Nimecopy na Kupesti hii..
By Erick Kabendera
At Butimba Maximum Security Prison, inmate
Eugene Maganga?s routine for the two years he
had been to wake up late on weekends. For
some reason however, on that Saturday
morning October 22, 1995, he had woken up
early and when he switched on his small radio
he was just in time to catch a brief news item
saying that President Ali Hassan Mwinyi had
granted him and several others clemency for
their crime.
This is a moment that the group of eight had
been waiting for, for the ten years that they been
behind bars serving a life sentence for treason.
They had never lost hope. ?Prisoners in different
cells who also heard the news started cheering,?
narrates Maganga, 50. ?Surprisingly I did not
cheer because I had waited for a long time for
this day to come. It was always terrifying to
imagine I could spend my entire life in prison.?
Maganga and the other seven ? Suleiman
Kamando, Zakaria Aspopo, Vitalis Mapunda,
Mbogolo, Kajaji Badru, Hatty MacGhee and
Christopher Kadego ? were convicted in 1985 for
a botched plan two years earlier to overthrow
the government of the country?s first President,
Julius Nyerere. The ninth person, Mohamed
Tamimu had been killed in an exchange with the
police at the time of their arrest.
On Monday October 24, 1995, two days after the
news had come on radio, Maganga was declared
a free man. He clearly remembers that day
when he crossed the prison gates to freedom.
The time was one p.m.?My joyous relatives and
those of my fellow prisoner Hatty MacGhee
welcomed us outside the prison. Emotions ran
high and the feeling then is very hard to explain
even now,? says Maganga.
Six of the other treason convicts were released
two days later from Ukonga Prison in Dar es
Salaam. By the time of their release, Maganga
had been shuffled through several prisons
including Ukonga in Dar es Salaam and his last
post at Butimba in Mwanza. Despite the
hardships they endured in prison, Maganga says
none of them has ever regretted for attempting
to overthrow the government. ?We only regret
failing the coup mission but we don?t regret
planning the coup.?
Before they came up with the idea of
overthrowing the government, Maganga and
Kadego worked in the army with the Tank
Battalion. Maganga was a Lieutenant while
Kadego was a captain. Maganga was 26 years
old and had just returned from London where he
spent four months brushing up his military skills
before he was summoned to go and fight in the
war with Uganda in 1978.
As one of the soldiers on the frontline, Maganga
believes Tanzania won the war because Uganda
had a weak army. But he is unforgiving of the
general premise on which the war was built.
?President Nyerere misused the country?s
resources to fight for the interests of his closest
friend Milton Obote so he could return him to
power.?
If the misunderstandings that led to the war
were genuine, Maganga says diplomacy would
have helped solve the problem amicably.
Instead they had favoured a military campaign.
Soon after this war, in May 1980, Maganga
joined the University of Dar es Salaam to study
International Relations and Public
Administration. He was never happy with the
kind of life that Tanzanians were living ? he says
they were poor and were being forced into
Ujamaa villages.
The group contended that the war between the
two countries was unnecessary and had only
resulted in the misuse of public funds. ?The war
wasn?t between the two countries rather it was
between Nyerere and Idi Amin.? Maganga
further says they also took issue with the
conditions in the army which had particularly
deteriorated after Major General Mrisho
Sarakikya, the first Chief of Defence Forces
(1964-1974) and his team had stepped down.
The coup plotters also felt that the president
lacked trust in the people from the north
because they been educated outside the country
and he feared that they would attempt to
overthrow him. ?People who were less educated
took over the positions and that is where things
went wrong,? says Maganga. Soldiers were not
commissioned on merit as the president was
keener on creating an army consisting of men
who couldn?t pose any challenge against him.
He says some officers were promoted twice in a
single week. ?We wanted to bring changes but
the type of people we wanted to work with were
not ready to sacrifice. Nevertheless, we didn?t
give up on our intention to bring about change.?
As Maganga and his colleagues were still
discussing the ways to go about their plans, they
met with the late Pius Rugangira (Uncle Tom)
who was an established Tanzanian businessman
in Kenya.
Rugangira?s father was not on good terms with
President Nyerere, according to Maganga, and
he had gone to live and work in Uganda. And
because of having his father in Uganda,
Rugangira was accused of being a Ugandan spy
? accusations that led to his fallout with the
government. Generally, he too felt that
Tanzanians were unnecessarily paying the price
of an ill-conceived war and that is why he gave
audience to the coup plotters.
