Ugandan President Godfrey Binaisa (centre) is escorted to his plane at Jomo Kenyatta Airport by Kenya’s President Daniel Moi (right) and Vice-President Mwai Kibaki after his visit to Kenya on May 8, 1980.
In October 1981, Kenyan security officials took Dr Godfrey Binaisa, the fifth president of Uganda, out of his house in Nairobi and bundled him unceremoniously into a plane to London.
In approving the deportation of Binaisa, then President Daniel arap Moi was keen to remain in good terms with President Milton Obote of Uganda, who had requested the former head of state’s expulsion from Nairobi.
“The Ugandan High Commissioner has confirmed to me that in deporting Binaisa, the Kenyans were acting at Obote’s request,” wrote the British High Commissioner to Kenya Sir John Williams in a declassified correspondence marked restricted. “He claims that Binaisa was organising subversive activities from his Nairobi base.”
Not even Binaisa’s wife, Marjorie, and their young son knew his whereabouts. For a week, she shuttled to and fro seeking assistance to locate her husband. Meanwhile, her landlord in Nairobi, acting under pressure from Moi’s government, had threatened to throw her out with her son.
“She has nowhere to go,and that she wishes her husband to contact her as soon as possible,” Williams wrote in an urgent correspondence to London after meeting Binaisa’s wife in Nairobi.
In London, a fatigued Binaisa sought accommodation in a hotel where he stayed for a week but left without paying, for he had been deported without any money in his pocket, the documents reveal.
Binaisa served as the president of Uganda between June 1979 and May 1980 in an interim government formed by groups that had deposed dictator Idi Amin. These groups operated under the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF).
Although Binaisa was the leader of the government by virtue of his position, the Military Commission, a powerful organ of the UNLF headed by Paulo Muwanga and Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, wielded great influence.
In order to consolidate his position and curb the influence of this commission, Binaisa had fired Chief of Staff Brigadier Oyite Ojok, an influential military officer who had played a great role in overthrowing Amin and a member of the Military Commission.
Among the reasons given by Binaisa in firing Ojok were the deteriorating situation in Uganda and a “near breakdown of relations between the civilian government and the army”.
However there were some rumours that Binaisa had fired Ojok after getting information that he was planning to stage a coup to bring back former president Obote who was living in exile in Tanzania after being overthrown by Amin.
To appease the northerners, among whom Ojok had acquired some sort of a legendary reputation, Binaisa announced Mathias Anyumba as the head of the military and Christopher Okoth as the Minister of State for Defence.
Binaisa’s move on Ojok, however, backfired when the Military Commission overthrew him, put him under house arrest and announced that the country would be ruled by a presidential commission.
The three-man presidential commission was made up of Justice Saulo Musoke, Mr Polycarp Nyamuchoncho and Mr Yoweri Hunter Wach-Olwol. It was largely titular, with most of the powers resting with the Military Commission. This was made clear to them by Mwanga, who stressed that it was his six-member commission that held supreme power.
Apart from Mwanga as chairman, other members of the Military Commission were Museveni as vice-chairman, and Ojok,Tito Okello and Zed Maruru.
Ojok and Mwanga were allies of the exiled Obote, and they had been plotting secretly to bring him back to power. This had the backing of President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, who was also determined to return his ally to power.
To prove this, on May 27, 1980, just two weeks after they had toppled Binaisa, Obote made a triumphant return to Uganda after nine years in exile to take part in the December 1980 elections.
The elections were to mark the end of the transition period and it was the first time in 18 years that Ugandans were heading to the ballot.
While other members of the Military Commission, such as Muwanga and Ojok, joined Obote’s campaign which was largely dominated by the northern tribes, Museveni formed his own Uganda Patriotic Movement, mainly made up of western tribes. To appease the Baganda, who still had an axe to grind with Obote for overthrowing their king in 1966, he chose Binaisa as his running mate.
The elections were won by Obote, who rewarded Muwanga with the position of vice-president and Ojok as army chief of staff.
