Great Lives from History: The Twentieth Century

Yoweri Kaguta Museveni

by Robert F. Gorman

President of Uganda (1986-    )

Museveni brought considerable stability to Ugandan political life after seizing power in 1986, gradually bringing a country wracked by decades of brutal dictatorship and civil war toward greater economic and political progress and a dramatic reduction in the country’s HIV-AIDS infection rates.

Areas of achievement Government and politics, social reform

Early Life

Yoweri Kaguta Museveni (yoh-WEHR-ee kah-GEW-tah moo-sah-VAY-nee) was born to Esteri Kokundeka and Amos Kaguta, a cattle herder, into the Nyankole tribe in the Ntungamo province of Uganda. The location of his homeland so near the border with Rwanda leads his adversaries to claim that Museveni is Rwandan rather than Ugandan. The ethnic diversity of Uganda is a major cause of conflict in the country. Ethnic conflict would affect the later thinking of Museveni, who would insist that Uganda must overcome such divisions to achieve a unified political life.

From a young age Museveni was a religious and political activist. After attending Kyamate elementary school he pursued secondary education at Mbarara high school and the Ntare school. He discovered fundamentalist Christianity while in high school and was a leader among born-again Christians. His leadership skills became more evident during his studies at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, where he imbibed and embraced Marxist doctrine and established the University Students’ African Revolutionary Front. He took time away from his college studies to learn guerrilla military tactics in Mozambique with Samora Machel’s Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) and then returned to write a senior thesis on Frantz Fanon’s theories of revolution as they applied in Africa.

After college Museveni spent a short time serving in the intelligence service of Ugandan president Milton Obote . With Idi Amin’s successful coup d’etat in 1971, Museveni and other Obote supporters fled Uganda seeking asylum in neighboring Tanzania. There, Museveni was party to the planning of an abortive coup attempt against Amin in 1972.

Museveni then taught for a time at a cooperative college in Moshi, Tanzania, but throughout most of the 1970’s he worked to promote opposition to the Amin dictatorship, forming the Front for National Salvation (FRONASA) in 1973. He was married in 1973 to Janet Kataha, with whom he would have four children.

Life’s Work

Museveni, along with other anti-Amin activists, met in March, 1979, to resolve their differences and form a united opposition called the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF). Museveni, as leader of FRONASA, which now comprised thousands of soldiers loyal to him, was one of eleven persons on the UNLF’s executive committee, which was headed by Yusuf Lule. The UNLF jumped at the opportunity to participate in the liberation of its country from Amin’s rule.

In October, 1978, Amin had made the mistake of invading Tanzania to seize the disputed Kagera salient as Ugandan territory. In April, Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere ordered his forces to retake Kagera province and to invade Uganda by way of retaliation. Amin’s forces rapidly fell apart in late April, and Museveni briefly occupied a position of prominence in the post-Amin government as minister of state for defense.

Considerable shuffling of personnel in the post-Amin government followed, and Museveni was moved from defense to minister of regional cooperation and then served as vice chair of a presidential election commission. He founded the Ugandan Patriotic Movement (UPM), hoping to win election to the presidency. The party gained only one seat in parliament, and he, along with other losing parties, rejected the outcome of the election won by Obote; the election was fraught with irregularities. Museveni decided to break with Obote, fleeing to his ancestral region along with numerous supporters and forming the Popular Resistance Army. Museveni and his army began to practice the tenets of guerrilla resistance. He later joined forces with other resistance forces and formed the National Resistance Army (NRA) with its political wing, the National Resistance Movement (NRM), which would eventually become the vehicle through which Museveni would govern Uganda.

Museveni became an increasingly popular and effective leader of the NRA-NRM during the five-year struggle against Obote’s government. The Obote regime was facing increasing international criticism for its brutality and human rights abuses in attempting to repress resistance. Obote was eventually overthrown by his own military and General Tito Okello assumed command. The guerrilla struggle continued, however, along with rancorous and unsuccessful attempts to resolve the civil war peacefully. Okello’s forces gradually melted away under the pressure of Museveni’s NRA, which seized the capital city of Kampala on January 25, 1986. On January 29, Museveni was sworn in as Uganda’s ninth president in just twenty-four years of independence. He promised to restore democracy in Uganda. The road to democracy, however, would prove to be a long and winding one, with Museveni very much in charge of the process. He would hold the presidency longer than his predecessors combined, bringing to Uganda an unprecedented level of political stability at the national level. The benefits of this stability were considerable, but there would also be costs.

