Following Des Peelo's fulsome reminiscences about the generosity, wisdom, honesty and insight of Charles Haughey on the latter's 80th birthday, I feel moved to reveal my own recollections of President-for-Life Field Marshall Idi Amin VC, Congressional Medal of Honor, Croix de Guerre and Hero of the Soviet Union.
He too would have been 80 this year if heaven had not grown impatient for his company. For several unsung years I was his personal counsellor and Minister for Finance (and mastermind of the financial coup in which, had it been successful, the Ugandan shilling would have replaced the dollar as the world's trading currency).
The Master, as he playfully liked to be known, had an enormous sense of humour. Even when gnawing on the femur of his nearest and dearest - which can be a melancholy business if one is as attached to one's family as he was - he was an entertaining companion. While he was tucking into the knee of his second cousin Agatha - she was suspected of giving away secrets of the Ugandan Space Programme to our deadly rivals in Chad - he regaled me with tales about their happy childhood together, and how once, when she wouldn't play with him, he had broken her arm. The little rascal. My, how we laughed.
His hospitality was as lavish as it was varied. Dinner might consist of the tongues of a thousand humming-birds, or he might just turn to a fellow guest and congratulate him on his elevation to the status of entrée: had he any preference as to how he was cooked? It was always enchanting to observe the great humour and kindness with which The Master broke the good news to a diner that he was about to be the dinner. As the Master himself often chuckled: what a difference an "n" makes, ho ho ho.
If The Master had a fault, it was in his kindness to strangers. During the Second Great Patriotic War with Mexico, he was asked by a journalist where the mighty Ugandan naval armada was going to strike first. Now this was a military secret, which we - The Master's military advisers - had spent long hours brooding over. We favoured amphibious landings on the coastline at Mexico City itself. But instead of staying silent, or even beheading the impudent reporter, The Master informed him that the intervention by his close friend the Pope might render such an operation unnecessary.
This was an enormous scoop, and it came as a major revelation to the people of Mexico that they might now sleep safely in their beds. Moreover, it transformed the career of the journalist, and he went on to become agricultural correspondent for the Kampala Argus free-sheet, distributed annually at the Ugandan International Air Show, before he ended his days being served with cinnamon on toast to the US ambassador.
The Master's preference for visual understatement was evident in his half-dozen palaces, in not one of which did he permit more than a ton of gold to be employed in the interior décor. This did not mean he lacked taste; the reverse was true, and he imported several thousand Indian craftsmen to create a facsimile of the Taj Mahal, personally strangling them all when they had finished. Those little touches, that attention to detail, were typical of The Master.
Of course, The Master is today legendary for his vision. Where pygmies saw the soil, he saw the stars. It was his misfortune that the Ugandan Space Station, one of his many great projects, wasn't completed before his involuntary and premature retirement as President-for-Life. Nor indeed was the nuclear carrier programme which would have changed the balance of world power. The same can be said of his project to reverse the flow of the Victoria Falls. It was surely one of the tragedies of his reign that his enormous vision was not rewarded as it should have been.
The Master surrounded himself with associates of dignity, probity and transparency: M'burka, and M'traynor and M'lalor, and of course, the greatest of them all, M'gubu. The Master himself was a man of almost Franciscan modesty, as his personal Boeing 747 testified: it contained but one jacuzzi and its swimming pool, with its frolicking retinue of naked Nubian virgins, fell far short of Olympic standards.
Frugal in personal style, The Master's regime put one more in mind of a Florentine court than a modern African state. He set the tone for modern Uganda. When the World Bank pointed out the country's colossal debts, The Master hit on the brilliant fiscal expedient of borrowing money to pay off those debts. This dazzling coup silenced most of his critics, and that handful of traitors who expressed reservations soon found themselves sharing a pool with The Master's pet crocodiles. Again, proof of The Master's boundless and kindly imagination, because on the one hand he was maintaining party discipline, and on the other, he was ensuring the crocs were fed at no cost to the exchequer. Just as important, his critics' families were not burdened with the cost of their funerals. A Ugandan solution to a Ugandan problem.
And that was typical of The Master: thoughtful in so many little ways. So it is sad - sad, do you hear? - to hear his good name being traduced by those who, if they were ever privileged enough to be at The Master's table, might just pass muster on the menu, but were not fit to pass the mustard to The Master.