Yoweri Kaguta Museveni

President of Uganda (1986– )

• Born: 1944
• Place of Birth: Mbarara district, Uganda

Museveni brought considerable stability to Ugandan political life after seizing power in 1986, gradually bringing a country wracked by decades of brutal dictatorship and civil war toward greater economic and political progress and a dramatic reduction in the country’s HIV-AIDS infection rates. However, his tenure was also criticized for its autocratic style of government and human rights violations, particularly through Museveni's support for anti-LGBTQ legislation and harsh methods of dealing with critics and political enemies.

Early Life

Yoweri Kaguta Museveni (yoh-WEHR-ee kah-GEW-tah moo-sah-VAY-nee) was born on September 15, 1944, to Esteri Kokundeka and Amos Kaguta, a cattle herder, into the Nyankole tribe in the Ntungamo province of Uganda. The location of his homeland so near the border with Rwanda prompted his adversaries to claim that Museveni was Rwandan rather than Ugandan. The ethnic diversity of Uganda has long been a major cause of conflict in the country. Ethnic conflict would affect the later thinking of Museveni, who would insist that Uganda must overcome such divisions to achieve a unified political life.

From a young age Museveni was a religious and political activist. After attending Kyamate Elementary School he pursued secondary education at Mbarara High School and the Ntare School. He discovered fundamentalist Christianity while in high school and was a leader among born-again Christians. His leadership skills became more evident during his studies at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, where he embraced Marxist doctrine and established the University Students’ African Revolutionary Front. He took time away from his college studies to learn guerrilla military tactics in Mozambique with Samora Machel’s Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) and then returned to write a senior thesis on philosopher Frantz Fanon’s theories of revolution as they applied in Africa.

After college, Museveni spent a short time serving in the intelligence service of Ugandan president Milton Obote. With Idi Amin’s successful coup d’etat in 1971, Museveni and other Obote supporters fled Uganda, seeking asylum in neighboring Tanzania. There, Museveni was party to the planning of an abortive coup attempt against Amin in 1972.

Museveni then taught for a time at a cooperative college in Moshi, Tanzania, but throughout most of the 1970s he worked to promote opposition to the Amin dictatorship, forming the Front for National Salvation (FRONASA) in 1973. He was married in 1973 to Janet Kataha, with whom he would have four children.

Life’s Work

Museveni met with other anti-Amin activists in March 1979 to resolve their differences and form a united opposition called the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF). Museveni, as leader of FRONASA, which now comprised thousands of soldiers loyal to him, was one of eleven persons on the UNLF’s executive committee, which was headed by Yusuf Lule. The UNLF jumped at the opportunity to participate in the liberation of its country from Amin’s rule.

In October 1978, Amin had made the mistake of invading Tanzania to seize the disputed Kagera region as Ugandan territory. In April, Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere ordered his forces to retake Kagera province and to invade Uganda by way of retaliation. Amin’s forces rapidly fell apart in late April, and Museveni briefly occupied a position of prominence in the post-Amin government as minister of state for defense.

Considerable shuffling of personnel in the post-Amin government followed, and Museveni was moved from defense to minister of regional cooperation and then served as vice chair of a presidential election commission. He founded the Ugandan Patriotic Movement (UPM), hoping to win election to the presidency. The party gained only one seat in parliament, and he, along with other losing parties, rejected the outcome of the election won by Obote; the election was fraught with irregularities. Museveni decided to break with Obote, fleeing to his ancestral region along with numerous supporters and forming the Popular Resistance Army. Museveni and his army began to practice the tenets of guerrilla resistance. He later joined forces with other resistance groups and formed the National Resistance Army (NRA) with its political wing, the National Resistance Movement (NRM), which would eventually become the vehicle through which Museveni would govern Uganda.

Museveni became an increasingly popular and effective leader of the NRA-NRM during the five-year struggle against Obote’s government. The Obote regime was facing increasing international criticism for its brutality and human rights abuses in attempting to repress resistance. Obote was eventually overthrown by his own military and General Tito Okello assumed command. The guerrilla struggle continued, however, along with rancorous and unsuccessful attempts to resolve the civil war peacefully. Okello’s forces gradually melted away under the pressure of Museveni’s NRA, which seized the capital city of Kampala on January 25, 1986. On January 29, Museveni was sworn in as Uganda’s eighth president in just twenty-four years of independence. He promised to restore democracy in Uganda. The road to democracy, however, would prove to be a long and winding one, with Museveni very much in charge of the process and later facing criticism for failing to ensure the establishment of true democracy in the country. He would hold the presidency longer than his predecessors combined, bringing to Uganda an unprecedented level of political stability at the national level. The benefits of this stability were considerable, but there would also be costs.

Stability helped Museveni establish resistance councils at the local level, which gave many Ugandans their first opportunity to participate in local politics outside the context of tribal affairs. Political parties were allowed at the national level, but they could not field candidates for election. Museveni insisted that all Ugandans, regardless of ethnic background, should support the NRM, or the “movement,” as it came to be called. Museveni also rejected his former beliefs in Marxist economics, embracing instead a neoliberal philosophy of economic reform, which included the dismantling of state enterprises, the growth of free enterprise, encouragement of domestic and foreign investment, and promotion of export trade.

These changes helped put the Ugandan economy on a much better footing. Greater levels of freedom for news media were granted, and women enjoyed an unprecedented rate of participation in Ugandan political life. Uganda also saw major progress in the reduction of HIV-AIDS infection through the implementation of Museveni’s so-called ABC program, which emphasized abstinence, being faithful in marriage, and condom distribution. He also led efforts to curb abuses by the military and police. Because of these important reform measures, Museveni gained the confidence of the international community, winning substantial degrees of outside support and earning him plaudits as one of Africa’s senior “new leaders.”