Stability helped Museveni establish resistance councils at the local level, which gave many Ugandans their first opportunity to participate in local politics outside the context of tribal affairs. Political parties were allowed at the national level, but they could not field candidates for election. Museveni insisted that all Ugandans, regardless of ethnic background, should support the NRM, or the “movement,” as it came to be called. Museveni also rejected his former beliefs in Marxist economics, embracing instead a neoliberal philosophy of economic reform, which included the dismantling of state enterprises, the growth of free enterprise, encouragement of domestic and foreign investment, and promotion of export trade.

These changes helped put the Ugandan economy on a much better footing. Greater levels of freedom for news media were granted, and women enjoyed an unprecedented rate of participation in Ugandan political life. Uganda also saw major progress in the reduction of HIV-AIDS infection through the implementation of Museveni’s so-called ABC program, which emphasized abstinence, being faithful in marriage, and condom distribution as a last resort. Because of these important reform measures, Museveni gained the confidence of the international community, winning substantial degrees of outside support and earning him plaudits as one of Africa’s senior “new leaders.”

However, as Museveni established his basis for rule, there were few real checks of his own authority. He involved Uganda in civil wars in neighboring Rwanda, Sudan, and Zaire (Congo). He resisted calls for greater levels of democracy inside Uganda, and he faced emerging internal resistance, which was in part precipitated by neighboring regimes retaliating for his meddling in their affairs. For example, Sudan supported the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda in retaliation for Museveni’s support of Southern Sudanese rebel forces under John Garang, a long-time ally of Museveni.

Furthermore, Museveni ruled Uganda for ten years without the benefit of an election, but in 1996 he permitted elections and won the presidency with more than three-quarters of the vote widely regarded as a referendum on Museveni’s reform policies. However, in subsequent years, Uganda became more deeply embroiled in conflicts in the Great Lakes region, and instability in the northern part of the country increased. Museveni stood for election again in 2001 and won, but he did so by a smaller margin in a hotly disputed contest. The second term was to have been his last because of the Ugandan constitution, but Museveni would seek and win a third term in 2006 after instituting multiple party politics. His margin of victory fell to 59 percent, diminished but still very strong.

Significance

Museveni has been without doubt Uganda’s most important postindependence leader. He overcame, for the most part, the highly divisive tribal politics of the country, which had led to vicious, vindictive, and even genocidal behavior by previous regimes. He has emerged as one of Africa’s top statesmen in the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He permitted, perhaps reluctantly, a gradual restoration of democracy in Uganda, which enjoyed an economic renaissance after years of national mismanagement. Known as the “pearl” of Great Britain’s African colonial possessions, Uganda’s promise of prosperity, once squandered, has largely been restored under Museveni.

On the other hand, Museveni’s interventionist foreign policy contributed to deadly conflicts in neighboring countries and to guerrilla war in the northern portions of Uganda. Still, many of these conflicts gradually surrendered to international diplomacy, and some hope exists for a generally peaceful future in the Great Lakes region. Museveni, then, may be regarded as a generally positive force in Uganda, and in Africa at large.

Further Reading

1 

Museveni, Yoweri K. Sowing the Mustard Seed: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Uganda. New York: Macmillan Education, 1997. In this book Museveni tells his own story, with an emphasis on his role in Uganda’s troubled political life.

2 

Oloka-Onyango, Joseph. “’New Breed’ Leadership, Conflict, and Reconstruction in the Great Lakes Region of Africa: A Sociopolitical Biography of Uganda’s Yoweri Kaguta Museveni.” Africa Today, Spring, 2004, pp. 29-54. A perceptive article assessing Museveni’s place as either a new leader or just another African strongman. Focuses on Museveni’s political significance.

3 

Ori Amaza, Ondoga. Museveni’s Long March: From Guerrilla to Statesman. Kampala, Uganda: Fountain, 1998. A review of Museveni’s life as a young man studying with FRELIMO in Mozambique. Covers the time when he honed his guerrilla skills to his rise to prominence as Uganda’s leader.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1941-1970: November, 1959: Rwandan Hutus Overthrow Tutsi Monarchy.

1971-2000: January 25, 1986: Museveni Captures Kampala; 1998: AIDS Devastates Africa.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Gorman, Robert F. "Yoweri Kaguta Museveni." Great Lives from History: The Twentieth Century, edited by Robert F. Gorman, Salem Press, 2008. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GL20C_1860.
APA 7th
Gorman, R. F. (2008). Yoweri Kaguta Museveni. In R. F. Gorman (Ed.), Great Lives from History: The Twentieth Century. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Gorman, Robert F. "Yoweri Kaguta Museveni." Edited by Robert F. Gorman. Great Lives from History: The Twentieth Century. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2008. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.