Personalizing power in Uganda

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 18, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 23-37

  Mwenda, Andrew M ^a,b  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment (ACODE)   (Uganda)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34547820857     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jod.2007.0048     Document Type: Review

References (12)

1. For example, see The World Bank Experience with Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Volume VI: Uganda Case Study (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2000);
2. and Uganda: Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Country Case Study Series (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1998).
3. Government White Paper on Constitutional Review and Political Transition (Entebbe: Government Publishing House, 2004).
4. Parliament had voted in May 2005 to hold the referendum on multipartism at the end of July. On 28 July 2005, voters went to the polls and ended the "no-party" era. For more background on Uganda's political history plus a guardedly optimistic analysis of the shift from Museveni's original "no-party" or "broad-based" government to multiparty competition, see Edward Kannyo, "Change in Uganda: A New Opening?" Journal of Democracy 15 (April 2004): 125-39.
5. A more skeptical diagnosis may be found in Anne Mughisha's comment entitled "Museveni's Machinations," Journal of Democracy 15 (April 2004): 140-44.
6. Besigye, a former officer in Museveni's army who had become a critic of the "no-party" system, had won 28 percent to Museveni's 69 percent in the 12 March 2001 election.
7. Yoweri K. Museveni, What Is Africa's Problem? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000);
8. and Sowing the Mustard Seed: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Uganda (New York: Macmillan, 1997).
9. Daniel Green, "Ghana: Structural Adjustment and State (Re)formation," in Leonardo Villalon and Philip Huxtable, eds., Critical Juncture: The African State Between Disintegration and Reconfiguration (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1997), 189.
10. Robert Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984);
11. and Goran Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
12. Examples of the regime's misuse of funds are not lacking. For instance, since 1998 President Museveni has had the use of a luxury jet aircraft that costs US$22,000 in public funds per day to maintain and operate. According to estimates from Uganda's Ministry of Education, the average cost of building a primary-school classroom is $4,200. Assuming that a classroom seats fifty students, this means that money which could have given schoolrooms to 728,000 Ugandan children (many of whom now study under mango trees) has instead gone to finance the rarefied travel habits of a single man. Other examples might include Museveni's bloated cabinet and squadrons of presidential appointees, which cost altogether $370 million per year; or the $40 million per annum that goes into the pockets of dishonest generals as pay for "ghost soldiers" who exist only as names on military payrolls.