Milton Obote

Apollo Milton Obote led Uganda to independence, was overthrown by Idi Amin, returned to power after Amin fell, and was overthrown again. He was a Lango from the north, educated at Makerere, and founded the Uganda People's Congress in 1960. At independence in 1962 he became prime minister in a coalition with the Buganda monarchist party, with the Kabaka Mutesa II as ceremonial president - an arrangement between the centralising north and the powerful southern kingdom that lasted four years. In 1966 he suspended the constitution, made himself executive president, and sent the army under Idi Amin to storm the Kabaka's palace; Mutesa escaped to England and died there. Obote abolished the kingdoms altogether and moved towards a one-party socialist state. Amin deposed him in 1971 while he was abroad, and the eight years that followed killed perhaps three hundred thousand Ugandans. Tanzania's invasion removed Amin in 1979, and Obote won a disputed election in 1980. His second government fought a civil war against Yoweri Museveni's guerrillas in which the army's conduct in the Luwero Triangle killed on a scale comparable to Amin's. His own generals overthrew him in 1985. He died in exile in Zambia in 2005. He nationalised much of the economy under his Common Man's Charter in 1969 and survived an assassination attempt the same year. The rivalry between north and south that he inherited and sharpened has outlasted him and every government since. Museveni, who removed his second government, was still in power twenty years after Obote's death. He was given a state funeral in Uganda in 2005, which was itself contested.

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