Uganda - President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni

The president of Uganda is former guerrilla chief Yoweri Museveni. He was born in 1944, raises about 1,500 head of cattle and became a guerrilla fighter in 1971. With the help of Tanzanian troops, he ousted Idi Amin in 1979. He married Janet Kataha in 1973 and has four children.

When word of Museveni and his guerrillas began popping up in the mid-1980s, they were the most obscure of players. In Kampala, moderates of various stripes had been at work trying to pull Uganda from the pit into which Amin had shoved it.

Uganda is still struggling to recover. Large portions remain insecure. Its military (Uganda's National Resistance Army [NRA], now with a political wing, the National Resistance Movement) is poorly armed and underpaid (they make about US$30-160 per month). But Museveni, without seeking the role, has become the most powerful man in Central and East Africa today.

Though he gets dissed a lot in his own country for not doing enough against poverty, suppressing human rights and calling Uganda's no-party system a "democracy" (after 14 years in power, the president begins his second five-year "term" in 2002), Museveni's got a good PR spin on with his support of the Sudanese rebels (the SPLA), which makes him buddies with Washington. When U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright swung through town back at the end of '97, she paid a visit to SPLA leader John Garang, boosting the legitimacy of Museveni's regime. Recently, Museveni has turned into a pop psychologist. He's been "studying" the families of young "terrorists" to see what makes them tick, and why they're so ticked off. "Government will approach their families and urge the parents to appeal to their children to give up and surrender before the army kills them," Museveni told a rally in June 1999. Museveni is Africa's Dear Abby.

Yoweri Kaguta Museveni

Princes' Road

P.O. Box 7069

Kampala

E-mail: museveni@starcom.co.ug

Tel.: 270331/9

http://www.uganda.co.ug/kags.htm