Friends For Peace In Africa

By September 2009, as his legal battles took a turn for the worse, Maj. Gen. James Kazini was considering leaving Uganda for the United States, Daily Monitor can reveal.

For help, the former army commander, who was found dead in his lover’s house last week, turned to Shaka Ssali, the Ugandan-born American journalist who works for Voice of America.

Dr Ssali confirmed yesterday, recalling that Gen. Kazini appeared to be “going through the motions” and wanted a “change of location”.

In Dr Ssali’s recollection of the telephone conversation, which happened sometime in September, Gen. Kazini’s plan was to spend Christmas in the US, where they would have had a detailed conversation about what was troubling the friend he first met in 1985.

“He was a friend,” Dr Ssali said in a telephone interview. “He wanted to chill, to get out of Uganda and catch up a bit.”

Asked why Gen. Kazini thought he would be helpful, Dr Ssali said the former army commander wanted to use him as a “reference” for his visa application, adding that “Kazini, in his own right, was a legitimate newsmaker”.

Dr Ssali said it was possible that Gen. Kazini, once in the US, “would go public” about his distress.
“So many things were going on in his life,” Dr Ssali said. “He basically wanted a change of location.”

Dr Ssali, who said he was “devastated” by his friend’s death, could not reveal details of his last conversation with him. “We were close in the sense that we could talk almost about anything,” he said.

The revelation that Gen. Kazini could have been planning to leave Uganda, perhaps for good, raises difficult questions about his fears in the months before he died.  In March 2008, he was convicted in a corruption case and sent to Luzira Prison by the Army Court Martial. Later, after he got bail, he had to deal with an insubordination case that could have condemned him to life in jail.

He was charged with disobeying lawful orders from President Museveni while he commanded the UPDF.

By the time he died, allegedly at the hands of his mistress, the insubordination case, widely seen in treason terms, was still pending. But Gen. Kazini was convinced he had already been convicted in an unread judgment, family sources said.

The Police are holding Lydia Draru, the confessed killer, but are considering the possibility that she was acting alone.

But Gen. Kazini’s family, including his widow Phoebe, have raised doubts that Ms Draru could have killed Gen. Kazini without the help of a third party. “I highly doubt that she was hit by a woman [acting alone] in that kind of way,” Ms Kazini said last week. “I think that other people were involved”.

President Museveni, speaking during a requiem service for the former army commander, joined those calling for a transparent probe into a killing that was raising more questions. Police investigators have refused to make public details of their progress. At the heart of the case is the reliability of Ms Draru, whose I-killed-him announcements alerted strangers to the presence of a dead man in her living room on the early morning of November 10.

Draru’s confession

In an interview with a Daily Monitor reporter, before she was arrested, Ms Draru said she hit her lover “three times” in self-defence after he threatened her. But it emerged that Gen. Kazini was not armed, and her claims of a scuffle were at odds with her prim appearance.

Also questioned is whether the hollow-section pipe found beside a dead Kazini was the actual weapon used to inflict the deep cuts his head suffered.

Gen. Kazini, who was buried on Friday in his adopted home of Ssanga, Kiruhura, had fallen out with the army establishment by the time he died. By some accounts, he had been trying to build a public profile, especially be rallying his people, the Basongora, to defend their rights. Eulogies spoke of his bravery on the battlefield, but his critics pointed out that his career had been plagued by accusations of corruption.

Dr Ssali said yesterday he first met Gen. Kazini in 1985, not long before the rebel National Resistance Army (NRA) captured Kampala, when the rebel  was in Dar-es-Salaam to receive a consignment of weapons from the Tanzanians.  

At a hotel in Dar, Dr Ssali recalled, a rebel and a student were able to find a connection. In January 1986, when Mr Museveni’s NRA captured power, the soldier “put me on line and I talked to Salim Saleh and Fred Rwigyema,” he recalled.

Gen. Saleh, Mr Museveni’s brother, and Rwigyema, who has since died, were calling from Nakasero State Lodge.