NRM

m7`s achivements
NRM’s 10 Point Programme

1. Restoration of democracy.
2. Restoration of security of person and property.
3. Consolidation of national unity and elimination of all forms of sectarianism.
4. Defending and consolidating national independence.
5. Building an independent, integrated and self-sustaining national economy.
6. Restoration and improvement of social services and rehabilitation of war-ravaged areas.
7. Elimination of corruption and misuse of power.
8. Redressing errors that have resulted in the dislocation of some sections of the population.
9. Cooperation with other African countries.
10. Following an economic strategy of mixed economy.

NRM achievements according to Museveni
1. Restoration of security of persons and property.
2. Introduction of democracy.
3. Building a professional bi-service army.
4. Development of human resource through education and health.
5. Expanding the GDP from Shs3.4 trillion in 1986 to Shs24.1 trillion today.
6. Diversification of exports.
7. Modernisation of road, telecommunications, electricity and piped water infrastructure.
8. Oil exploration and discovery.
9:53 PM | Add a comment | Permalink | View trackbacks (0) | Blog it | UGANDAJanuary 25
23 years later... Has Museveni delivered the fundamental change?
23 years later... Has Museveni delivered the fundamental change?
Emmanuel Gyezaho

Kampala

Tomorrow, President Yoweri Museveni celebrates more than two decades of uninterrupted stay in power. From a bush war hero, who preached the gospel of frugal spending and lean government, to a politician now enjoying the perks that come with longevity in power. Sunday Monitor’s Emmanuel Gyezaho examines the transformation of President Museveni, the man, as we know him.

On Wednesday, January 26, 1986, President Yoweri Museveni stood on the front porch of the Parliamentary Building before a rudimentary desk and took the oath as the 9th President of the Republic of Uganda.

He had just ousted the short-lived rogue regime of Gen. Tito Okello Lutwa after a five-year guerrilla war that had also seen his National Resistance Army rebels fight Dr Apollo Milton Obote’s (1980-85).
PROMISE: Mr Museveni swears-in as President on January 26 , 1986. File photo.


On that day, President Museveni delivered his now memorable line to a very anxious nation: “No one should think that what is happening today is a mere change of guard; it is a fundamental change in the politics of our country,” he said.

In that speech, the President promised to run a frugal and responsible government and told his fellow countrymen: “We want our people to be able to afford shoes.

The honourable excellency who is going to the United Nations in executive jets, but has a population at home of 90 percent walking barefoot, is nothing but a pathetic spectacle. Yet this excellency may be busy trying to compete with [then US President Ronald] Reagan and [then USSR President Mikhail] Gorbachev to show them that he, too, is an excellency.”

Such was the contempt President Museveni had for African leaders who were living opulent lifestyles while their nations basically decayed around them. But as he celebrates 23 years in power, the idea that inspired his disdain for affluence resurfaces to haunt him.

Only last week, it emerged that the government had forked out Shs88.2 billion for a luxurious new Gulfstream V extra-special performance executive jet for the President, even as the state continues to borrow heavily abroad to supposedly provide better infrastructure, decent education and healthcare for Ugandans.

It is understood that the new jet, the only one of its kind known to be owned by either an African head of state or anybody else on the continent, is fitted with enhanced anti-terror capabilities.

In the early years, his ministers drove around in modest Nissan Laurel saloon cars, today they have expensive fuel-guzzling Toyota Landrcruisers 4WD.
The President’s critics are now armed with fodder to question his lifestyle and judgement. They ask, is this the fundamental change he talked about in ’86?

Respected academic and Executive Director of the Mbale based Afrika Study Centre, Prof. Dani Wadada Nabudere told Sunday Monitor in an interview on Thursday that the country was witnessing power corrupt the President. “That’s open for all to see,” said Prof. Nabudere.

“He (Museveni) told us in 1986 that he wanted people in government not to live in opulence. He even wanted State House to have cutlery from Tumpeco (a local plastics producer). It is clear power has gotten to his head. Since he has absolute power, he feels he can ride any storm.”

President Museveni’s press secretary, however, believes such criticism is unfounded.
Said Mr Tamale Mirundi: “What they (the critics) don’t know is that the Presidency is the property of the State. How do other President’s travel? Because he is our President, we must ensure he lives comfortably. We must protect him. In 1986 there wasn’t terrorism. We have soldiers in Somalia and do you think the Islamists are happy?”

And while Makerere University political science professor Aaron Mukwaya did not pick issue with the purchase of a new jet for the President because “I thought Parliament discussed and approved that matter”, he said there was evidence to indicate a complete transformation of Mr Museveni from the austere man we once knew.

“In 1986, Museveni was just coming from the bush. He didn’t understand the mechanisms of the State and what power is. So when he comes to power, he realises there are so many factors; he needs to expose himself domestically and internationally,” said Prof. Mukwaya. “So it was inevitable that these things would happen. He totally forgot about the dictum that power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Former Samia Bugwe North MP, Aggrey Awori, once a strong Museveni critic but now in bed with government, was more philosophical in his analysis of the lifestyle changes the President has undergone.

