A short story about the NRA and the smell of coffee

My cousin Hamza Abbas was a suspect in a murder case. He is alleged to have killed a UNLA (so-called Obote army) soldier.

In a typical situation of the time, the UNLA soldier had forcibly grabbed Hamzas housemate in a night club in Muhokya (this is my childhood hometown). But this alone did not give the soldier enough satisfaction: he also wanted to humiliate Hamza with a beating. Hamza (mother Munyarwanda and father Nyamwezi) was not the kind of man to take such things lightly.

In an instant, he disarmed and severely beat the soldier (who is said to have died three days later). With murder hanging over his head, Hamza sought refuge at our orphan home. As a DP activist during the 1980 general elections (the old man was sub-county DP vice president), Dad ran across the border into DR Congo for fear of his life. Hamza had had some military training (use of weapons) when he worked as an army driver with the Wakombozi (Tanzanian occupation army). He had also been trained in martial arts by a rogue Italian engineer working with Stirling Astalidi, the company that built the Nakasongola Air Base in the 1970s.

At Muhokya, he was known as “the commando”. With a Tanzanian father and a Munyarwanda mother, Hamza posed as a Tanzanian; and nobody challenged him on that because his father Abbas Juma was a Tanzanian.

Needless to say, the Wakoombos felt comfortable working with him (using Stirling Astalidi dump trucks) poaching animals in Queen Elizabeth National Park. When Kasese fell to the NRA rebels, Hamza disappeared from our home only to emerge a month later ragged and sick. proper battle fatigues. Now he was a rebel soldier of the NRA. He was just passing by the house on his way to appropriate (steal?) a truck belonging to Mutanywana Secondary School. I joined him.

So my main contribution to the Luweero thing is that I participated in the theft of a school truck. With this truck, Hamza returned to his previous job as an army driver (and yours truly was his unofficial conductor or turn-boy). As a boy, my first task was to steal the coffee stocks of Nyakatonzi Co-operative Union in Kasese. Yes, the NRA had a thing for the smell of coffee. I heard this was common in many other places.************

In 1994, I was in Kigali (Rwanda) minding my own business. Kagame and his Inkotanyi boys also minded their own business, stopping the genocide. And then some NRA people also minded their own business in Kigali. With the NRA in Kigali, I had the opportunity to witness another incident where the NRA smelled some coffee.

The story is that there was coffee ready for export in Rwandex in Gikondo (Kigali Industrial Area). As stated earlier, NRA personnel were in Kigali minding their own business. The problem, however, is that the NRA allegedly also took care of coffee ready for export from Rwandex. Then the Rwandex coffee stocks disappeared. A certain Paul was an NRA information officer in Kasese when the Nyakatonzi Co-operative Union coffee stock disappeared.

Paul, who was familiar with the smell of NRA coffee, immediately suspected that the NRA people were responsible for the disappearance of Rwandex coffee. So when I heard that certain Ugandans associated or connected with the NRA were involved in planning the disappearance of coffee from Uganda. The Development Authority, I smiled knowingly, a sense of déjà vu. My 10 Congolese francs of advice is: The Ministry of Agriculture should do agronomy and leave agribusiness to the private sector. And UCDA should retain its status as a regulatory agency.