Jew World Order

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.”