Uganda: Political background

In Uganda, Indigenous kingdoms were formed in the 14th century. Among them were the Buganda, Bunyoro, Toro, Ankole and Busoga. Over the following centuries, Buganda Kingdom dominated over the other kingdoms. During that period, people had plenty of time to work out their hierarchies, as there was very little penetration of Uganda from the outside until the 19th century. Despite the fertility of the land and its capacity to grow surplus crops, there were virtually no trading links with the east African coast. Contacts were finally made with Arab traders and European explorers in the mid-19th century - the latter came in search of ivory and slaves.

After the Treaty of Berlin in 1890 defined the various European countries' spheres of influence in Africa, Uganda, Kenya and the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba became British protectorates. The colonial administrators introduced coffee and cotton as cash crops and adopted a policy of indirect rule, giving the traditional kingdoms considerable autonomy, but favouring the recruitment of Buganda tribes people for the civil service. A few thousand Bugandan chiefs received huge estates from the British, based on which fortunes they made. Other tribes people, unable to get jobs from the colonial administration or make inroads in the Buganda-dominated commercial sector, were forced to seek other ways of gaining influence. The Acholi and Lango, for example, were dominant in the military. Through, this seeds for the intertribal conflicts that were to tear Uganda apart following independence.

A loose coalition led Uganda to independence in 1962 promising that the Buganda would have autonomy. It was not a particularly advantageous time for Uganda to come to grips with independence. Civil wars were raging in neighbouring southern Sudan, Zaïre (now Congo) and Rwanda, and refugees poured into the country. It also soon became obvious that Milton Obote had no intentions of sharing power with the Kabaka (the Bugandan king). Obote ordered his army chief of staff, Idi Amin, to attack the kabaka's palace.

Obote became president, the Bugandan monarchy was abolished and Idi Amin's star was on the rise. Nevertheless, events soon started to go seriously wrong. Obote rewrote the constitution to consolidate virtually all powers in the presidency. He then began to nationalize, without compensation, 50,000,000,000 worth of foreign assets. In 1969, Amin was implicated in a financial scandal and he responded to the bad press reports by staging a coup. Obote fled and so began Uganda's first reign of terror.

The army was empowered to shoot on sight anyone suspected of opposing the Amin’s government. Over the next eight years an estimated 300,000 Ugandans lost their lives. Amin's main targets were the Acholi and Lango tribes people, the professional classes and the country's 70,000-strong Asian community.

In 1972 the Asians - many of whom had come from other British colonies to work in Uganda's plantations as far back as 1912 - were given 90 days to leave the country with nothing but the clothes they wore.
During this period the economy collapsed, infrastructure crumbled, the country's prolific wildlife was machine-gunned by soldiers for meat, ivory and skins, and the tourism industry shuttered. The stream of refugees across the border became a flood. Inflation hit 1000%, and towards the end, the treasury was so bereft of funds that it was unable to pay the soldiers.

Faced with a restless army wracked by intertribal fighting, Amin foolishly chose to go to war with Tanzania. The Tanzanians rolled into the heart of Uganda. Amin fled to Libya. The 12,000 or so Tanzanian soldiers who remained in Uganda, supposedly to help with the country's reconstruction and to maintain law and order, turned against the Ugandans.

In 1980, the government was taken over by a military commission, which set a presidential election date for Uganda later that year. Milton Obote returned from exile in Tanzania to an enthusiastic welcome in many parts of the country and swept to victory in a blatantly rigged election. Like Amin, Obote favoured certain tribes. Large numbers of civil servants and army and police commanders belonging to southern tribes were replaced with Obote supporters from the north, and the prisons began filling once again. Reports of atrocities leaked out of the country and several mass graves were discovered. In mid-1985 Obote was overthrown in an army coup led by Tito Okello Lutwa.

Shortly after Obote became president in 1980, a guerrilla army opposed to his tribally biased government was formed in western Uganda. Yoweri Museveni, who had lived in exile in Tanzania during Amin’s reign, led it. From a group of 27 grew a guerrilla force of about 20,000, many of them-orphaned teenagers. In the early days, few gave the guerrillas, known as the National Resistance Army (NRA), much of a chance, but by the time Obote was ousted and Okello had taken over, the NRA controlled a large slice of western Uganda. Fighting proceeded in earnest between the NRA and Okello government troops, and by January 1986 it was clear that Okello's days were numbered. The NRA launched an all-out offensive and took the capital.

Despite Museveni's Marxist leanings, he proved to be a pragmatic leader, appointing several archconservatives to his cabinet and making an effort to reassure the country's influential Catholic community. At the same time, over 300,000 Ugandan refugees returned from across the Sudanese border. The economy took a turn for the better and aid and investment began returning to the country.

Museveni won democratic 'no-party' elections in 1994 and again in 1996 and 2001. In that time, key economic reforms were introduced and by the turn of the millennium, the economy was experiencing sustained growth, and even a modicum of prosperity.

Even then, Museveni faced a number of challenges in this period, notably in the north, which was plagued by various anti-government rebel factions such as the bizarre Christian group known as the Lords' Resistance Army, allied with Sudan's Islamic government, and the West Nile Bank Front, led by Idi Amin's former minister.

At the same time, the country's levels of AIDS and HIV infection grew to be among the highest in the world; in some villages the infection rate went up is as high as one in four. Museveni won another presidential term of office in 2001, and in 2002 concluded a peace deal with the Ugandan National Rescue Front. The following year Uganda pulled out of the war in Democratic Congo Kinshasa and a government committee recommended a transition to multiparty democracy