Uganda
Government
| Uganda Table of  ContentsTHE CENTRAL QUESTION facing Uganda after the  National Resistance Movement (NRM) led by Yoweri Kaguta Museveni came to  power in January 1986 was whether or not this new government could break the  cycle of insecurity and decay that had afflicted the country since  independence in 1962. Each new government had made that goal more difficult  to achieve. Despite Ugandans’ hopes for improvement after the war that ended  President Idi Amin Dada’s rule in April 1979, national political and economic  difficulties worsened in the seven years that followed. A new guerrilla war  began in 1981. The National Resistance Army (NRA), military wing of the NRM,  seized Kampala and control of the national government in January 1986. The  NRM pledged it would establish legitimate and effective political  institutions within the next four years. It failed to achieve this goal,  however, partly because new civil wars broke out in the north and the east,  and in October 1989 the NRM extended its interim rule until 1995.Few of the basic political questions that  confronted Uganda at independence had been settled when the NRM seized power  in 1986. Under protectorate rule after 1894, Uganda’s various regions had  developed along different paths and at different rates. As a result, at  independence the most politically divisive issue was the difference in  accumulated wealth among these regions. Political tensions centered around  the relatively wealthy region of Buganda, which also formed the most cohesive  political unit in Uganda, and its relationship to the rest of the country.  Adding to these tensions by the late 1960s, northern military domination had  been abruptly translated into political domination. Moreover, some political  leaders represented the interests of Protestant church organizations in a  country that had a Catholic majority and a small but growing Islamic  minority. Ugandan officials increasingly harassed citizens, often for their  own economic gain, while imprisonment, torture, and violence, although  universally deplored as a means of settling political disputes, had become  commonplace. All of these factors contributed to political fragmentation.The NRM government promised fundamental change to  establish peace and democracy, to rebuild the economy, and, above all, to end  military indiscipline. The new government’s political manifesto, the  Ten-Point Program, written during the guerrilla war of the 1980s, traced  Uganda’s problems to the fact that previous political leaders had relied on  ethnicity and religion in decision making at the expense of development  concerns. The Ten-Point Program argued that resolving these problems required  the creation of grass-roots democracy, a politically educated army and police  force, and greater national economic independence. It also insisted that the  success of Uganda’s new political institutions would depend on public  servants who would forego self-enrichment at the nation’s expense. Political  education would be provided to explain the reasons for altering institutions  and policies Uganda had used since independence. The new institutions and  policies which the NRM announced it intended to put in their place involved  drastic changes from the practices of earlier regimes.At the time that the NRA seized power, however,  its organizational life had been brief, its personnel were few, and its  political base was narrow. It had few resources to achieve its ambitious  proposals for reform. The NRA had been formed in 1981, but its political  wing, the NRM, had not been organized as a government until 1985. And because  the NRA had been confined primarily to Buganda and western Uganda when it  ousted the northern-based Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA), many  Ugandans believed it had simply substituted southern political control for  northern domination. Separate civil wars resumed in the north and east only a  few months later, and many people in those areas remained deeply skeptical  about NRM promises.
In addition, as soon as it came to power, the NRM  implemented the policy of broad-based government that Museveni had adopted  during the guerrilla war. He appointed leaders of rival political parties and  armies to high-level military and cabinet offices. These new leaders  generally did not share the NRM’s approach to reforms, however. Furthermore,  as a government, the NRM had to rely on existing state institutions,  particularly government ministries, local administrative offices, and the  court system. Government procedures had enjoined public servants working  within these institutions from any political activity. Many officials were  neither sympathetic to the objectives of the NRM nor convinced that political  education for public servants was a legitimate means to accomplish those  goals. As a result, Museveni’s government was partly led and predominantly  staffed by officials who preferred to restore the policies pursued by the  Ugandan government in the 1960s. They shared power with a few NRM officials  who were committed to radical changes. Nonetheless, NRM leaders made the most important  policy decisions in the regime’s first four years, relying on the wave of  popular support that accompanied their rise to power and their control over  the national army. They introduced several new political bodies, including an  inner circle of NRM and NRA officials who had risen to leadership positions  during the guerrilla war, a hierarchy of popular assemblies known as  resistance councils (RCs), the NRM secretariat, and schools for political  education. But the NRM had too few trained cadres or detailed plans to  implement the Ten-Point Program during this period. As Museveni himself  conceded, the NRM came to power before it was ready to govern. For these reasons–lack of a nationwide political  base, creation of a broad-based government, the absence of sufficient trained  cadres of its own, and the necessity of relying on existing government  ministries–the new government’s leaders chose a path of compromise, blending  ideas they had developed during the guerrilla war with existing government  institutions on a pragmatic, ad-hoc, day-to-day basis. As a result, during  its first four years, the government maintained an uneasy and ambiguous  reliance on both old and new procedures and policies. And it was often difficult  to determine which official in the government, the NRM, or the NRA possessed  either formal or actual responsibility for a particular policy decision. New civil wars and ill-chosen economic policies  diverted the government’s energies from many of its ambitious political and  economic reforms, but others were begun. In frequent public statements,  Museveni returned to the basic themes of the TenPoint Program, indicating  that they had not been abandoned |
