When James Kazini commanded Ugandan troops, during that country's second successive military expedition in neighbouring Congo Democratic Republic, back in 1999, his rank was that of brigadier-general.

As a less experienced officer, thirteen years earlier, while fighting on the side of Yoweri Museveni in the rebel wars of that era, Kazini won the heart of his military commander with his cleverness, trickery and fearlessness on the battlefield.

His loyalty to the cause of the N.R.A., the National Resistance Army, was never in doubt. From the dictatorship of Sir Milton Obote to the near "terror-infested" rule of Field Marshal Idi Amin, back to Obote and then to General Tito Orkelo, the people of Uganda had suffered horribly, and only the N.R.M. could save the country. It was Museveni's divine mission, and subordinates like Kazini believed strongly in it.

The man who has run the affairs of the Ugandan state since Kazini and other Ugandan and non-Ugandan fighters helped bring him to power in Kampala over twenty-three years ago has, some have said, repaid the loyalty of one of his best commanders. For instance, some who knew General Kazini very well did, and do still, speak of him as "very corrupt" and "akin to women."

He's said to have a problem once with drinking, prompting his boss to invite him over to the presidential palace for "some frank talk;" and during his country's second military campaign in Congo D. R., following Museveni's and Kagame's decision to rise up against Laurent Kabila, Kazini was said to have fallen short, not necessarily on the battle-field, but, in the area of morality, as well as "working for the cause."

Nobody knew whether he was charting a totally independent course for himself in Congo or whether he was acting for his boss, President Museveni, when Ugandan forces in Congo abandoned their alliance with Rwandan troops based in Congo.

Many analysts still find it hard to understand the rationale behind President Museveni's decision to keep Kazini's elevated position in the military after what happened in 1999. Relations between the ex-allied armies reached such a low ebb that fighting broke out between them in the Congolese town of Ksangani.

Days of bitter clashes resulted in a mauling of the seemingly invincible N.R.A. forces of Uganda, under General Kazini. Without so much public show of it, the Rwandans had killed hundreds of Kazini's men in the clashes, losing less than half that number themselves.

It took a face-saving meeting between Kagame and Museveni for calm to be restored, leaving the longstanding alliance between Tutsi-dominated Rwanda and their former mentors in Uganda to suffer and be stricken by previously unknown suspicion.

Perhaps, pained and angry, President Museveni was looking for an opportuned moment to strike at one of his most accomplished subordinates. Kazini did rise to the post of the head of the Ugandan People's Defence Force, or U.P.D.F., the name which the former rebel N.R.A. assumed shortly after it won the war in 1986

The beginning of the end came, when he was discredited and was promptly sided by his boss, after he was first exposed by a United Nations, U.N. investigation into economic exploitation in eastern Congo, and then, the real one, by an official Ugandan inquiry.

The actual straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak, came with news, last Tuesday, November 10, that the Major-general James Kazini had passed on and in the most bizarre of circumstances. Surely, if he'd been asked which way he preferred to leave this world, the former army commander would not have chosen an iron bar as the instrument to do it. But, on the day, a woman in the police net, declaring herself to be Kazini's girlfriend, admitted without remorse that she had hit him on the head with an iron bar, killing him almost instantly.

Under police custody, the suspect has continued to make statements in the public domain, giving grisly details of what had actually transpired.

So far, the Ugandan police are saying very little either about their ongoing investigations or the confessional statement said to have been made by the killer-woman. "Ongoing interrogations" being carried out on the woman also includes tests to ascertain her sanity at a mental health facility, before she's formally charged in court.

As the chief of the U.P.D.P., the fallen soldier was dismissed by Mr. Museveni exactly six years ago, following accusations by the U.N. that he plundered resources in the D.R.C., while he was in command of Ugandan troops carrying out an operation there.

At the time in question, Museveni's Rwandan allies had been the first to accuse Kazini of "corruption," "exploitation" and "terrorism." They said his activities in eastern Congo had made the Ugandan army no better than the Hutu enemies and other "renegade forces" they'd been sent to flush out.

Describing him as "a simple rascal," his opposite number in the R.P.A., or Rwandan Patriotic Army, accused Kazini of "doing no other business than pillaging, looting and mining resources" in eastern Congo.

Major-general James Kazini is largely given credit for master-minding the crushing and bringing about the complete military defeat of the Allied Democratic Forces, or the A.D.F. rebels, who were operating and causing great chaos and mayhem in western Uganda's Kassesse District.

Only last year, the former chief of the Ugandan army was found guilty of causing the government of Uganda a huge financial loss by setting up an inflated pay-roll of what is commonly known in many government-run organisations across Africa as "ghost workers." In Major-general Kazini's case, he had created a (fictitious) list of "ghost soldiers" and was punished for it.

Before his self-professed lover sent him to the great beyond, the ex-army chief was facing a potentially treasonous charge of subversion. He had disobeyed a presidential order not to transport large numbers of troops, when he was the head of the U.P.D.F. But, for a last-minute order by Uganda's Constitutional Court, Kazini would surely have been convicted and sentenced on that charge by the military court-martial that tried him.

But, General Kazini is dead, leaving Uganda, including those who despised and respected him, to wonder how a man who achieved so much success for his country and his troops on the battlefield could eventually lose to a singular stroke of an iron bar. He was a man described by one of his former colleagues in the U.P.D.F. as "having at times plunged into the thick of battle to make his point."

According to another former soldier-colleague of the fallen general, "not one bullet struck him throughout all those dangerous and testy moments of his illustrious military career."

That says it all. Many will wonder whether it was not Kazini's fate to have passed on the way he did: the great commander and leader of thousands, who escaped or prevailed over hideous odds in battle, only to be cut down, not just by a stone slung by a David against a Goliath, but, by a single blow dealt out to him by a "mere woman," even if an aggrieved one, who felt that she had a score of the heart to settle by taking the life of her own lover.