort and later handed back power, intact, to his political mentor and boss.

Kawawa was a lead actor in the uniting of the people of Tanganyika and Zanzibar and in the creation of the Tanzanian nation state. In addition he was key in conceiving of and implementing the African Socialist Arusha Declaration and associated Ujaama policies. He was a gifted political communicator, mobiliser and implementer.

As a longstanding Tanzanian minister of defence, he played a pivotal role in the liberation of southern Africa from Portuguese colonialism and white settler autocracy and of ridding Uganda of the Amin junta. It is Kawawa who offered the political guidance over that mammoth task, which led to Uganda’s liberation. For this reason he travelled with the Uganda National Liberation Front leader, Yusuf Lule, to Kampala for Lule’s swearing in as president in early April 1979.

But, Kawawa is also equally associated with the failures of the policies he helped to craft: The collapsing of the Tanzanian economy by Ujaama, for instance, or the return of the Obote and his Uganda Peoples Congress autocracy in Uganda in 1980.

When discussing Akena Adoko’s legacy, it is the period from 1962 to 1971 that I will focus on. During this time, to quote the then Makerere-based Mazrui, he was ‘… the second most powerful civilian in Uganda after the Head of State’. To appreciate this, one needs to recall that he combined the roles of chief ideologue and spymaster of the Obote I regime. Indeed, he was Obote’s first cousin. Against this background, the questions I intend to address are how and in whose interest did Adoko apply this power?

As head of the General Service Unit, Obote I’s security apparatus, Adoko was responsible for Obote’s rehabilitating Idi Amin, who had been recommended for disgraceful discharge by based on his atrocious misconduct in Karamoja. The placement of the army commander, after all, depends considerably on the vetting process of a country’s intelligence organs. Amin’s retention was selfishly and politically calculated: It was intended to retain Obote and Adoko in power against the wishes of the people of Uganda.

Added effects of Adoko’s counsel to Obote, manifest in the latter’s response to the implications of the 1966 Daudi Ochieng parliamentary motion of 1966. In sum, this response deliberately collapsed constitutional rule and disintegrated the Uganda body politic, through the abrogation of the 1962 Lancaster House Constitution. Ironically this had been crafted by Obote and Kabaka Mutesa II. What was also crafted was the arrest of five dissenting cabinet ministers during a cabinet meeting, as well as Amin’s attack of the Lubiri (Mutesa’s Palace) and Obote’s ‘palace coup’, all that year.

One needs to recall that approximately 1,000 people, mostly innocent civilians, were killed in the process. Civil liberties were suspended soon after, through the imposing of Buganda specific emergency regulations. In addition all opposition political parties were banned in 1969 and their leadership were detained without trial. This included Buganda’s leading princes and princesses.

I cannot conclude a discussion of Adoko’s legacy without mentioning his callous justification of these misdeeds on Uganda Television, the numerous public lectures he offered and his verbose 1968 text, ‘Crisis in Uganda’, in which he justified his regime’s misadventures as a ‘revolution’.

Adoko’s ineptness and further disservice to Uganda and the people of Africa is illustrated through his failure to adequately warn Obote of the danger the Amin posed to their regime’s survival. Rather, in typical tragicomic style similar to Emperor Nero and burning Rome, Adoko left or fled Kampala for the January 1971 Singapore Chogm when Amin was on the rampage. Normally, as security chief and lead regime ideologue, he had no business abroad. He should have remained behind to mobilise against Amin’s coup.

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* Kintu Nyago is the executive director of Forum for Promoting Democratic Constitutionalism in Kampala, Uganda.
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