30th
Jubilee Editions President
Museveni More to
come |
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Profile of
President Museveni Yoweri Kaguta
Museveni became President of the Republic of Uganda
on January 29, 1986 after leading a successful
five-year liberation struggle. He went to the bush
with 26 other young men and organized the National
Resistance Movement and National Resistance Army
(NRM/NRA) to oppose the tyranny that previous
regimes had unleashed upon the population. After
victory, he formed a broad-based government that
helped to unite the country's political groups.
Previous to the struggle of 1981-1986, Museveni had
been one of the leaders in the anti-Amin resistance
of 1971-1979 that had led to the fall of that
monstrous regime Museveni, who
has been politically active since his student days
at Ntare School, Mbarara, in south west Uganda,
studied political science at the University of Dar
es Salaam, graduating in 1970 with a Bachelor of
Arts degree in Economics and Political
Science. After
Idi Amin's coup in 1971, Museveni was instrumental
in forming Fronasa (the Front for National
Salvation). Fronasa made up the core of one of the
Ugandan fighting groups which, together with the
Tanzanian People's Defence Forces, ousted Amin's
regime in April 1979. The NRA was
unique in Africa The NRA (now
renamed the Uganda People's Defence Forces) is
unique in Africa for being the only guerrilla force
to take over power without much external support
and without having a rear base in a neighboring
country. Its main camps were based only 20 miles
from the capital, Kampala. This demonstrated how
the NRA leadership was, in extremely difficult
circumstances, capable of achieving sophisticated
levels of organizational discipline and techniques
for managing both soldiers and
civilians. Early political
awareness Owing to his
background and his early determination to fight
against political and social injustices, Museveni
decided in 1966 to lead a campaign mobilizing the
peasants in northern Ankole to fence their land and
refuse to vacate it. The campaign was largely
successful and his political awareness and activity
became more focused during the three years (1967 to
1970) he spent at the University of Dar es Salaam.
His wide reading covered Fanon, Lenin, Marx,
Rodney, Mao, as well as liberal Western thinkers
like Galbraith. These writers shaped his
intellectual and political outlook. Compared to
other universities in the region, Dar es Salaam had
a very good, progressive atmosphere which gave the
students a chance to become familiar with
pan-Africanist and anti-colonialist ideas. This was
due to the Pan-Africanist views and policies of
Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, the President of Tanzania.
Nevertheless, many professors and lecturers were
right wing in their views and this often brought
them into conflict with the radical
students. The
dissatisfaction with the stance of the lecturers in
1967 led Museveni, Eriya Kategaya, James
Wapakhabulo, Joseph Mulwanyamuli Ssemwogerere, John
Kawanga, all from Uganda, Charles Kileo and Salim
Msoma from Tanzania, Kapote Mwakasungura from
Malawi, Adam Marwa and Patrick Quoro also from
Tanzania, John Garang from Sudan, Andrew Shija from
Tanzania, and many students from other African
countries, to form a self-help ideological study
and activist group known as the University Students
African Revolutionary Front (USARF). Every Sunday
they would hold a class, invite speakers of their
choice, enrich their ideas about the evolution of
society, and discuss topics dealing with the
production and distribution of
wealth. USARF was
composed of students from Kenya, Zambia, Malawi,
Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda and
Museveni was elected its chairman for the whole
time he was at the university. USARF identified
closely with African liberation movements,
especially Frelimo in Mozambique, which the Front
supported, for instance, by producing pamphlets for
their publicity work. Other members of USARF were
to become politically active and influential both
in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa. Pragmatic,
nationalist politician He accepts this
heterogeneity as a matter of course because it
mirrors the social spectrum of Ugandan society. He
formed a broad-based government and demonstrated to
Ugandans that although they had different
political, social and religious backgrounds, they
had a lot in common and a common destiny, contrary
to the divide-and-rule tactics previous politicians
had used to fragment Ugandan
society. He took pains to
explain that the typical Third World problems of
poverty, illiteracy, disease and general
backwardness had nothing to do with one's religion
or ethnic origin. The NRM's guiding Ten-Point
Program, which was debated and agreed upon under
his chairmanship in 1984 during the bush war,
basically set out to redress the political and
social wrongs that were inflicted on the Ugandan
people for two-and-a-half decades. He says: "The
National Resistance Movement has an unwavering
commitment to the respect of human rights and the
sanctity of life. We waged a protracted war against
tyranny on a platform of restoring personal
freedoms and the amelioration of the socioeconomic
conditions of our people &endash; that is the
cornerstone of our program."
He has typically
taken a very independent political stand and says:
"We take from every system what is best for us and
we reject what is bad for us. We do not judge the
economic programs of other nations because we
believe that each nation knows best how to address
the needs of its people. The NRM is neither
pro-West nor pro-East &endash; it is
pro-Uganda". In July 1990,
President Museveni was elected the Chairman of the
Organization of African Unity for the year 1990/91.
As he said in his acceptance speech, this was a
vote of confidence in the efforts of the National
Resistance Movement to build a just society with a
democratic and economically viable future for the
nation. The general consensus both at home and
abroad, however, was that his election was a vote
of confidence in the man himself. It showed that
after only four-and-a-half years in office, he was
already an international statesman of considerable
standing. A new
constitution for Uganda When the
Constituent Assembly was opened on May 18, 1994,
President Museveni challenged the delegates: "We
must ensure that our political institutions spring
from our social structure. If we are to develop, we
must evolve institutional models which will
liberate us from our backwardness. We must
modernize our societies and lay the foundation for
industrialization. We cannot modernize,
industrialize or develop without creating an
appropriate institutional framework within which to
work. It is the historic responsibility of this
Constituent Assembly to set our country on the path
to development and prosperity." Although the law
entitled him, as President, to address the
Constituent Assembly on any issue he wished, he
deliberately refused to influence the proceedings.
As a result, no individual or political faction can
dub the new constitution a 'Museveni' document.
This was a great contribution to the
constitution-making process. Delegates arrived at
decisions either by consensus or majority vote.
However, he advised delegates to combine
flexibility on contentious issues by distinguishing
between subjective demands and the objective
realities that The process
culminated in the promulgation of a new
constitution on October 8, 1995. Museveni says:
"The NRM has been like a political doctor trying to
solve the problems of Uganda. In order to treat a
disease, however, you must, first of all, diagnose
the illness." Ugandans agree that the new
constitution went a long way towards healing the
political and social ills from which Uganda had
suffered since independence. It also laid a firm
foundation for the stability of the country for
generations to come. First directly
elected President In the last five
years, Museveni has initiated dramatic programs
that are destined to transform the lives of
Ugandans forever. Grassroots-based programs in
health, safe water provision and mass education
have replaced the shallow elite programs of the
past that did not address the needs of the majority
of the people. At the same time, Museveni has
maintained hard-nosed macroeconomic stabilization
policies that have controlled inflation below 10
per cent for the last nine years. Consequently, the
GDP of Uganda has doubled over the 15 years that
the Movement Government has been in power. Absolute
poverty has reduced from 56 per cent to 44 per
cent. School enrollment in primary schools has
jumped from 2.5 million to 6.8 million children;
and universities have grown from one in 1986 to 13
by 2001. |