Source: U.S. Library of Congress
POLITICAL DYNAMICS
When the NRM took power in 1986, it added a new  element to the unsolved political issues that had bedeviled Uganda since  independence. It promised new and fundamental changes, but it also brought  old fears to the surface. If this government demonstrated magnanimity toward  its opponents and innovative solutions to Uganda’s political difficulties, it  also contributed significantly to the country’s political tensions. This  paradox appeared in one political issue after another through the first four  years of the interim period. The most serious political question was the  deepening division between the north and the south, even though these units  were neither administrative regions nor socially or even geographically  coherent entities. The relationship of Buganda to the rest of Uganda, an  issue forcibly kept off the public agenda for twenty years, re-emerged in  public debate. Tension between the NRM and the political parties that had  competed for power since independence became a new anxiety. In addition, the  government’s resort to political maneuvers and surprise tactics in two of its  most important initiatives in 1989, national elections and the extension of  the interim period of government, illustrated the NRM’s difficulties in  holding the nation to its political agenda.
Fears of Regional DominationFor the first time since the protectorate was  founded, the NRA victory in 1986 gave a predominantly southern cast to both  the new political and the new military rulers of Uganda. For reasons of  climate, population, and colonial economic policy, parts of the south,  particularly Buganda, had developed economically more rapidly than the north.  Until the railroad was extended from the south, cotton could not become an  established cash crop in the north. Instead, early in the colonial period,  northerners established a pattern of earning a cash income through labor on  southern farms or through military service. Although there had never been a  political coalition that consisted exclusively, or even predominantly, of  southerners or northerners, the head of the government had come from the  north for all but one of the preceding twenty-three years of independence,  and each succeeding army’s officers and recruits were predominantly  northerners. Northerners feared southern economic domination, while  southerners chafed under what they considered northern political and military  control. Thus, the military victory of the NRA posed a sobering political  question to both northerners and southerners: was the objective of its  guerrilla struggle to end sectarianism, as the Ten-Point Program insisted, or  to end northern political domination? In the first few days following the NRA  takeover of Kampala in January 1986, there were reports of incidents of mob  action against individual northerners in the south, but the new government  took decisive steps to prevent their repetition. By the end of March, NRA  troops had taken military control of the north. A period of uneasy calm  followed, during which northerners considered their options. Incidents of  looting and rape of northern civilians by recently recruited southern NRA  soldiers, who had replaced better disciplined but battle-weary troops,  intensified northerners’ belief that southerners would take revenge for  earlier atrocities and that the government would not stop them. In this  atmosphere, the NRA order in early August 1986 for all soldiers in the former  army, the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA), to report to local police  stations gave rise to panic. These soldiers knew that during the Obote and  Amin governments such an order was likely to have been a prelude to  execution. Instead of reporting, many soldiers joined rebel movements, and a  new round of civil wars began in earnest. Although the civil wars occurred in parts of  the east as well, they sharpened the sense of political cleavage between  north and south and substantiated the perception that the NRM was intent on  consolidating southern domination. Rebels killed some local RC officials  because they were the most vulnerable representatives of the NRM government.  Because war made northern economic recovery impossible, new development  projects were started only in the south. And because cash crop production in  the north was also impossible, the income gap between the two areas widened.  Most government officials sent north were southerners because the NRA officer  corps and the public service were mostly southern. By mid-1990, the NRA had  gained the upper hand in the wars in the north, but the political damage had  been done. The NRM government had become embroiled in war because it had  failed to persuade northerners that it had a political program that would end  regional domination. And its military success meant that for some time to  come its response to all political issues would carry that extra burden of  suspicion. |
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Facts about Uganda
| World Facts IndexThe colonial  boundaries created by Britain to delimit Uganda grouped together a wide range  of ethnic groups with different political systems and cultures. These  differences prevented the establishment of a working political community  after independence was achieved in 1962. The dictatorial regime of Idi AMIN  (1971-79) was responsible for the deaths of some 300,000 opponents; guerrilla  war and human rights abuses under Milton OBOTE (1980-85) claimed at least  another 100,000 lives. The rule of Yoweri MUSEVENI since 1986 has brought  relative stability and economic growth to Uganda. During the 1990s, the  government promulgated non-party presidential and legislative elections.
