Museveni: Africa's Next Tyrant?

Another article from Uganda, Museveni Warns Diplomats (from the Monitor via Allafrica.com) that is interesting and demands some comment, I think. It goes back to the over 50% of the budget being provided by outsiders.

This is from the independent newspaper in Uganda. If you compare this reporting to that on the BBC (link is from a previous post), there is something missing from this one… Why were the bail proceedings interrupted? Well, mainly because there were lots of armed thugs outside the courthouse waiting for Besigye to emerge. This brings back memories of when I was there and discussions were just starting on whether Museveni would change the constitution to stay in power. Thugs just happened to start busting into meetings with opposition leaders and beat the hell out of them. Now those thugs have been given guns by the government (and guns are supposed to be very illegal in Uganda unless you are a guard, so minivans full of youths in black shirts with assault rifles pretty much have to have the support of the government. Oh. And the guns the guards have tend not to be the highest of quality, often missing stocks and from about the 1940s).

So the apolitical political approach. I am not all that interested in going through the whole history. If you are interested, Peter Uvin has a great book called Aiding Violence: the Development Enterprise in Rwanda that goes into a lot of detail (not that I am entirely unbiased. Professor Uvin is my thesis advisor). The basic claim is that by claiming to not get involved in local politics by pulling funding when shady stuff started happening (there were quite a lot of “small-scale killings” of only 10-20,000 in the years before the genocide), the international community was complicit in creating the environment that allowed it to happen. Is that the path that is going to be followed in Uganda?

How can the international community even claim to be apolitical and uninvolved in local politics if they are dumping loads of money into a government? Doesn’t that imply tacit agreement with what is being done?

Then there is the question about what the results would be if funding were withdrawn. Museveni would be gone very quickly, and I would think it would be followed by yet another bloody succession fight in Uganda.

But isn’t that where Museveni is leading the country anyway? By demonstrating that the only way he is leaving power is if he is forced, Uganda will yet again avoid the potential for a peaceful transfer of power. Even if fighting is avoided in the short term, it will be the end result.

It is sad. Museveni has done a lot of good things for Uganda (assuming you are not Acholi) and had the potential to become a great African statesman, something that is seriously lacking and needed. Instead, it would seem that he would prefer to be the next Mugabe (president of Zimbabwe, who at one time was quite respected internationally, and is now not so much).