How to reward winning sportsmen, the Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada way

Perhaps because he was one, the late Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin Dada, spared no expense in treating his winning sportsmen.

Amin, (full official title - His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Alhaji Dr. Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE), was the Ugandan light heavyweight boxing champion between 1951 and 1960. He was also a good swimmer.

His long military career took him to the very top of the Ugandan armed forces as Army Commander. It was from that position that he staged a successful bloody coup in 1971, deposing his benefactor, the Independence president Milton Obote.

His nine-year reign of terror belongs to the annals of historical infamy, often mentioned in the same breath as Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot.

Yet there was a section of Ugandans who found themselves the object of his extravagant generosity and keen patronage not because they were his political supporters – they almost always are apolitical – but because of simply who they were; the best young men and women Uganda could offer.

Partly because he identified with them as kindred spirits, partly because he had the absolute power to do it and partly because he was cunning enough to recognize their political value, he rewarded their exploits handsomely, sometimes even outrageously, and made sure the rest of the country saw it.

These were the sportsmen. And Abbey Nasur Odero was one of them.

Nasur was the inspirational Maragoli (later Imara) and Gor Mahia striker of the early 1980s. He had also been the Uganda Cranes right winger from 1972 to 1979 and was a member of the legendary team that narrowly lost the Africa Nations Cup final to Ghana in Accra in 1978.

Born of a Kenyan mother and a Ugandan father in Kampala in 1952, Nasur is equally at home in Kibera, Nairobi and Naguru, Kampala. His Kenyan and Ugandan football career, his accent-free Luganda and Kiswahili and his family - born, raised and working in both countries - are a fine study in the dual heritage of a man in the afternoon of his life who is still trying to figure out what it all means.

In 1976 Cranes team

In 1976, Nasur was in the Cranes team that won the Cecafa senior Challenge in Zanzibar, a tournament that Amin was following with keen interest.

“In the evening,” Nasur remembers, “word came through that Amin was sending us a plane to take us home. When we boarded, we discovered that it was packed with all manner of exotic food and drinks. Amin’s instructions to the pilot were that he should not fly directly to Entebbe from Zanzibar, a journey of a mere one hour or so; instead he said we should fly all over the skies, so that we can enjoy a big party up there. He said he himself would give the signal to land.”

Amin’s wishes being law, that is actually what happened. On arrival in Entebbe and after a day to recover from the party, it was announced on Radio Uganda that the President would be hosting the Cranes for lunch at Cape Town, an exotic island in Lake Victoria.

(During the 1975 Organization of African Unity Summit which crowned him chairman, Amin took a new bride in a surprise ceremony after which he took awed guests on a tour of the island and had his Mig 21 jets stage bomb runs in the lake to demonstrate how Uganda was ready to tackle apartheid South Africa. But that’s a story for another day)

The exuberant Cranes (with many players hungover) met the President for lunch, accompanied by one of his wives. Amin asked the players what they wanted.

Nasur continued: “I remember it was David Otti who spoke up first. He was a member of the technical staff. Otti told the President that the players wanted to do some shopping. They couldn’t do that in Zanzibar because ‘there was nothing there.’ At that point Amin asked us where in the world we wanted to go shopping. He said he was going to facilitate that at once.”

“A brief exchange took place. Somebody said we go to Europe but another, I think it was Otti still, who pointed out that Europe was too cold then. It was November and it was winter. It was then that somebody made the inspired suggestion of Libya.

“Amin became very excited and told us that Muammar Gaddafi, the late Libyan leader, was his great friend. There and then it was agreed that Libya was the place to go. Amin announced that he would call his friend Gaddafi at once to host us.”

There were no direct flights between Uganda and Libya but that was no problem. There was a weekly cargo flight that freighted cotton to Europe. It was operated by a Boeing 747.

Amin decided that a portion of that plane would be configured into passenger roll to accommodate the Cranes.

The plane would then make a stop-over in Tripoli on its way to Europe and drop off its VIP passengers. It would do the same a week later to collect them with their shopping. And that is what happened.

“Each one of us was given Sh415,000 (USD5000) as an allowance,” says Nasur. “In Tripoli, all we did was wake up in the morning, eat a massive breakfast, shop all day and retreat to our hotel for dinner. We did this daily for one week. And mark you, Tripoli is a modern city; it was just as if we were shopping in Europe.” Some people, mainly women, might describe this as shop until you drop.

Today, if the Sh415,000 us properly utilised, it is more than enough to give its investor financial freedom. It is almost unimaginable what it could do in 1976.

One of the most compelling, if least studied, narratives of an African tragedy over the last 50 years is how generations of high achieving young men and women blew their hard-earned fortunes as their financially-illiterate parents and cavalier governments watched. And even today, it goes on. But that’s a story for another day.

“When we returned home,” Nasur remembers, “it was VIP treatment all the way. Amin decreed that we be not subjected to any customs formalities; we just went past open gates. Life was heavenly.”

