Museveni, guerilla leader turned textbook dictator predicts big win

KAMPALA, Wednesday

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who is seeking re-election on Friday, has stamped out a dozen rebellions and outfoxed scores of political opponents during his 25-year rule.

A charismatic and at times hilarious public speaker, Mr Museveni won praise abroad and support at home for adopting progressive policies, installing a disciplined army, and shepherding Uganda through years of economic growth.

But, in 2011, Museveni’s Uganda is plagued by poor service delivery, a feckless parliament, and a justice system that has proven incapable of suppressing egregious government corruption, analysts say.

Mr Museveni, who has over the past 25 years expanded from trim rebel leader to rotund head of state, is likely to win another five-year term in the February 18 elections.

Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday Mr Museveni said he was confident of a “big win” in Friday’s poll.

“It will be a big win,” he told reporters at the presidential palace here. “The results are going to be very good. We shall win with a big majority,” he said.

A total of seven candidates are running against Mr Museveni who is already the region’s longest-serving leader and who is widely expected to secure re-election.

“We are not worried at all ... you just wait, you will see,” he told reporters. Wednesday is the final day of campaigning ahead of the vote. After leaving Entebbe Museveni is expected to head into the capital Kampala for his final meeting.

If his regime doesn’t change course it “could relegate Uganda to the list of unstable African nations,” US Ambassador Jerry Lanier wrote in a leaked cable, accusing the president of “autocratic tendencies”.

Opposition leader Kizza Besigye is also on the last day of his campaign trail in and around Kampala. Many commentators think Friday’s vote could be the closest in Museveni’s history.

In 1996, the veteran leader, who fought his way to power in 1986, took 75 per cent of the vote, but his share dropped to 69 per cent 2001 and to 59 per cent in the 2006 election.

Attention is already shifting to the immediate post-poll period, with Dr Besigye vowing to conduct his own tally.

Dr Besigye, who is taking on Museveni for the third time and who is regarded as his main rival, has claimed only rigging could deprive him of victory and warned that Uganda was ripe for an Egypt-style revolt.

Dr Besigye has in the past failed to nullify fraud-tainted elections in court and for his third presidential bid, he has promised to conduct a parallel count of the votes and declare national results 24 hours after polling ends.

Opposition leaders plan to deploy a team of 40 observers to 95 per cent of the country’s 24,000 polling stations to guard against rigging.

Born to a farming family, probably in 1944, Mr Museveni, who nearly always sports a beige safari hat secured with a chin strap when outdoors, emerged in the 1970s as one of many exiled Ugandans working to topple the military dictator, Idi Amin Dada.

His Tanzania-based Front for National Salvation united, with the Tanzanian army’s backing, ousted the strongman in 1979, and Museveni was named to a military commission charged with overseeing the restoration of civilian rule in Uganda.

He swore that if the 1980 elections were not free and fair he would go to the bush and fight. Early in 1981 his National Resistance Army overran remote military barracks in his native western Uganda.

Five years later the NRA captured Kampala and Museveni became president. Shortly after taking power, Museveni argued Africa’s problem was leaders who refuse to retire.

His decision two decades later to scrap presidential term-limits and to retain power indefinitely is, according to many former allies, his greatest betrayal.

“In his imagination he thinks he’s the only one who can change the fortunes of this country. He doesn’t believe in institutions, he just believes in himself,” Mugisha Muntu, Museveni’s longest serving army commander, told AFP.

Museveni defeated or struck deals with some 14 rebel groups, although it took him until 2006 to expel the Lord’s Resistance Army, who terrorised Uganda’s north for more than 20 years.

One of the first African leaders to speak openly about Aids, he spearheaded a campaign that reduced Uganda’s prevalence rate from over 20 to around 6 per cent.

He liberalised the economy, bringing goods and renewed prosperity to the once destitute capital, Kampala. (AFP)