For three whole days, Radio Uganda blared the startling news by Idi Amin's military spokesman, normally a euphemism for the Big Daddy himself, that a fleet of American, Chinese, Indian and Israeli planes had been sighted over the Indian Ocean near Mombasa, heading to attack Uganda.

It became the slowest flight of military planes in history because to date none of the alleged planes has arrived anywhere in Uganda to discharge their deadly payload. This was one of the favourite antics that delighted Amin to dramatize himself at a time when his blood drenched regime was besieged with innumerable difficulties just before it collapsed from its misadventure with Tanzania.

When Idi Amin was not brutalising and butchering the Ugandan people, he had the knack to make fun of his victims by way of cracking ribald and coarse jokes. He enjoyed the behaviour of a complacent cat which, having preyed on a doomed rat, amuses itself by toying playfully with it.

Those who happened to be deprived of their lives were often explained as having "disappeared" or fled to Tanzania.

This humiliation of the country encompassed every aspect of life. Public officials could be arraigned and dismissed from atop an anthill as Amin would be surveying his cassava garden. Prominent Ugandans found themselves subjected to unwilling rides in the boots of cars driven by Amin's operatives. Nothing was sacrosanct.

The extreme bestiality of the regime roused deep detestation amongst the people. The yearning for its overthrow grew by leaps and bounds.

But there existed an unconscionable failing in the political sphere; there was no unanimity over what had to replace the notorious situation.

Dr. Obote and his UPC group proudly presented themselves as having been opposed to Amin's rule "right from the very beginning." By this, they purported to possess a higher moral rectitude than others to claim the reign of power from Amin, ostensibly because all other Ugandan political groups had been collaborators of the dreaded Amin rule. They scarcely mentioned that Idi Amin had, in any case, been part and parcel of the Obote regime whose squabbles had been the reason for the Amin ascendancy. Quite naturally, those who had not been privy to the Obote governance could not have been in the intrigue "from the very beginning" as was being bragged. This is why the very suggestion that UPC miscreants could be restored to power to go on as before was repulsive.

The Obotes encouraged the belief that Idi Amin's rule was brutal merely because it was by Sudanese foreigners, justifying their own hidden intent at pogroms and genocide against the West Nile people. Yet many Ugandan communities of which Obote was a part, like the Kakwa, Acholi, Langi, Jie, etc, have their origins and relatives in the Sudan, let alone the many others who are astride the common borders like the Congo, Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda.

Earlier in 1971, Dr. Obote himself had sought to use the Sudanese at Owiny Kibuul in his attempts to put himself back into Office, a venture that ended in tragedy when some recruits were intercepted by the Amin soldiery in Tororo and sportily slaughtered.

Amin's illiteracy and lack of education became a rallying point when one Ugandan exile group argued that the politics of Uganda had to be conducted only by eminent and well travelled intellectuals like themselves. The exclusive exercise of power by a hypocritical elite, without the people, was offered as a solution to the despotic rule. Still, there were a number of other variants of the same dictatorial undertones. It was suggested that power had to be disposed of in proportion to the number of fighters of each group. One such group under the late Justice Mathew Opu disbanded after it failed to agree on who should be supreme. The good judge thought that, because his Kakwa soldiers would be the bulk in overthrowing Amin after the abortive putsch by Brig. Charles Arube, the presidency had to reside in him as a Kakwa.

Only when it was accepted that the end of Amin's rule had to flow from democratic credentials and the full recognition of the rights of the Ugandan people did the political process move forward with the formation of an interim UNLF arrangement to administer the country with a view of the final empowerment of the population. The seizure of power by the UPC in an attempt to undermine this process brought into the country a new war.

It was quite clear that, despite the initial military supremacy of the UPC, its victory was not guaranteed. Victory is assured only if it cultivates and embodies politics by the people as a whole in the everyday phenomenon of control and use of power.

When, therefore, we see some of our own NRM officials gloat in power today with unabashed impudence and disregard for public opinion, it must be our duty to raise the incisive signboard: the disgrace of Idi Amin and other subsequent regimes was not because they lacked absolute power.

James Magode Ikuya, The author is a member of NEC (NRM) representing historicals.