By Online Team

23^rd July 2012:

One of Britain’s top newspapers, The Telegraph, has accused the British government under Prime Minister David Cameron’s leadership of pouring aid into an autocratic Uganda led by President Yoweri Museveni.  In his piece, the author David Blair said:

To hold an opposition rally in Uganda is to run the gauntlet of riot police laden with rubber batons and tear gas who lurk at key junctions across the capital, Kampala.

Ingrid Turinawe, a former parliamentary candidate, suffered at their hands not for staging a rally, but simply for trying to drive to one. “They blocked my car and all of a sudden they were forcing me out,” she remembered.

“They grabbed and groped my breast several times. They bundled me on to a police van. They were beating me, kicking me all the way to the police station.”

Like many opponents of President Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s autocratic leader, Mrs Turinawe is quite accustomed to arrest and assault. But this violent sexual harassment, carried out by police officers in public, was the most traumatic and humiliating ordeal the mother of five has yet endured.

“They pulled me out of the car by my breast. They were scratching me, all over my body. My breast was injured. I was in a lot of pain. I was treated for a whole week after that,” said Mrs Turinawe, 38. “They were using dirty language. They were saying ‘you have to stop this, or you will die’. Now, if I get home late, my children say ‘we were going to contact the police to see if they had killed you’.”

Far from being unusual, this kind of treatment is routinely meted out to Mr Museveni’s critics. Kizza Besigye, the national opposition leader, has been the target of relentless persecution: assaulted, doused in pepper spray, drenched in tear gas, shot with a rubber bullet and arrested at every turn on bewildering charges ranging from treason to unlawful assembly to rape.

Barely a week goes by without Mr Besigye appearing in court; he has even been prosecuted for allegedly disrupting traffic. All this amounts to an abuse of the “law to achieve a political aim,” said David Mpanga, his lawyer.

Meanwhile, violent disorder in Kampala has become a monthly — if not weekly – occurrence as Mr Museveni tries to suppress mounting discontent.

Yet Uganda will receive £101.5 million of British aid this year, with £22.5 million going straight into government coffers, albeit reserved for health, education and administrative improvement.

Perhaps the only point of agreement between Mr Museveni and Mr Besigye is that Britain should be more careful with its money. London’s cross-party consensus in favour of increasing the budget of the Department for International Development (DFID) is matched by unity between Uganda’s rivals that some of this aid is damaging.

For different reasons, the president and the opposition leader have reached the same conclusion: they both want Britain to write fewer cheques. Mr Museveni believes that aid for “governance” or “capacity-building”, two of DFID’s key priorities, is inherently insulting.

“Quite a bit of [aid] is used for non-core and arrogant areas such as the so-called ‘governance’ issues, capacity building etc,” he wrote in May. “I call these non-core and arrogant because the people of Uganda do not need assistance in governance.”

Meanwhile, Mr Besigye wants Britain and other donors to stop putting money into Ugandan government coffers unless democratic reform takes place. “I think it is really scandalous that any country should be giving what they call budgetary support,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “If you want to give aid, it should be project aid rather than money that is put in the government kitty.”

Foreign donors provide over a third of Uganda’s national budget, with Britain the second largest bilateral contributor. The silver lining is they have enough “leverage” to insist on political reform, said Mr Besigye. The problem, he added, was they were failing to use this influence to full effect.

So Mr Museveni has been able to slant every election in his favour by hand-picking the Electoral Commission that runs the contests. Creating an independent body to administer clean elections should be top of the list of donor demands, added Mr Besigye.

“They should use the levers they have — and I believe they have significant levers in their hands to influence political and electoral reforms,” he said.

Stephen O’Brien, junior minister for international development, said that Britain’s direct budgetary support for Uganda had been cut by a third since 2010. The remaining funds had been “redirected” to “specific projects aimed at improving health services and financial management, which will ensure we continue to help the poorest Ugandan families”.

Uganda’s population doubles every 25 years and now exceeds 33 million. National income is less than $500 per head, making this one of the poorest countries in the world.

Mr O’Brien said that Britain was “at the forefront of work to promote human rights around the world, and regularly lobbies Governments which violate those rights”.

With or without British lobbying, however, the signs are that Mr Museveni is becoming more authoritarian. A draft law now before parliament would force anyone holding a “public meeting” to seek police permission at least a week in advance.

The Public Order Management Bill defines a “public meeting” as more than “three persons” gathering to discuss the “principles, policy, actions or failure of any government”.

Clause Eight empowers the police to deny permission “for any reasonable cause”. That could mean anything, said Mr Mpanga, one of Uganda’s leading lawyers. “The powers vested in the police are too broad: they can form a subjective view and just refuse,” he added.

Once, Kampala was a placid capital thick with palm fronds and banana trees. Today, the city has modern shopping malls for the elite – and fetid slums with tin shacks for an impoverished majority. Year on year, the shanty towns expand across once fertile hills and Mr Museveni becomes steadily more unpopular in his own capital.

Those who know him are not surprised by his descent into autocracy. The former guerrilla leader seized power by fighting his way into Kampala in January 1986; even today, the parliament building still bears the scars of that battle.

He took over a shattered country that had endured unbroken civil war and dictatorship since Britain’s departure in 1962. The outrages of two tyrants, Idi Amin and Milton Obote, scarred Uganda’s first 23 years of independence.

Amin, a grotesque parody of an African leader, butchered at least 200,000 people. Obote, less eccentric but equally ruthless, probably killed even more.

The fact that Mr Museveni fought both of these dictators helps explain why many Ugandans still support him. In 1981, he started with 27 volunteers and built one of the most effective guerrilla armies in African history, waging war on Obote so successfully that the tyrant was eventually deposed by his own army chief.

After winning the presidency, Mr Museveni rebuilt the state, reformed the economy and restored stability, achieving genuine and widespread popularity. Among his allies at that time was Mr Besigye, who was his personal doctor.

But Mr Museveni had a familiar flaw: he was obsessed by power and convinced of his own indispensability. “Anybody who understands President Museveni will know that his mission in life is power, power, power,” said Mr Besigye.

Under the constitution, he should have stepped down in 2006 when his second term ended. But Mr Museveni simply amended the document and stayed in office, ignoring the half-hearted protests of Tony Blair’s government.

After 26 years in power, few doubt that he wants to rule for the rest of his life. Mr Museveni is only 68 — youthful by the standards of African leaders — so another decade or two of dominance is realistic.

But critics predict he will become more dictatorial the longer he reigns. Livingstone Sewanyana, head of the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative, said the president was deeply afraid of a Ugandan version of the Arab Spring. “The underlying beliefs are twofold: one, the state fears that what happened in North Africa could also happen here. The other is they know their popularity has been waning over time.”

The overriding goal, he added, was “preservation of the regime and protection of ill-gotten wealth”.

The lush green hills around Kampala are studded with the whitewashed mansions of a corrupt elite that has prospered under Mr Museveni.

They have every chance of becoming richer still: in 2015 Uganda will start producing oil from beneath Lake Albert with an output target of 200,000 barrels per day. From then onwards, billions of dollars of revenues will flow into the president’s hands.

In speech after speech, he looks forward to the day when he can reduce Uganda’s dependence on foreign donors to zero. If Britain and its allies have the weight to restrain Mr Museveni today, they may not wield that influence for much longer.

This, said Mr Sewanyana, created a closing window of opportunity to curb his excesses, starting with the Public Order Management Bill. “When we realise more money from oil,” he said, “the willingness to listen to other players will be reduced and the chances of repression and abuse will increase.” END.  Login to www.ugandacorrespondent.com every Monday to read our top stories mid-week for our updates

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