Biography of Uganda President Yoweri Museveni
Considered by many as a leading figure of the “new generation” of African leaders, Yoweri Museveni was born into a family of Hima cattle herders, a clan of the Ankole people of southwestern Uganda in about 1944. He was named Museveni in honor of the Abaseveni, those Ugandans who served in the Seventh Battalion of the King’s African Rifles during World War II. Early in Museveni’s childhood, his parents converted to Christianity, and from the age of seven he was sent to school. At Kyamate Primary School, he met Martin Mwesiga and Eriya Kategaya, who were to become two close colleagues in the adult political struggles that lay ahead.
In 1962, while at Ntare Senior Secondary School in Mbarara, Museveni became a born-again Christian, but in 1966 he broke with established Christianity over the missionaries’ refusal to allow the Scripture Union to debate his motion condemning Ian Smith’s Universal Declaration of Independence (UDI) in Rhodesia. For some time, he had been unhappy with some of their biblical interpretations, and in particular, he believed that their stand of evading “worldly” issues and condemning all violence, even as a means of liberation, was immoral.
By this time, Museveni had developed an interest in Ugandan politics. He and his student colleagues condemned the sectarian basis of much of Ugandan party politics: the DP (Democratic Party) and UPC (Uganda Peoples Congress), as they saw it, being primarily divided along a combination of religious and tribal sectarianism. In 1967, Museveni went to the University of Dar es Salaam to study political science.
He preferred Dar es Salaam to Uganda’s own Makerere because he perceived it to be politically more radical, and he saw Tanzania under Nyerere as the one African country that provided clear support for the liberation movements of southern Africa. Finding most of the university’s staff not radical enough, Museveni founded the student discussion group, the University Students’ African Revolutionary Front. He made contact with the Mozambican liberation movement, FRELIMO, and met Eduardo Mondlane, Samora Machel, and Joachim Chissano.
In 1968, Museveni led a small group of students to visit the liberated zone in northern Mozambique. Contacts made at this time were to prove invaluable in the future when Museveni and his colleagues needed military training in guerrilla warfare. Upon graduating in 1970, Museveni got employment in the President’s Office in Kampala as a research assistant, and he briefly joined UPC. Museveni writes in his memoirs that he cherished a glimmer of optimism during this time period that the UPC could be transformed from inside, despite the fact that he claims to have mistrusted Obote and the UPC ever since the middle of the 1960s.
Idi Amin’s coup in January 1971, with the goal of rallying support for a long liberation struggle. They made their way to Dar es Salaam, but Museveni was unable to win Nyerere’s support for any kind of struggle that did not involve Obote being reinstated as President of Uganda at this time. This setback occurred while they were in Dar es Salaam. Museveni was very active during the 1970s in surreptitiously recruiting followers both inside and outside of Uganda. He also organized military training, mostly in Mozambique, and smuggled guns into the nation.
In September of 1972, he was a participant in Obote’s failed invasion of Uganda. During this conflict and earlier skirmishes with Amin’s forces, a lot of his closest friends were taken out of his life. When the Tanzanians eventually invaded Uganda in 1979, Museveni joined them with a group of well-trained Ugandan exiles under his leadership.
This force was under his command. Museveni participated in the interim governments of Yusufu Lule and Godfrey Binaisa, but he left those positions because he was dissatisfied with the intrigues and the lack of agreement that emerged during those times. In the end, he was in favor of removing both of these interim presidents from office, but he was dismayed to see that the same divisive party politics from the 1960s had returned.
Museveni quickly organized his own political organization, the Uganda Patriotic Movement, in order to compete with Obote once the latter returned to Uganda in May 1980. Museveni denounced the election as “rigged” after it was determined that Obote had been returned to power as a result of the extremely flawed election that took place in December 1980. He then went into hiding to continue his long-running quest for liberty. The assault on the Kabamba barracks, which are located to the west of Kampala, marked the beginning of the conflict on February 6, 1981.
The assault by twenty-seven armed men did not succeed in taking the armory, and Museveni took his troops to the Luwero Triangle to the north of Kampala in some captured vehicles via a convoluted path in order to get there. The years that followed were filled with war and suffering; but, with Museveni’s leadership and training, a well-disciplined National Resistance Army (NRA) was established from the ground up.
Under Uganda President Yoweri Museveni leadership, a National Resistance Movement (NRM) was established, and a ten-point plan was devised to serve as the foundation upon which the new government would be established when the war was won. When Kenya’s President Moi attempted to mediate a peace deal between the National Resistance Army (NRA) and the Okello regime, which had taken power from Obote in July 1985, Museveni used the Nairobi peace talks to buy his men more time to position themselves for the final assault on Kampala.
This occurred while Moi was in power in Kenya. The city fell to the NRA on January 27, 1986, and two days later, Yoweri Museveni was sworn in as president of Uganda. On coming to power, Museveni placed a high priority on army discipline, national reconciliation, and economic reconstruction. The well-disciplined army soon gained wide respect among civilians, in marked contrast to the fear and contempt that greeted the sectarian and ill-disciplined armies of Amin, Obote, and Okello. Museveni instilled in the army a clear respect for human rights and for the law as well as order.
Yoweri Museveni was essential in convincing parliament to authorize the return to Ugandan Asians of assets stolen by Amin in 1972. On the economic front, financial discipline and economic liberalization were firmly established, and Yoweri Museveni was instrumental in getting parliament to sanction the return. According to him, they were seasoned businesspeople who had capital and a dedication to Uganda, and as a result, they were an essential component of his plans for the expansion of the economy of the nation.
Yoweri Museveni saw a wide free trade area including eastern, central, and southern Africa as the only way to truly advance the economic and commercial growth of Africa. This was a major tenet of his vision for the future. In order to do this, he played a significant role in the revitalization of the East African Community that took place in Arusha, Tanzania, in the month of January 2001. Yoweri Museveni’s claims of national inclusivity will remain somewhat hollow until the northern half of the country, which is home to Obote and Amin, is brought more fully into sharing the economic advantages of the south.
In the southern half of the country, things like national reconciliation, economic growth, and building back up have gone well. Attacks in the north by dissident rebels who operate from bases in Sudan and eastern Congo have put the Ugandan army through harsh testing. Ironically, Museveni had first constructed the Ugandan army out of tiny, mobile bands of guerrilla fighters when he first took power. In 1998, Museveni gave permission for the Ugandan Defense Force to cross into the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC; formerly known as Zaire) and pursue the rebels and their supporters there in response to additional attacks from rebels coming across the western border from the unstable Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
By doing so, Yoweri Museveni drew the army of Rwanda into the current civil war that he had started in Uganda as a result of his actions. Regardless of Uganda’s strategic interests in the civil conflict taking place in its neighboring country, the presence of the Ugandan army in the Congo (up to its departure in 2003) has cast severe doubts on the much-vaunted judgment and integrity of President Museveni. Politically, Museveni continues to oppose multiparty politics on the grounds that it might eventually lead to the rise of sectarianism.
Because Yoweri Museveni continues to get strategic and economic backing from Britain and the United States, he is almost the only person in Africa who is not under pressure to adopt the multiparty prescription. This support ensures that he continues to receive it. However, it is highly improbable that his inclusive and nonpartisan “movement” system can survive the last five years of his time as president, which started in March 2001 when Yoweri Museveni was reelected to that office.
Also read: Haile Selassie I reigned as Emperor of Ethiopia from 1892 until his death in 1975.
