Troops surrounded the kabaka's palace and many of the powerful Baganda never forgave Obote for ending the centuries-old kingdom and driving King "Freddy" into exile; he died in London in Under Obote's virtual one-man rule, Uganda, for a time, experienced relative political stability and economic prosperity. He launched a "move to the left" in , introducing a Common Man's Charter to create "a new political culture and way of life with the means of production in hands of the people as whole".
Ruthlessly driven, he soon became the whipping boy of the western press, a kind of socialist ogre of the emergent independent Africa. In fact, Obote's policies did not involve large-scale nationalisation, as was alleged.
What he sought was a substantial, but not majority, shareholding in foreign-owned businesses, as was happening in other African countries at that time. It was a diluted form of socialism that he proposed to put before the electorate, but he was frustrated by Amin's coup in January , carried out while Obote was attending the Commonwealth prime ministers' conference in Singapore.
At first the overthrow was welcomed by many Ugandans. Before long, however, Amin launched an eight-year reign of terror; while the number of dead will never be known, exile organisations put it at , From his exile in Tanzania, Obote issued regular denunciations of the "fascist dictator Amin who had transformed Uganda into a human slaughterhouse".
But it was not until that he had an opportunity to regain power following the overthrow of Amin by invading Tanzanian troops.
In elections marred by widespread and blatant irregularities - to their lasting discredit pronounced fair by a team of Commonwealth observers - Obote's UPC won. Although power was again his, he had sown the seeds of dissatisfaction that in time were to flower into full-blown revolt and victory for the guerrilla leader Museveni.
Those fraudulent elections, plus his miscalculated exploitation of tribal politics, proved to be his downfall. His Langi-dominated army took terrible retribution on civilians living in the Luwero triangle, just north of Kampala, where Museveni's National Resistance Army guerrillas were operating, giving Uganda one of the worst human rights records in the world at that time.
However, internal divisions arose within the army, and by July Obote was once again on the ignominious road to exile, first to Kenya, and then to Zambia, where fellow independence leader Kenneth Kaunda allowed him to stay.
Milton Apollo Obote was once quoted as saying: "I'd rather have Milton's brains than Apollo's good looks. Milton Obote. Because the Buganda tribespeople who lived in southern Uganda dominated the economy, Obote went to Kenya to find work.
He worked there first for an engineering firm and then for several industrial concerns. While in Kenya, he became interested in politics and was a founding member of the Kenya African Union. In Obote returned to Uganda. He entered politics when he was asked to return to the Lango district to replace a local Uganda National Congress party leader who had been imprisoned.
In , a sudden vacancy caused by the resignation of the Lango member of the Legislative Council led to Obote's appointment as a replacement. In Uganda's first direct elections later that year, Obote won the seat by a wide margin, and his rise in Ugandan politics was under way.
Obote soon became president of the Uganda National Congress party, one of many parties trying to forge a unity to bring Uganda independence. In , Obote joined his organization to a rival party, thus founding the Uganda People's Congress; he became its president. When a conference provided for elections leading to independence, Obote allied his party to the Buganda party under Kabaka King Yekka in order to defeat Benedicto Kiwanuka's ruling Democratic party.
The coalition gained a majority of the Ugandan votes, and Obote became Uganda's prime minister. He presided over British withdrawal in October But independence did not solve Uganda's problems. Buganda had been an ancient African kingdom, and British rule had left Buganda autonomous within the Uganda Protectorate.
It was the most prosperous part of the country and home to Uganda's most educated elite. In accord with Uganda's constitution, agreed to by the British prior to independence, Obote appointed the ruler of Buganda to the largely ceremonial office of president of Uganda.
But Bugandans were not willing to settle for less than a dominant place in the nation's politics, and Obote's alliance with Kabaka Yekka became increasingly unstable as friction grew between Buganda and the central government. The problem erupted into a crisis in Obote suspended the constitution, declared a state of emergency, and assumed full power. He introduced a new constitution, abolished Buganda and other kingdom-states within Uganda, and assaulted Kampala, the capital of Buganda under the leadership of General Idi Amin.
The Bugandan king fled and died in exile in London.
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