Yoweri Kaguta Museveni President of Uganda

The birth of a modern African democracy
The path to independence

Influenced not only by western political ideologies but by Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism, the western world’s lasting legacy in Uganda has been a political and religious wrangle for control – largely carried out at the expense of Ugandans. When Arab traders arrived in the Kingdom of Buganda in 1845, it was the harbinger of an epoch of power shifts and the use of violence to assert control on the various tribal Kingdoms that then constituted modern Uganda.

The colonisation of Uganda by Britain was, however, achieved as much by subterfuge as by force. A British protectorate since 1894, the signing of the Buganda Agreement in 1900 ceded control of Buganda to Britain. The document was written in Luganda, still the most widely spoken language in Uganda, and English – the English version legally binding. As none of the Bugandan regents understood the colonial vernacular, in the stroke of a pen they effectively signed away their autonomy.

Control over Buganda’s neighbouring kingdoms was not so easy to sieze and less still to maintain. Rebellions against British-controlled Buganda were commonplace until the British government, in 1954, proposed an East African Federation, which was roundly rejected. The colonial administrators then exiled Kabaka (king) Mutesa, who was agitating for Bugandan independence. This act stoked the embers of Ugandan nationalism and provided the platform upon which political parties would eventually campaign for an independent Uganda – culminating in the 1961 elections that saw Benedicto Kiwanuka of the Democratic Party installed as the first chief minister of Uganda.

A Catholic, Kiwanuka was unpopular both internally and with the colonial administrators who favoured a protestant leadership, thus an alliance between the Kabaka Yeka Party – created to protect the traditional status of the Kabaka – and the Uganda People’s Congress defeated the Democratic Party in the national elections of April, 1962.

In October of the same year, Uganda declared its independence and Milton Obote became the first prime minister of Uganda with Edward Mutesa, Kabaka of Buganda, as his president.

Allegations of corruption and the suspension of the 1962 constitution saw Obote overthrown by a military coup led by Major-General Idi Amin, commander of the armed forces. Amin’s murderous regime lasted until 1979 when a coalition of rebel Ugandan fighters and the Tanzanian People’s Defence Force swept into Kampala.

Marred elections in 1980 - each party had its own ballot box - saw the UPC’s Paolo Mwanga claim victory. His term would last six months. 1980 also witnessed Obote again assume the office of president, where he would remain until ousted in 1985, and the emergence of Yoweri Kaguta Museveni’s Uganda Patriotic Movement.

Elected president in 1986, Mr Museveni started a broad-based ‘movement’ system of government that was ratified by national referendum in 2000. In 2001, he was re-elected in the second presidential elections of the post-Amin era. Having guided Uganda to its current position on the world stage, Mr Museveni has been described by western observers as one of a ‘new generation of African leaders’.