Last week this column promised to submit its own list of the most brilliant Ugandans.
To answer this question, we must take the broadest look at society. What are the talents, the achievements and skills of the greatest consequence to society and mankind? Is it brilliance in thoughts, brilliance in output and outcome?

In particular, what is Uganda and what therefore are and have historically been the most pressing, most emotional issues that have shaped national life? What talent does Uganda most lack?

Is Uganda a happy, economically self-sufficient country, with stable politics? Is Uganda a New Zealand or Sweden? If not, what are the policies and talents required to address this problem?

And so, that is the basis for my nomination of the people I regard as the most brilliant (or “brilliant” Ugandans). Based on my interaction, reading or hearing about numerous people, my first nomination of brilliant Ugandans is Fred Guweddeko, a researcher at Makerere University.

Guweddeko’s knowledge of Ugandan history from the 1970s to the present day, (particularly intelligence, political, and military history), his ability to dig up the most obscure facts and details of Ugandan history are his main strength, on the surface.

There is only one Ugandan here or abroad that I can think of, who can reply to my challenge to produce a list of 600 names of people supposedly killed by Idi Amin, and that is Guweddeko. If he can’t, no other Ugandan can. Better even than Guweddeko’s knack for researching is his ability to think up a case and reason around all the details pertaining to it.

By analysing the mentality of a tribe, the interplay between one’s religion and psychological disposition, a piece of research here, a tip from a relative there, an article in a particular newspaper, Guweddeko can arrive at a staggeringly accurate picture of a situation. Whenever I sit down with Guweddeko and hear him reason, I feel the ground shake under my feet.

The only other Ugandan I know with a mind like that is another of my nominees --- the late president Milton Obote: a mind that pulls together strands of evidence, circumstantial reasoning, quoting a public document, and with that, delivers his case. In May when the Secretary for Defence Brig. Noble Mayombo died, thousands of us speculated about the possible cause of death. Something didn’t seem to add up. But just as we were starring a particular direction, Guweddeko came up with the most unexpected of angles.

In a letter to Colonel James Mugira committee charged with looking into Mayombo’s death, Guweddeko asked a dozen or so questions that suddenly opened the eyes of most of us to a much darker explanation for Mayombo’s death. Imagine how much richer in understanding our history Ugandans would be if characters like Guweddeko were given priority by our governments since independence.

Obote fits in this category. While he believed himself a politician --- at which, by any African standard, he was --- but that is not what he was best at. Had we known at independence what we were later to learn, we would have instead appointed Obote the director of analysis in intelligence, director of CID, or any position that made use of his investigative skills, gripping arguments, and compelling mind. In April 1990, Obote, now in exile in Lusaka, Zambia, wrote a document titled “Notes On Concealment of Genocide In Uganda” in which he sought to explain his side of the tragic story of the massacres in Luweero Triangle in the early 1980.

I have not been as shaken by a paper written with such clarity, force of reason, vivid description of location, as that. I trembled as I read it (You can read it on the UPC party website upcparty.net, under the President’s Corner) This is the document that completely changed my view of the NRM government, President Museveni, and all that we have been told about Luweero. That document, so well-written, so compellingly argued, explained to me for the first time what I previously could not understand: Museveni’s extreme unease at the mere mention of Obote. Museveni knew Obote’s mind.

Expressing his fear of Cassius in Shakespeare’s tragic play Julius Caesar, Caesar remarked, in Act 1, Scene 2: “He reads too much. He is a great observer, and he looks quite through the deeds of men…Such men as he…therefore…are very dangerous.”
In other documents on the UPC website, Obote explained the deaths at Kanungu, the situation in northern Uganda after the NRM took power, and the connection between NRA generals Salim Saleh, Fred Rwigyema, and rebel leader Alice Lakwena. Obote repeated this gripping train of reasoning in his April 2005 autobiographical series in Daily Monitor recorded by Andrew Mwenda, in pointing the blame for the Luweero massacres on the NRA. Next week, I will assess my four or five remaining nominees.

timothy_kalyegira@yahoo.com