In an interview with Sunday Monitor's PHOEBE MUTETSI, Mr Jaffar Amin, son of former Ugandan military leader Idi Amin, talks about his presidential ambitions in 2011 and his father's character and what made many Ugandans and the world hate him.

Your father is making headlines long after his reign and life. The Last King of Scotland movie has created the greatest buzz in Uganda and the world over about the character, behaviour and deeds of your father. What is your take on the movie?

Some international news agency reporters came to interview me; they asked me to watch the movie. So I had to watch it to know what it's about. But it (the movie) more or less shows the stereotype the West has had of my father, albeit in subtle ways; the raving mad, trigger happy, out of control man.

And the way it portrays one of our mothers, Mama Kay, is very disrespectful. She (Kay Amin) was a very decent lady, could never have had an extra marital affair. And the circumstances in which she dies (in the movie), were very controversial and sad. I am sure her actual children will be very hurt by those scenes.

However this movie is our platform. I am writing a book about my father - I know people like to think of him as this brute that came out of nowhere. I also intend to open a website.

How would you rather perceive of Amin, the man the world viewed as a tyrant?

My father was not pretentious. What you saw is what you got. He had a great sense of loyalty and dedication to his country and he expected not any less from his staff. So he laboured to understand if his ministers, his staff, were working for the state or against it.

Today, people may not understand this but colonialism built that strong sense of loyalty to the state. You work for the colonial master, you work for the country. This sense of nationalism was very strong then. So people tended to confuse this (loyalty to the state) with perception that he's paranoid, he's a megalomaniac, he is in love with power and so on.

He was a man from a very poor background and he pulled himself up, with shoestrings to presidency. That scene in the movie where he sits on the floor in his bedroom, with his back against the settee and narrates to Dr Garrigan of his past and how he intended to make changes in the country, is the most accurate portrayal of my father.

At that point Forest Whitaker brought to life the man (Idi Amin) I knew. He would always sit on the floor just like that, with his back to the settee and he never lost track of who he was, his past.

As a president who had come from a very humble background he tried to level the playing field. He wanted to make changes in this country that would serve the common man's interest. That was the period Uganda was stratified with the haves and the have-nots. On top of the ladder were the Indians, the elites, and cultural leaders. The common man was the scum of the earth and my father was trying to right that.

The people who were aggrieved most were the elite. This was a man out of nowhere and making all these changes, they obviously didn't take it positively. It is like if today a poor man from Kyebando (a Kampala outskirt) came and took over power. The elite would not take it well or even at all. So that is why you are likely to meet the elite of the 1970s claiming to have fled the country during my father's regime.

So are there no people who fled for fear of their lives?

The movie has scenes of the people disappearing; people who just went missing, got killed for little or no reason. Just a hunch that someone is disloyal to the president and you will never see them again.

Look, like any other government, a president will not keep cabinet ministers or any government official whose loyalty he doubts. The minute he would discover you are not loyal to him or the State he would get rid of you. He would actually rearrange cabinet based on people's performances, make transfers; he was fond of transfers and not that nonsense that he used to execute them.

But you see in such a government where the president has absolute power (which he had) it was easy for all killings, assassinations, and all kinds of atrocities to be blamed on him. It is not like today where one can choose to blame the judiciary, the parliament or the local government.

So what do you say to the people who have continued to blame the death and disappearing of hundreds and thousands of their relatives on your father?

Let the government agree to a truth and reconciliation commission, like they did in South Africa, Rwanda or with the Jews after the holocaust. Let's have people come out and testify. This country needs that to heal and move on.

Northern Uganda is stuck in a pathetic war, the West Nile is languishing and Karamoja is in the wilderness. And for an answer, as to why this is happening, you will have people telling you that it's because of the misrule of the past. People tend to suggest it is a punishment for the past 'bad' leadership.

So this is a certain way of minting out revenge to these people, to us. Yet issues like the Luwero skulls, what happened in West Nile have never been substantiated. All the atrocities of the 80s, the Anyanya (an armed group from southern Sudan) and others are all blamed on [Amin]. It is sort of blanket blame. No one has come out and said, let us redress these issues, corroborate the figures.

