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President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni

H.E Yoweri Kaguta Museveni became President of the Republic of Uganda on January 29, 1986 after leading a successful five-year liberation struggle. He went to the bush with 26 other young men and organised the National Resistance Movement and National Resistance Army (NRM/NRA) to oppose the tyranny that previous regimes had unleashed upon the population. After victory, he formed a broad-based government that helped to unite the country’s political groups.

Previous to the struggle of 1981-1986, Museveni had been one of the leaders in the anti-Amin resistance of 1971-1979 that had led to the fall of that monstrous regime.

President Museveni, who has been politically active since his student days at Ntare School, Mbarara, in south west Uganda, studied political science at the University of Dar es Salaam, graduating in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics and Political Science.
After Idi Amin’s coup in 1971, Museveni was instrumental in forming Fronasa (the Front for National Salvation). Fronasa made up the core of one of the Ugandan fighting groups which, together with the Tanzanian People’s Defence Forces, ousted Amin’s regime in April 1979.

Early political awareness

Yoweri Kaguta Museveni was born on August 15, 1944 during the Second World War and his name was taken from the Abaseveni, who were Ugandan servicemen in the Seventh Regiment of the King’s African Rifles into which many Ugandans had been drafted.

Yoweri Museveni looking after his cattle in Nyabusozi in Mbarara District

He was born in a peasant pastoralist background in Ankole, western Uganda.
As the peasants in his home area were nomads, their children did not go to school and modern ideas about animal husbandry, hygiene and health care did not percolate through to them.

In addition, they were exploited and oppressed by land policies, such as ranching schemes, which displaced them from their traditional lands. Such policies were instituted by the British colonialists and supported by local collaborator chiefs and, later, by neo-colonialist independence politicians.

Owing to his background and his early determination to fight against political and social injustices, Museveni decided in 1966 to lead a campaign mobilising the peasants in northern Ankole to fence their land and refuse to vacate it. The campaign was largely successful and his political awareness and activity became more focused during the three years (1967 to 1970) he spent at the University of Dar es Salaam. His wide reading covered Fanon, Lenin, Marx, Rodney, Mao, as well as liberal Western thinkers like Galbraith. These writers shaped his intellectual and political outlook.

Compared to other universities in the region, Dar es Salaam had a very good, progressive atmosphere which gave the students a chance to become familiar with pan-Africanist and anti-colonialist ideas. This was due to the Pan-Africanist views and policies of Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, the President of Tanzania. Nevertheless, many professors and lecturers were right wing in their views and this often brought them into conflict with the radical students.

The dissatisfaction with the stance of the lecturers in 1967 led Museveni, Eriya Kategaya, James Wapakabulo, Joseph Mulwanyamuli Ssemwogerere, John Kawanga, all from Uganda, Charles Kileo and Salim Msoma from Tanzania, Kapote Mwakasungura from Malawi, Adam Marwa and Patrick Quoro also from Tanzania, John Garang from Sudan, Andrew Shija from Tanzania, and many students from other African countries, to form a self-help ideological study and activist group known as the University Students African Revolutionary Front (USARF). Every Sunday they would hold a class, invite speakers of their choice, enrich their ideas about the evolution of society, and discuss topics dealing with the production and distribution of wealth.

USARF was composed of students from Kenya, Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda and Museveni was elected its chairman for the whole time he was at the university. USARF identified closely with African liberation movements, especially Frelimo in Mozambique, which the Front supported, for instance, by producing pamphlets for their publicity work. Other members of USARF were to become politically active and influential both in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa.

First directly elected President

In 1996, Museveni offered himself as a candidate for President in the first general elections since the abortive attempt of 1980. Two other candidates, including Paulo Ssemwogerere, the veteran opposition leader who had been a minister in the NRM Government for 10 years, opposed him. Museveni won a landslide victory – with more than 75 per cent of the vote – and became the first directly elected President in the history of Uganda.

In the last five years, Museveni has initiated dramatic programmes that are destined to transform the lives of Ugandans forever. Grassroots-based programmes in health, safe water provision and mass education have replaced the shallow elite programmes of the past that did not address the needs of the majority of the people. At the same time, Museveni has maintained hard-nosed macro-economic stabilisation policies that have controlled inflation below 10 per cent for the last nine years. Consequently, the GDP of Uganda has doubled over the 15 years that the Movement Government has been in power. Absolute poverty has reduced from 56 per cent to 44 per cent. School enrolment in primary schools has jumped from 2.5 million to 6.8 million children; and universities have grown from one in 1986 to 13 by 2001.

For more information visit the official website for the Uganda State House