Ex-president falls in love online

Former Ugandan president Godfrey Binaisa (84) has fallen in love and married — in a mass wedding — Japanese woman Tomoko Yamamoto, whom he had only met through the internet.

Binaisa said he was introduced to Yamamoto last month during a ceremony that was part of an international mass wedding of Korean billionaire Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church in the South Korean capital, Seoul.

“I decided to get married to Yamamoto on July 26, while I was in Seoul, when I was introduced to her through a satellite link,” Binaisa, who was president for between June 1979 and May 1980, said in an interview in Kampala.

Binaisa said he was to travel to Columbus, Ohio, in the United States, where the 58-year-old pharmacist Yamamoto lives, in order to meet her and her family.

“I am preparing to travel to the US to meet her and her family and to bring her back to Uganda in style and arrange a Uganda-style grand wedding ceremony,” he said.

Binaisa’s first wife Irene died 19 months ago from a stroke and he has since been living with family members, including his daughter, all of whom, he said, are willing to receive Yamamoto into the family.

“I hope she is going to be a useful addition to our community,” he said, pointing out that at 84, he still felt strong to marry.

Binaisa’s father, a former Anglican Church minister, remarried a 56-year-old woman at the age of 98, but he died a few years later.

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