Milton Obote: Milton Obote, who has died aged 80, had that rarest of opportunities among deposed African leaders - a second chance - and he blew it.
One of the architects of Ugandan independence in 1962, he served as prime minister and then president, before being ousted in a military coup by his military commander, Idi Amin. Seeking exile in Tanzania, he was helped back to power by president Julius Nyerere, whose forces invaded Uganda in 1979. Controversially elected president a second time in 1980, he was overthrown by the army yet again five years later, and his exile became permanent.
The horrors of Idi Amin's reign of terror did much in the early days of Obote's "second coming" to cover the excesses of his government, but it is estimated that more than 100,000 people died fighting in the guerrilla war waged by the ultimately victorious Yoweri Museveni, the country's current president. Museveni's government estimates that more than 500,000 people died during Obote's second presidency as a result of him trying to make people move from rural areas into cities.
Milton Apollo Obote was born in the village of Akokoro in the Apac district of northern Uganda, the third of nine children of Stanley Opeto, a farmer and minor chieftain of the Lango tribe. "I was born of a ruling family," Obote was fond of saying, which in time became a conviction that he was a man of destiny. Educated at a Protestant missionary school in Lira, he entered Makerere University College in Kampala in 1948, but dropped out after two years, completing his formal education with a number of correspondence courses.
After working in Buganda in the south as a labourer, clerk and salesman, he served his political apprenticeship in neighbouring Kenya, where he worked for an engineering firm. He became a member of Jomo Kenyatta's Kenya National Union during the troubled period of the Mau-Mau emergency.
When he decided to return home, he founded the Uganda National Congress (UNC) in 1955, and three years later joined the pre-independence Uganda legislative council, as a full-time politician.
In addition to gaining a reputation for outspokenness with the colonial authorities, he soon became a canny political operator. He thus concluded an electoral alliance with the newly established Kabaka Yekka, or King Only Party, so that his own Uganda People's Congress (UPC, following the splitting of the UNC) had a comfortable majority in coalition, with Obote as prime minister, at independence in 1962.
Four years later, in the wake of allegations of corruption - he and Amin were accused of involvement in gold smuggling - he suspended the constitution and had himself installed as executive president. Sir Edward Mutesa II, the kabaka, or king, of Buganda, called the government's action illegal. Troops surrounded the kabaka's palace and many of the powerful Baganda never forgave Obote for ending the centuries-old kingdom and driving King "Freddy" into exile; he died in London in 1969.
Under Obote's virtual one-man rule, Uganda, for a time, experienced relative political stability and economic prosperity. He launched a "move to the left" in 1969, introducing a common man's charter to create "a new political culture and way of life with the means of production in hands of the people as whole". Ruthlessly driven, he soon became the whipping boy of the Western press, a kind of socialist ogre of the emergent independent Africa.
In fact, Obote's policies did not involve large-scale nationalisation, as was alleged. He sought a substantial, but not majority, shareholding in foreign-owned businesses, as was happening in other African countries at that time. It was a diluted form of socialism that he proposed to put before the electorate, but he was frustrated by Amin's coup in January 1971, carried out while Obote was attending the Commonwealth prime ministers' conference in Singapore.
At first the overthrow was welcomed by many Ugandans. Before long, however, Amin launched an eight-year reign of terror; while the number of dead will never be known, exile organisations put it at 500,000.
From his exile in Tanzania, Obote issued regular denunciations of the "fascist dictator Amin who had transformed Uganda into a human slaughterhouse". But it was not until 1980 that he had an opportunity to regain power following the overthrow of Amin by invading Tanzanian troops.
In elections marred by widespread and blatant irregularities - to their lasting discredit pronounced fair by a team of Commonwealth observers - Obote's UPC won.
Although power was again his, he had sown the seeds of dissatisfaction that in time were to flower into full-blown revolt and victory for the guerrilla leader Museveni. Those fraudulent elections, plus his miscalculated exploitation of tribal politics, proved to be his downfall. His Langi-dominated army took terrible retribution on civilians living in the Luwero triangle, just north of Kampala, where Museveni's National Resistance Army guerrillas were operating, giving Uganda one of the worst human rights records in the world at that time.
However, internal divisions arose within the army and by July 1985, Obote was once again on the ignominious road to exile, first to Kenya, and then to Zambia, where fellow independence leader Kenneth Kaunda allowed him to stay.
Milton Apollo Obote was once quoted as saying: "I'd rather have Milton's brains than Apollo's good looks." In the event, it was brawn that kept him in power and muscle that eased him out.
He had four children by his marriage.
Milton Apollo Obote, born December 28th, 1924; died October 10th, 2005