With Rugangira volunteering to finance their
mission, Maganga and other army officers who
had already agreed to work together were now
optimistic. ?We were all young and we did not
trust any high ranking officer in the army
because they were satisfied with the way things
were.? Though quite forthcoming with just about
everything on their coup plans, Maganga is
hesitant to reveal exactly how they had had
planned to carry it out. He will only say it is still
their ?top secret? though they expected to exploit
the general negligence in the army to achieve
their goals.
Another plotter who was in Maganga?s company
at the time of the interview but preferred not to
be named, says most people believe the group
was given a lot of money to carry out the coup
but in fact the little money that they received
from Rugangira was only meant to take care of
small emergencies. He insists it was not
compensation for carrying out the coup. ?If we
were paid money, none of us would have been
poor today,? he says.
The former soldier adds that they wanted to
build a multiparty democracy in which people
could freely express their opinions and choose
their own president. ?We had proposed that
Rugangira would become the Prime Minister but
on condition that he would not contest as a
presidential candidate in the election that would
be held five years later.?
Three days before the planned coup was to take
place, Rugangira reportedly asked them the
positions they wanted to be given in the new
government but they had replied they wanted
nothing. When all arrangements were in place,
they waited for the president who was on a state
visit abroad to return. According to Maganga,
the president came back in January 1982 after
spending two months away and went to his
home village in Butiama.
?The reason we wanted to overthrow the
government while he was in the country is that
we intended to assassinate him,? Maganga says.
It was Rugangira who opposed the assassination
plan in favour of arresting the president.
Nyerere unexpectedly spent more time in
Butiama and had still not returned to Dar es
Salaam two days before the day when the coup
was to take place on Monday January 9, 1982.
The Friday before that ? on January 6 ? they had
planned to meet for the last time before the
coup was carried out but some of their
colleagues did not turn up for the meeting.
Mohamed Tamimu was among those who didn?t
come. ?We were worried and we decided to send
one of us to Kinondoni Mkwajuni to enquire but
we were shocked to find that the police had
raided his house and killed him,? says Maganga.
At that point, they all knew their identities and
plans were secret no more. Tamimu, according
to his colleagues, had a culture of keeping
records of the meetings and the names of
collaborators. It was only a matter of time
before they were arrested. They had guessed
right.
The police were all over looking for the group.
Kadego and Maganga decided to escape through
Tanga and Mombasa to Nairobi where they
stayed for ten months as political refugees. ?We
don?t know what happened to the others whom
we left in Dar es Salaam but we had not given up
when we arrived in Nairobi. We wanted to re-
organise ourselves and come back to overthrow
the government,? says Maganga.
They never blamed each other for failing to carry
out the coup successfully though Maganga
believes their luck ran out because MacGhee
was a civilian and didn?t know how to keep
secrets. He suspects MacGhee had leaked the
information to almost all of the people he knew
before even the mission was a halfway.
Maganga also suspects that Tamimu knew that
MacGhee was not a former American soldier as
he had claimed but did not tell them. ?We
realised later that his real name was Hatibu
Hassan Gandhi and he was a Tanzanian pilot. ?
In Nairobi, they had no jobs and they were
surviving under the support of United Nations
Commission for Refugees. Maganga says they
had some contacts with the America embassy in
Nairobi whom they requested for sponsorship to
start a base in Nairobi from where they would
reorganise and plan for another coup. ?They said
they had so many similar activities to support
and could not afford sponsoring ours,? he says.
A few days later as Maganga and Kadego
loitered in the streets of Nairobi, they suddenly
ran into their co-plotters Uncle Tom and
MacGhee whom they had left in Dar es Salaam.
The two had escaped from Keko Prison in Dar es
Salaam where they had been taken upon their
arrest.Though they were comfortable with their
life in Nairobi Rugangira decided to travel to
London to look at ways to move them to Malawi.
He was worried that the government in Nairobi
would conspire with Dar es Salaam and arrest
them. All eight of them had somehow managed
to escape to Nairobi.
Indeed, before Rugangira returned from
London, the group was arrested by the
authorities in Nairobi and exchanged with Senior
Lance Corporal Ochuka and Sergeant Pancras
Oteyo who had also made attempts to
overthrow the government of then President
Daniel arap Moi in 1982 and fled to Tanzania.