“Politics isn’t a matter of faith where you commit yourself to some doctrine,” said Mr Awori, who abandoned his mother party, the Uganda People’s Congress. “It is an art of possibilities, perceptions and constant changes. In this case, the man [Museveni] has undergone tremendous transformation. In 1986 he was barely a President; he was still in the mould of a rebel leader not interested in the perks of the Presidency.”

Mr Awori said he doubted whether the President had personally “run” to the Ministry of Finance and ordered the purchase of a jet. “It’s the people around him who must have said, ‘Sir, your office needs better transportation.”

Added Mr Awori: “It is a matter we have to live with. These modern seemingly expensive items come with the office of the President, and given the difficult security environment obtaining, such as international terrorism, he definitely needs secure transport.”

What cost does the taxpayer has to bear in maintaining the President? According to the ministerial policy statement for the Presidency, this financial year alone, the Ugandan taxpayer will have forked out Shs51.3billion sustaining the Office of the President, besides Shs66.5 billion needed to run State House.

It isn’t in doubt that the Presidency, like any other across the globe, deserves the comfort and efficiency of modern transport. But why is it an issue for critics of this expenditure? The case made is that, the Executive and its policies are not in tandem with the needs of society. For a President who was seen as a reformer; one who spoke of fundamental change by lean effective government and frugal spending, the transformation is out of step with his own vision for change.

In understanding the evolution of Mr Museveni, however, we must assess his performance over the past two decades and determine whether he has lived up to his promises.

President Museveni assumed the mantle of leadership in Uganda at a time when the State had been run-down; insecurity was at an all time high and the economy was in tatters. His administration arrived with a high-sounding 10 Point Programme -- recently modified to 15 points -- with the restoration of democracy and security top on the agenda.

President Museveni introduced the Movement political system, a system that was supposed to be all-embracing where individual merit thrived, and one that was to forge national unity. In the years that followed, Uganda attained relative stability and economic growth after enduring decades of government mismanagement, civil war and rebel activity.

Initially an avowed disciple of the Marxist-Socialist economic model, President Museveni later introduced radical measures to liberalise the country’s economy – at the urging of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, that included privatisation and currency reform.

His State-of-the-Nation addresses have always been punctuated with rosy statistics about the progress Uganda has made, although quite often, he has said little if at all anything about the problems that have blighted his Presidency.

In his latest missive to media houses ahead of tomorrow’s celebrations, President Museveni points out that the “literacy rate [in the country] has risen to almost 70 percent up from 42 percent in the early eighties.”

The economy, President Museveni wrote, “has been growing at an average 6% of GDP since 1986.”
Without doubt, revenue collection under his tenure has exponentially increased.

Statistics from Ministry of Finance indicate that the Uganda Revenue Authority now collects Shs4 trillion compared to Shs5 billion in 1986. “As a result, Uganda can now service 70 percent of our own national budget, a great indicator of progress towards independence,” wrote the President in a letter to media houses last week.

The number of Ugandans living below the poverty line has reduced, he opined, to 31 percent down from 56 percent in 1988.

Mr Moses Byaruhanga, the president’s political assistant told Sunday Monitor on Friday that his critics “must appreciate what the NRM has done. Those criticisms are not logical and well-thought-out.” He cited the introduction of Universal Primary Education (UPE) in 1997, the increase in domestic revenue collected and the construction of new roads as examples of the fundamental change President Museveni promised in 1986.

If we are to gauge Mr Museveni’s performance based on UPE enrollment figures, his administration certainly scores highly. In 1997, 2.2 million pupils were in primary school, and as of 2007, that number had risen to 7.5 million, government statistics show. But questions abound about the quality of education provided for under UPE in the absence of adequate facilities and teaching resources especially in rural areas.

The high drop-out and increasing failure rate has blighted the programme. In the 2008 Primary Leaving Examination results, only 17,021 pupils out 463,631 passed in division one, an almost 50 percent drop compared to 2007 results which returned 31, 969 first grades out of 404,985.

The road infrastructure is at its worst and the public health services are all but crippled.
Two decades of conflict in northern Uganda, unprecedented institutionalised corruption in government, growing nepotism and cronyism, increased militarization of politics, disrespect for human rights by the security services and intolerance for the political Opposition, evidently stand out as the other negatives in his regime.

In 2005, President Museveni had presidential term limits deleted from the Constitution, in his quest to stay in power, following a Shs5 million inducement paid to NRM-leaning MPs. That action was a contradiction to his 2001 commitment to relinquish power at the end of his second elective term in office.

He told the US’ Los Angeles Times in an interview on March 12, 2001: “I will leave office for sure, because I am not a hereditary king. I would be very glad to leave office, once I have served my term.