However, as Museveni established his basis for rule, there were few real checks of his own authority. He involved Uganda in civil wars in neighboring Rwanda, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He resisted calls for greater levels of democracy inside Uganda, and he faced emerging internal resistance, which was in part precipitated by neighboring regimes retaliating for his meddling in their affairs. For example, Sudan supported the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda in retaliation for Museveni’s support of Southern Sudanese rebel forces under John Garang, a long-time ally of Museveni.

Furthermore, Museveni ruled Uganda for ten years without the benefit of an election, but in 1996 he permitted elections and won the presidency with more than three-quarters of the vote widely regarded as a referendum on Museveni’s reform policies. However, in subsequent years, Uganda became more deeply embroiled in conflicts in the Great Lakes region, and instability in the northern part of the country increased. Museveni stood for election again in 2001 and won, but he did so by a smaller margin in a hotly disputed contest. The second term was to have been his last because of the Ugandan constitution, but in 2005 the Ugandan parliament approved a constitutional amendment to abolish presidential term limits; also in 2005, Ugandan voters overwhelming supported a return to multiparty politics.

Museveni successfully sought a third term in 2006 after instituting multiple party politics. His margin of victory fell to 59 percent, diminished but still very strong. In 2007, Museveni drew criticism for his decision to open the Mabira Forest to sugarcane corporations for agricultural development; Museveni defended the decision, arguing it was critical to Uganda's continued economic development. He was elected to a fourth term in the presidential election of February 2011, winning 68 percent of the vote. His challenger, Kizza Besigye, won 26 percent of the vote and alleged voter fraud but was unable to mobilize support for a recount. In May 2013, the government temporarily forced the shutdown of two newspaper after those papers published a letter that suggested Museveni was grooming his son to be his successor.

In 2016 Museveni was reelected to a fifth term; by that point a number of international observers, as well as domestic critics, had begun describing Museveni's government as at least somewhat autocratic. By that time, Museveni had also attracted international criticism over his government's human rights record, particularly the increasing discrimination against the country's LGBTQ population. Museveni signed a bill in 2014 that banned same-sex sexual relations in the country and frequently spoke out against the country's LGBTQ community in comments that were criticized as homophobic. In 2017 Museveni oversaw a reform that removed age limits on the presidency of Uganda. The removal of presidential age limits was viewed by many as an attempt by Museveni to remain in power longer and dozens of Ugandan lawmakers were arrested for protesting against the passage of this reform.

Museveni was reelected for a sixth term in 2021; opposition leaders in Uganda argued that the election had been fraudulent, and independent reports compiled by international observers also concluded that the elections were neither free nor fair. During his sixth term Museveni continued pursuing a number of longtime policies, including increasing suppression of Uganda's LGBTQ population, and also made some significant shifts in Uganda's foreign policy. Although Uganda remained an ally of the United States and the beneficiary of US funding, Museveni also sought to cultivate a closer relationship between Uganda and Russia, which had been hit with harsh sanctions and found itself increasingly isolated on the international stage following its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In July 2022 Museveni hosted a visit for Russia's foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and in July 2023 Museveni traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia, for the Russia-Africa Summit. While at the summit, Museveni met with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

In April 2024 Uganda's constitutional court upheld a new, particularly strict anti-LGBTQ law that Museveni had signed the year before. This law further criminalized a number of aspects of LGBTQ expression and identity and in some cases allowed the death penalty for same-sex sexual activity. It also provided for life imprisonment for people convicted of engaging in same-sex relations. Later that year, Museveni publicly commended the positive working relationship between the presidency and Parliament. Though he acknolwedged past tensions between the two branches of government, Museveni stated that the continued cooperation has contributed to Uganda's stability and progress.

Significance

Museveni was, without doubt, Uganda’s most important postindependence leader of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He overcame, for the most part, the highly divisive tribal politics of the country, which had led to vicious, vindictive, and even genocidal behavior by previous regimes. He emerged as one of Africa’s top statesmen in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

On the other hand, Museveni’s interventionist foreign policy contributed to deadly conflicts in neighboring countries and to guerrilla war in the northern portions of Uganda. Furthermore, allegations of voter fraud and efforts to consolidate power by Museveni marred his reputation within Uganda and around the world and led many observers to describe his rule as autocratic by the twenty-first century. His human rights record in Uganda, including his imprisonment of political opponents and crackdown on the country's LGBTQ community, also led to widespread international condemnation. Nevertheless, Museveni was credited with restoring political stability and economic growth to Uganda after years of civil war and economic mismanagement.

Bibliography

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Dahir, Abdi Latif. "Ugandan Court Upholds Draconian Anti-Gay Law." The New York Times, 3 Apr. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/world/africa/uganda-anti-gay-law.html. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Kron, Josh. "President of Uganda Coasts Into a Fourth Term." New York Times. New York Times, 20 Feb. 2011. Web. 20 Dec. 2013.

Museveni, Yoweri K. Sowing the Mustard Seed: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Uganda. New York: Macmillan Education, 1997. Print.

Museveni, Yoweri K. Interview by Baffour Ankomah. "President Museveni: 'Development Is the Destination.'" New African 521 (2012): 6–13. Print.

Ori Amaza, Ondoga. Museveni’s Long March: From Guerrilla to Statesman. Kampala: Fountain, 1998.

"SONA 2024: President Hails Parliament, Executive Relationship." Parliament of the Republic of Uganda, 6 June 2024, www.parliament.go.ug/news/7302/sona2024-president-hails-parliament-executive-relationship. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

"Zimbabwe and Uganda Leaders Meet with Russian President Putin." Africa News, 28 Jul. 2023, www.africanews.com/2023/07/28/zimbabwe-and-uganda-leaders-meet-with-russian-president-putin/. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.