?We were heavily handcuffed and blindfolded
and taken to Isaka Maximum Security Prison in
Dodoma where we stayed from November 1983
to October 1984,? says Maganga.
On arrival there, they found the walls of the
prison cells they were assigned were smeared
with faeces. They were chained to the ground,
and spent three days without taking a shower.
The head of the prison had directed the prison
warders not to talk to the captives or even get
near them fearing that the captives would try to
influence the law enforcers to join hands with
them.
Maganga says however that the people who
were guarding them were not all that bad and at
one time they helped the prisoners smuggle a
letter out to the American Embassy. They had
wanted the world to know that they were in jail
because nobody was aware of this at the time.
The letter they had written, Maganga says,
prompted a UN Commissioner for Refugees to
visit Tanzania and pressured government to
forward the case to court. The trial started in
January 1985 and in December of that year they
were sentenced to life imprisonment.
They insist that in principle they have no regrets
about plotting the coup, but Maganga says his
only disappointments are in the way their lives
turned out. After being set free, they found that
some friends and relatives had turned hostile
towards them and did not want to be seen near
or with them. Both Kadego and Maganga have
never married and Maganga says the hardest
part was probably not the ten years they spent
in jail but starting all over again when they
owned nothing. ?The government made sure
that we don?t get employed anywhere and some
of us have remained unemployed to this day,? he
says.
Some of them whose families were better off
managed to make a breakthrough in businesses.
?Kadego and I live hand to mouth. In fact Kadego
is a machinga,? Maganga says. MacGhee died a
week after their release while a couple of them
tried to join the opposition parties but decided to
quit. They felt the parties were disorganised and
the people who led them seemed self-seeking.
?In the last year?s elections, I contested for a
parliamentary seat in Tabora constituency but I
lost. I don?t want to involve myself in politics
again,? Maganga says.
Maganga has two children from different
mothers and he says nobody bothered to send
them to good schools while he was in jail. He
still hopes to provide them with a good
education but with no income, his plans are
beginning to seem like wishful thinking. He had
himself enrolled at the Open University of
Tanzania to study Law in 1999 but dropped out
in his second year due to lack of fees. ?Not all
my friends care about my problems. Some try to
reach me when they have something to give
me,? he says.
With the way things are going for him right now,
he is just about ready to do any job that is
offered to him. Still, his personal life doesn?t
bother him quite as much as what he calls ?the
mindset of Tanzanians?. ?They complain of
almost everything but none of them has ever
taken any action. They blame us for trying to
overthrow the government while most of them
would not even dare,? he says. He told me he
was going to bed that night without any food but
that didn?t bother him; it would not be the first
time. It is when he says, ?This country? Nyerere
corrupted the mindset of the people. Very few
people can think and take action,? that he wears
the mask of disappointment.
A dog?s life
The time in prison had been very harrowing
even for political prisoners like themselves. They
were not allowed some of the privileges they
were entitled to, and they got to witness several
vices that thrived under the very noses of prison
authorities. Maganga recalls witnessing juvenile
prisoners being sodomised. There were same
sex couples, drug peddlers and some notorious
inmates even organised ?beauty pageants? where
men strutted their stuff.
?Prisoners who supervised others slept with
those who won the beauty contests and gave
them little favours in return, for instance,
excusing them from hard work and allowing
them the luxury of bathing with soap. It was a
nasty and disgusting experience that still lingers
in my mind,? says Maganga. Before he was sent
into prison, Maganga says he thought that
jailhouses were managed by welfare officers but
to his surprise there weren?t any in the prisons in
which he served his sentence.
Moreover, prisons officers facilitated drug
trafficking in jails and even participated in selling
juvenile prisoners to other prisoners. These
wardens also looked on as weaker prisoners
were raped without trying to intervene in any
way. Maganga is however happy for the small
changes him and his colleagues were able to
bring in all the prisons they served in. With
James Christopher Kadego his closest ally, they
had been instrumental in strengthening sporting
activities and defending the rights of other
prisoners in Ukonga. ?We never tolerated
anyone who tried to violate the rights of others.?
Because of their efforts to defend them, some of
their fellow prisoners did not celebrate their
release, for they would now be left to fend for
themselves.