To be remembered, just as a freedom fighter who helped to give the people of Uganda a key to their future, to give them democracy, get rid of dictatorship.”

Now, the President, mid-last year launched his bid for fourth term at a rally in the eastern town of Mbale.

AMIN

On March 23, 1979, less than three weeks to the end of Amin’s government, a resident of Kampala called Daniel Kyahulwa Kakonge simply disappeared never to be seen again.

It was assumed that this was the work of the dreaded State Research Bureau, intent on wreaking havoc on innocent Ugandans one last time before their tyrannical government fell from power.

On March 26, 1979, a man called Benjamin Henry Emor was murdered in Kampala. This reinforced the desperate wish by thousands of Ugandans for the Tanzanians to quickly step in and end Idi Amin’s reign of terror.

On the very day Amin’s government collapsed, April 11, 1979, Noah Lameck Masiira Sempiira, former General Manager of the National Trust (the agency that completed Uganda House in Kampala in 1973), was shot dead right outside the Uganda Commercial Bank headquarters building.

Since this was during the war, with Tanzanian troops surrounding Kampala, it was assumed that it was one of the unfortunate instances of “collateral damage”, the inevitable civilian deaths during combat.

A week later, April 18, 1979, an employee of the Uganda Electricity Board (known today as Umeme), John Mary Muzeyi Kalema, was shot dead by unknown people in Kampala. On June 1, 1979, a prominent Kampala bank manager called Tony Gonza Bagonza was shot dead in the city.

On June 3, 1979, Mary Nalumu Sembuya, a senior nurse at Mulago Hospital and wife of businessman Christopher Sembuya (of Sembule Steel Mills), was shot dead at their home at No. 32 Windsor Crescent in Kololo, a Kampala suburb.

The assailants stole the Sembuya’s car, a Fiat number UUQ 820. With the government of President Lule in office for only five weeks, on June 1, 1979, a building at plot 48 Kampala Road that housed the Uganda Ey’eddembe Publications was set on fire.

Once again, the assumption was that this must be the work of the only known evil people in Uganda since 1971: soldiers of ex-president Amin’s Uganda Army or the State Research Bureau intelligence agency.

“Ousted Idi Amin’s bandits are held responsible for the fire which broke out in buildings in Kampala on Friday,” is the way the government-owned newspaper, the Uganda Times reported the incident on Monday June 4, 1979.

However, some people were starting to note a pattern that left them unconvinced that this was the sabotage by Amin’s men.

A former exiled opponent of Amin’s regime, expert in criminology and forensic evidence, Andrew Lutakome Kayiira – who was now the deputy Minister of Internal Affairs in the UNLF government – called and told a press conference in Kampala that the building on Kampala Road had been set on fire by explosives.

Kayiira said this was only the latest in “a number of incidents in the past which have brought about a sense of insecurity in the country,” reported the Uganda Times on June 5.

“He [Kayiira] said there are more reports of people dressed in military uniforms commandeering vehicles whose owners are either killed or left stranded in remote areas of Kampala.”
These military uniforms that Kayiira referred to were of the UNLA, not Amin’s Uganda Army.

Then, too, the explosives used to blow up the Kampala Road building just opposite today’s Shell Capital petrol station were the exact same type that had been used to blow up buildings in Masaka and Mbarara and buildings at Ntare School in Mbarara in the closing stages of the 1979 war.

On Sunday June 10, 1979, Christopher B. Mwoyogwona, an official of the Caltex petroleum company, and his eight year-old son Charles Mwiwa, were shot dead by unknown gunmen on the Kampala-Jinja Highway near Lugazi. Their bodies were thrown into Mabira Forest.

At this point, alarm bells started to ring among security circles. With the fall of Amin’s regime, most of his former henchmen like Major Bob Astles, Brig. Ali Fadhul, and Lt. Col. Nassur Abdallah had been arrested or had fled the country.

The priority of anybody who had once worked for the Amin regime, now condemned around the world and whose officials and agents were being hunted down, was to either flee the country or, for those who stayed around, to keep as low a profile as possible.

There would hardly have been a reason to conduct open acts of sabotage when it was clear to all that, with the arrival of the Tanzanian-UNLA force at the Uganda-Sudan border area of Koboko on June 3, 1979, the Amin era was now effectively over.

Besides, the bullet cartridges being found at the scene of these shooting incidents in Kampala showed that the guns used were the Chinese/Russian-made AK-47 assault rifles used by the Tanzanins and the UNLA, not the British-made G-3 rifles that the Uganda Army under Amin used as its basic weapon.

Although Ugandans still felt relief at the ouster of Amin from power and believed they were entering a new and happy chapter of their history, there was a growing sense of bewilderment and fear at the security situation.

If we had been liberated from the dread of Amin’s brutality and terror and Amin’s army too soundly beaten to ever be a factor again in Ugandan life, who were these armed men, in military uniform, who were terrorising Kampala?