Players motivated

Amin’s lavish generosity worked wonders in motivating players. They scaled heights never before reached in their history and which now, more than three decades later, seem only but a mirage. After the extraordinary Libyan adventure, the Cranes set their sights on the Africa Nations Cup.

With some of the most talented players ever to play football in East Africa – Jimmy Kirunda, Moses Nsereko, Edward Ssemwanga, Tom Lwanga, Philip Omondi, Ashe Mukasa all come to mind – the Cranes easily qualified for the final stages of the tournament. Then came the finals.

Based in Kumasi, the Cranes opened their campaign with a 3-1 thumping of Congo Brazzaville. They lost 3-1 against Tunisia before recovering to crush defending champions Morocco 3-0. In the semi-finals, they defeated Nigeria 2-1, with Nasur on the scoresheet to reach the final in Accra against the hosts.

“I remember several Nigerian players coming and saying to us: ‘You will win the final.’ But we lost 2-0. However, consider this: the Ghanaians put us on a long bus trip from Kumasi to Accra through a very rough road. We arrived completely exhausted.

“Then, in the hot and humid climate of the coastal city, air conditioning in our hotel ‘mysteriously’ failed to work. Our rooms, which didn’t have nets, hosted swarms of mosquitoes; in the morning, some players reported they hadn’t slept a wink. I don’t know how all this was accidental. But we took to the field weakened.”

Still, Amin was very pleased and offered job promotions to the players, with all their attendant perks and privileges.

Like in Kenya, the majority of the elite sportsmen were in the uniformed services – the army, the police and the prisons. Nasur was an Assistant Superintendent of Prisons, Denis Obua, the great left winger, was an Assistant Superintendent of Police. Many others, like the legendary John Akii-Bua, Olympic gold medalist in 1972, also occupied high positions.

Waning influence

But Amin, who had sent hundreds of thousands of innocent people to their deaths and who had destroyed the Ugandan economy was sooner or later going to have a rendezvous with the kind of fate reserved for people who do such things. In 1978, his support base had greatly shrunk and his army was riddled with dissentions, assassinations and desertions.

It was the kind of extremely stressful environment that drives a desperate man to make a catastrophic error. This is what Amin did in November when he invaded Tanzania and formally annexed the Kagera region.

At that time, African strongmen pursued a mutually beneficial foreign policy of molly-coddling one another in observance of a supposedly sacrosanct OAU principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of member states. It translated to a licence to do whatever one pleased with his restive people. The exception was Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere.

The invasion of Tanzania was the impetus that he needed to decide that it was time for Amin to go, whatever the OAU thought. Not only did he push back Amin’s demoralised and undisciplined forces back to the Ugandan border, but he pursued them all the way to Kampala and beyond to effect a regime change. Amin fled to Libya, where his friend Gaddafi welcomed him with open arms.

‘Wanted men’

As for Abbey Nasur and all the many sportsmen who had served in the uniformed services, it was time to earn a new status. They became pariahs and outright wanted people. Worse if they shared tribe with Amin, or even if they just came from the North.

“If you had been a policeman, soldier or prisons officer,” says Nasur, “you became marked as Amin’s askari. I had never contemplated leaving but my wife frantically said to me: ‘We are not safe. The children are not safe. We must flee.’ She became very insistent and I decided to take heed.”

He put his family of five in his car and drove all the way to Kibera, to his mother’s house. At the border, he was waved off by friendly officers, who recognised him.

But Kenya was awash with Ugandans and the Kenya government mounted a massive operation to round them up and ship them back home.

Nasur’s Uganda-registered vehicle was a dead give-away. He was arrested and carted off to Kakamega show ground, the holding ground for people about to be sent back home to face their fate.

But after a week of his stay at the showground and certain that he would be repatriated, he heard that there was a man frantically looking for him. The man was going among the hundreds of timid souls asking for Nasur. He carried with him a letter, which he said was from the PC.

Kadenge to the rescue

Nasur was at first scared of stepping forward, unsure who this man was. But he took his chances - and the man turned out to be Joe Kadenge, the famous Kenya football legend. He didn’t know Kadenge. But he guessed the many Ugandans informed him of the presence of the great footballer.

Kadenge was then the team manager of Imara FC, formerly Maragoli. He talked the provincial administration into releasing Nasur, rented a house for him in Kibera and gave him a place in Imara. And he made sure that Nasur and his family never ran out of food.

“I will never be able to thank Joe Kadenge enough for as long as I live. To this day, I am overwhelmed with gratitude each time I remember what he did for me. I played for Imara for two seasons and I helped nature players like Wilberforce Mulamba and Francis Kadenge, Joe’s son. But I don’t know what I will ever do for Joe. He treated me with a kindness more than the most loving father could.”

Roy Gachuhi, a former Nation Media Group reporter, is a writer with The Content House.