Geography  of Uganda
 Population  of Uganda
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FOREIGN RELATIONS
| Uganda Table of ContentsUganda is landlocked and depends on foreign  imports for most of its consumer goods and energy requirements. Even before  independence, maintaining an open trade route to the Indian Ocean was the  primary foreign policy objective of all governments. For this reason, once  the railroad from Mombasa to Kampala was completed early in the protectorate  period, relations with Kenya became the government’s most significant foreign  concern. During much of the period of British rule, the most worrying foreign  issue for politically conscious Ugandans was the possibility that Kenyan  white settlers would gain control over all of East Africa. During the 1950s,  when African nationalism gained the upper hand in the four East African  territories, the achievement of closer relations among the four also became  an important foreign policy objective. Later, however, economic differences  eroded initiatives toward federation and eventually led to hostilities  between Uganda and Kenya in the 1980s that would have been unimaginable two decades  earlier. After independence, political issues erupting into violence within  Uganda or its neighbors also caused serious strains in their bilateral  relations, frequently involving rebels, refugees, and even military  incursions. Because of its former colonial rule, Britain maintained a close  and special relationship with Uganda. But over time, this role slowly  diminished as Uganda cultivated new links with other industrialized  countries. And, despite its protestations of nonalignment, Uganda remained far  more closely linked, both economically and politically, to the capitalist  than to the socialist bloc.Ugandan foreign policy objectives changed  considerably after Idi Amin’s coup d’état in 1971. For the first decade after  independence, policymakers had emphasized cooperation with Uganda’s neighbors  and the superpowers, participation in international organizations, and  nonalignment in order to protect the state’s sovereignty and support the  African bloc as much as possible without losing opportunities for expanding  trade or gaining assistance for development. When Amin seized power, he  followed a far more aggressive, though unpredictable, foreign policy. Uganda  threatened its neighbors both verbally and militarily. The gratuitous verbal  attacks that Amin launched on foreign powers served mainly to isolate Uganda.The NRM government introduced new radical foreign  policy objectives when it first came to power and consequently brought new  complications into Uganda’s foreign relations. At the outset, President  Museveni enthusiastically supported international and especially African  cooperation but conditioned it on an ideological evaluation of whether or not  other regimes were racist, dictatorial, or corrupt, or violated human rights.  On this basis, shortly after taking power the government went to great  lengths to enter trade agreements with other developing countries based on  barter rather than cash, in order to publicize Uganda’s autonomy, even though  most of its exports continued to consist of coffee purchased by the United  States or by European states, and most of its imports came from Europe. In  response, Uganda’s neighbors were suspicious of Museveni’s radical  pronouncements and felt that he was attacking their rule through his  denunciations of their human rights policies. They also avoided close ties to  Uganda because they suspected that the NRM government, having come to power  through a guerrilla struggle, might assist dissidents intending to overthrow  them.During its first four years in power, the NRM  government moderated its foreign policy stance to one that more closely  reflected the conventional positions of preceding Ugandan governments than  the changes proposed in its Ten-Point Program. Uganda maintained friendly  relations with Libya, the Soviet Union, the Democratic People’s Republic of  Korea (North Korea), and Cuba, although most of its trade and development  assistance came from the West. In addition, though it consistently maintained  its stance of geopolitical nonalignment, the fact that the NRM government  accepted an IMF structural adjustment plan made it more politically  acceptable to Western leaders. During this period, many African leaders  overcame their suspicion of Museveni and the NRM and elected him chair of the  Organization of African Unity (OAU) in July 1990.
Postindependence heads of government in Uganda  made almost all significant foreign policy-making decisions themselves,  leaving their foreign ministers to carry them out or explain them away. In  order to shore up their domestic power bases, Obote, Amin, and Museveni often  introduced new foreign policies that broke sharply with existing relations.  They also used foreign policy symbolically to signal the international  posture they wished to cultivate. Amin’s pronouncements were the most  puzzling because they frequently incurred enormous costs for Uganda’s  relations with other states. Foreign ministry officials never knew when it  was safe to ignore his orders or when they had to take them seriously. All  three presidents often used foreign policy as a public gesture in an effort  to give the government more autonomy in international affairs, improve its  public standing with radical states, or satisfy vocal militants in the  government. In such cases, the government usually gave public support to  radical states and causes, while continuing privately to maintain its more  conservative foreign relationships. Foreign relations with radical countries,  however much they irritated United States and British officials, did not play  a significant role in shaping Ugandan foreign policy. |
Rita M. Byrnes, ed. Uganda: A Country Study.  Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress.
