Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni: From reformer to autocrat

Yoweri Museveni has been at Uganda’s helm for nearly 35 years. Now, the 76-year previous is standing for re-election once more on Thursday.
The former insurgent chief is a veteran state chief, however he nonetheless doesn’t draw back from utilizing bellicose rhetoric. When Bobi Wine, a preferred contender for the presidency, was arrested on the marketing campaign path in November 2020 — leading to mass protests and dozens of deaths amongst Wine’s supporters — Museveni spoke like a real autocrat: “They have entered a space we are very familiar with, that of struggle,” he mentioned.
Eternal revolutionary
Museveni has all the time loved making grand and controversial pronouncements. Before he turned president, nevertheless, the message was a lot completely different. Museveni offered himself as an innovator and argued in opposition to presidents unwilling to surrender workplace. After a few years as a insurgent chief, he seized energy in 1986, ending a interval of bloody civil wars in his homeland. Initially, he introduced peace and financial prosperity to Uganda.
He cemented the one-party system with a brand new structure. Ten years later, a constitutional modification allowed different events in addition to the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) to enter the political realm, however on the identical time the regulation abolished the two-term restrict on the presidency. Despite the phrase “resistance” within the identify of his occasion, the previous insurgent was by then an establishment in his personal proper.
Fighting terrorism
“Since 1971, I have been in fighting mode,” Museveni mentioned on the time. “Am I supposed to give up halfway and slink away?” After the introduction of the multiparty system, he solidified his place by projecting clear enemy photos: the infamous Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) militia that has been raiding provinces in northern Uganda and neighboring nations for the reason that Nineteen Eighties, adopted by the Somali Al-Shabaab Islamists that the Ugandan military has been combating in opposition to aspect by aspect with Kenya and Burundi in Somalia as a part of a global mission.
In a world newly polarized after the 2001 terrorist assault on the World Trade Center in New York, Museveni’s battle in opposition to terrorism within the Horn of Africa earned him sympathies. As an elder statesman, he more and more sat on the negotiating desk as a mediator in conflicts, whether or not within the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, South Sudan or Ethiopia.
By showing as a peacemaker, he tried to distract from the rising issues in his personal nation, in accordance with Mareike Le Pelley of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. “Many Ugandans do not remember the war years of the 1970s and 1980s. They were born after the civil war ended,” she mentioned in 2016, on the time head of the muse’s Uganda workplace. Young Ugandans, she mentioned again then, had been most involved concerning the lack of jobs. Discontent is certain to extend, she mentioned.
New opposition
Her prediction proved right, not least as a result of the best way political and civil liberties are dealt with as of late has lacked the spirit of optimism prevalent within the Nineteen Eighties. A free press is more and more being shackled; social media shops have been banned and incitement in opposition to homosexuals has been making the headlines, fueled by a political debate that features calls for to penalize homosexuality.
When Museveni lifted the age restrict for presidents in 2017/18 with one other constitutional modification, paving the best way for his election marketing campaign, the tide firmly turned: the youthful technology not noticed Museveni, the one president that they had ever recognized, as unavoidable. Since 2017, they’ve rallied behind 38-year-old Robert Kyagulanyi, a former pop star higher often called Bobi Wine.
“If I had met Museveni at my age, he would be my best friend because most of the things I say today are what President Museveni said in the early ’80s,” Kyagulanyi informed DW. It’s unlucky, he added, that the president is now appearing identical to the rulers who compelled him to go underground and battle in opposition to them.
Kyagulanyi will not be solely Museveni’s fundamental challenger within the elections — the presidential hopeful has additionally requested the International Criminal Court to research the incumbent president for human rights violations.