In 1972 the figures of the people killed during my father's regime were, apparently, eighty thousand, in 1982 the figures increased to three hundred thousand and in the State of Blood (a book about Idi Amin's regime by Henry Kyemba) the figures stated are one hundred and eighty thousand. Something is not right. You would be surprised with the actual numbers, the right facts and figures.

Would the truth and reconciliation commission clear your father and the family name?

There is no sense of guilt and I know people expect us (Idi Amin's family) to feel guilty. My siblings have promised never to return to Uganda. Almost all of them have acquired foreign citizenships. They simply dread coming back and taking all that is said and atrocities attributed to our father.

And it's not just my siblings, there are so many from northern Uganda who have gone abroad and promised never to return because they feel this government marginalises them and thus don't feel they are part of this country any more. Revisiting the past and sorting the truth from the trash should clear all this.

How old were you when your father was president?

We left for exile in Libya when I was turning twelve years. So I was in my pre-teens. But I have a photographic memory; I remember most of what was going on during that time. He was always busy. I would say we all got closer while in exile. We spent enough time with one another and I got to know my father really well.

He was a loving but strict father. He wanted us to learn everything regardless of our ages. He taught me how to drive when I was twelve and some of my young brothers learnt when they were much younger. It was interesting to see little boys driving. The Arabs found it a bit disturbing but that is who he was. For example he made sure we all got military training. I actually learnt how to shoot when we were still in Uganda.

My father's bodyguards- beautiful female bodyguards that I had a huge crush on - were our shooting instructors. My father, like Gadaffi, had only female bodyguards, we used to call them Camanyolas, it's a Congolese word for commandos.

How would you describe Idi the President?

He was autocratic, he was almost communist like. Some people look back to the communist era and say, the organisation was amazing! But some tend to remember the anarchy of the 80s and then blanket it with the 70s, because, the instabilities were in the 80s.

There were quite a number of forces all vying for the same seat. But that couldn't happen in my father's era because he was always in control and some people didn't like that. People questioned his absolute power.

'This man who seems to control everything.' That controlled calmness, controlled mechanism, where everything seems to be working well, is in some people's memories. He was also a practical man. If a region asked for a school, in two days the construction would start. The schools were there, the hospitals....

The literature we are fed about him brings him out as a scarecrow, but if you go out to the villages and ask those people what they remember of him, his regime, you would be surprised at how nostalgic they are. Look at the tranquil Kampala today, and its people will tell you it's never been better since 1986. But go to the north, people have memories that can't be derailed by films and books.

Amin's absolute power

It is one thing to take up arms and say I am going to fight you, and it's another to start screaming, when you are not the first one to shoot. You went out to hurt somebody who you felt was in power, and then you found that he was better organised than you thought. I disagree with the image of the so-called mad man, the sense of paranoia.

The Asian expulsion

He actually expelled about 80-85 Indian, British passport holders. In 1971 he had asked them to choose between Uganda citizenship and British citizenship, they had held onto their British citizenship. It was not a spur of the moment as some people would have you think, he had warned them earlier on.

And I don't know why this is never mentioned, but those who left the country were compensated. The British government ensured that. My father paid them one billion dollars. The pictures are there, go to the archives and you will see pictures of my father handing over the cheque.

Actually when the Indians were coming back and reclaiming their property Moses Ali questioned why they should reclaim their property yet they were paid.

Did Uganda have all that money?

My father had the support of OPEC countries. He had the support of King Faisal and Gadaffi. They actually advised him to pay this amount of money so as to get that out of the way.

And the Indians know that. When I was studying in the UK I lived in Leicester, an area filled with Ugandan Indians. And these people reinvested the money in business similar to those they had here or better. I would meet them and joke, "my father chucked you out of Uganda! And they would just say, it was a blessing in disguise." They were paid.

What are your personal goals, would ever contest for presidency for example?

Why not, in 2011, I will be 45 years, I should be in position to contestant for presidency. But right now I am what you would call a reluctant politician. I am still working on my book and I plan to avail it on the Internet, so that if some one downloads one chapter and pays two dollars, then that goes towards building a hospital.... Those are the social issues I want to tackle.

Jaffar is an Air Express Manager and does voice-over advertising. His last successful stint was one with Stanbic Bank asking people to go and by shares. The bank sold 280 billion shares and he believes his voice-overs were mostly the reason for this success.