Museveni, however, contested the results and almost immediately launched a guerilla rebellion against Obote’s regime. His running mate, Binaisa, fled to Kenya through the Namanga border where he was briefly detained by Kenyan authorities until Obote’s government confirmed that he was free to travel.
In permitting Kenyans to allow Binaisa entry, Obote’s government was convinced that the former president was merely transiting through the country to London or New York where he had practised law during Amin’s brutal regime. But when he holed up in Nairobi for months, Obote started getting worried.
He had good reasons to feel so because Nairobi at that time hosted a small number of Ugandan professionals and business elite who were very politically active. These exiles operated underground cells to influence political and military affairs in their country.
According the declassified papers, a worried Obote contacted Moi demanding the expulsion of Binaisa whom he feared posed the greatest danger to his rule.
The Kenyan government, consequently, approached Jerome Martin Aliker, an ally of Obote and a prominent Ugandan dental surgeon in Nairobi, to advise Binaisa to leave Kenya quietly .
Aliker himself fled Uganda in 1972 after Amin took power, and settled in Nairobi where he operated a successful dental practice until 1996 when he returned to Uganda. He had many friends in the Jomo Kenyatta government, and in fact had direct access to the president .
“I personally had direct contact with the President (Kenyatta). Kenyatta was very sympathetic to Ugndans . In fact, almost all the permanent secretaries were ex-Makerere, and they were very sympathetic to us,” he once narrated in an interview with the University of London.
“When Kenyatta died and President Moi took power, he replaced most of Kenyatta’s appointees with his appointees who did not go to Makerere and therefore had no sympathy for Ugandan exiles in Nairobi,” he added.
Perhaps this explains why Moi’s government decided to implement Obote’s request against Binaisa post-haste.
In order to hide their involvement, Kenyan authorities used Aliker to convince Binaisa to leave but he refused.
“ Martin Aliker has given me the following account. The Kenyans first asked him to approach Binaisa and advise him to leave Kenya quietly,” Williams wrote in a confidential letter.
When Binaisa refused and stayed put, the Kenyan government sent two officials to talk him, but he again refused, arguing that there was no deportation order.
A deportation order was subsequently issued and Binaisa was hounded of his house in Nairobi by Kenya’s Immigration officials and unceremoniously put on a plane to London.
He arrived in London on October 24, 1981, and insisted on applying for a six-month visitor visa even though as a former head of state he had permission to enter and remain in the United Kingdom under the special Heads of State Procedure.
For his own safety, he refused to give his address, but it was later discovered that he checked into a hotel where he stayed for a week and left without paying because he had no money. His attempt to open an account to deposit some 5,000 Libyan dinars, which somebody had given him, was rejected by Barclays Bank, the documents reveal.
Having succeeded in having Binaisa expelled from Kenya, Obote turned his focus on Britain—he wanted London to muzzle Prof Yusuf Lule, the fourth president of Uganda, who was living there in exile. But the British government refused.
“ Unlike Kenyans, we have had to explain that this is not possible unless he transgress British laws,” AE Huckle of the Foreign Office wrote.
Meanwhile, in Nairobi, Binaisa’s wife was still in the dark about his whereabouts. On November 3,1981, she visited the British High Commission in Nairobi and pleaded for help in finding her husband. She also revealed that her landlord, certainly out of pressure from the Kenya government, was threatening to evict her.
“Mrs Irene Marjorie Binaisa of PO BOX 67099, Telephone 566649, today called at this office to ask that I endeavour to trace her husband ex-president Binaisa of Uganda and pass to him a message to the effect that attempts are being made to evict her and her son from the house she occupies in Nairobi,” read a telegram marked “immediate” and “confidential” sent to the Foreign Office from Nairobi. The two were later reunited.
In 2001, Binaisa returned to Uganda after a long period in exile in America where he practised law. As a former head of state, he was accorded full retirement benefits under the Presidential Emoluments and Benefits Act (1998).
In 2004, after the death of his wife in London, he married a Japanese woman, Tomoko Yamamoto, whom he had met on a dating site, but the marriage only lasted a year.
Binaisa died in 2010.
Opiyo is a London-based Kenyan journalist and researcher.
