Museveni’s opinions on the World Bank’s decision to stop lending to Uganda were met with Bobi Wine’s rebuttal.
Museveni, General
The ideological ambiguity and policy nomadism of your four-decade rule are best exemplified by your recent outrage about the World Bank withholding future financing to Uganda.
Instead of taking responsibility for all that has gone wrong, you continued to place the blame elsewhere, notably on imperialists, neocolonial agents, saboteurs, bureaucrats, technocrats, the Cabinet, dishonest politicians, the media, etc. But whenever you claimed to have succeeded on your own, you were quick to claim credit.
Four weak and faulty premises are uncovered in your extensive argument, as well as the inescapably flawed conclusions you derive. Evidence reveals that you are Uganda’s top neocolonist in addition to those you are blaming for the country’s failing socioeconomic development.
The following four examples highlight how flawed your logic is:
DISTORTION OF HISTORY
You routinely give readers a distorted and incomplete picture of Uganda before 1986. Your false narrative asserted that the National Resistance Army had atoned for its sins in 1986 and that Uganda was a failed state with a variety of problems.
The current generation of young people needs to be aware that the State of Uganda maintained a number of functional parastatals despite the serious harm that the violence—in which you played a major role—meted out to people’s quality of life. It controlled prosperous companies as well as public buildings like district or regional referral hospitals and schools, which provided a launchpad for the desperately needed start-up. Your tyranny presided over the plunder and poor handling of these resources in the name of privatization.
You still haven’t explained why the country’s textile, public transportation, food processing, leisure facilities, agricultural cooperatives, and manufacturing capacities vanished, leaving places like Jinja, Bushenyi, Masaka, and Mbale shining lights of our young nation’s potential.
You have substituted Uganda’s public capital with terrible ploys like “Operation Wealth Creation” and agricultural cooperatives that were previously productive with “SACCOs,” which are an abject disaster.
You present the NRA as an innocent, well-meaning, and progressive actor, but this is not and never has been the case. A violent, corrupt force that made a considerable contribution to Uganda’s glacial socioeconomic change, it was and is now known by the moniker NRM. Neocolonialism is still going strong under you, sir.
You are neo-colonialism’s leading advocate.
Among the nine people who have occupied the office of President in the 61 years since our purported independence, you are the undeniable advocate of neo-colonial and neoliberal goals.
During your government, the sale of public utility infrastructure was orchestrated and supported by the same World Bank that you are now denouncing.
You have presided over our public sector’s sacrifice on the altar of foreign interests, as well as the careless deregulation, extreme liberalization, and sacrifice. To us, your hypocrisy is obvious.
You have offered the Bretton Woods gods a number of domestic investors, including Sembule Electronics, the Dairy Corporation, and a promising number of domestically held institutions. They were removed, and in their place you installed dubious foreign investors like Velupillai Kananathan, Rosa Whittaker, Kristian von Hornsleth, and Enrica Pinetti!
Instead of a local banking sector, we have a commercial banking system that is foreign-owned, extractive, poorly regulated, and designed to harm local industry through exorbitant lending rates and anti-SME development.
It doesn’t help matters that your government keeps borrowing money from commercial banks in spite of sensible policy suggestions to the contrary because this only makes things worse for the same private sector whose successes you keep praising.
At the UN General Assembly, our country has regularly backed imperialist positions on the so-called Global War on Terror, international trade legislation, agricultural policy, and educational policy under your regime.
You are an expert at converting the heroic personnel of our armed forces into mercenary labor that can be contracted out to anyone willing to pay. Ugandan troops are advancing Western objectives in several African countries under the absurd and fruitless flag of Pan Africanism.
Last but not least, the deliberate transfer of this crucial sector to the World Bank and underregulated, profit-driven private players means that millions of young Ugandans will never have access to the affordable, publicly funded, high-quality education that you and many others in your generation enjoyed, despite your modest upbringing. Please let’s have one more successful neocolonialist!
MISTREATING THE UGANDAN DEBT BURDEN
While acknowledging that borrowing has been harmful, you claimed to object to the huge debt load Uganda has accumulated. But that claim is untrue if you don’t understand the reasons why we have so much debt.
A significant factor is the public sector’s inefficiency. When you are in charge of a sizable, taxpayer-funded patronage network that includes over 70 ministers, hundreds of Resident District Commissioners (RDCs), countless presidential advisors, “special” assistants, and paramilitary organizations of all kinds, how is anyone supposed to take such a claim seriously?
The gerrymandering (or, more correctly, the mushrooming of electoral constituencies) you oversaw raised the number of elective seats to the point where Parliament alone now has more than 500 legislators, up from the initial 30.
Additionally, the Life Presidency you oversee incurs a massive cost for taxpayers due to its repeated requests for extra (and classified) spending from Parliament and the patronage system it enjoys that is funded by tax dollars. Budget cuts rarely affect the extravagant lifestyle your group enjoys, but they destroy important sectors like public health and education.
Your insistence on maintaining the status quo has caused the district, the national referral hospital network, and the general public health infrastructure to be destroyed. The once-reliable hospitals in Iganga, Itojo, Mbale, Soroti, and Lira are now moribund, understaffed, and death traps due to your replacement of those facilities with equally horrible health centers. The only thing you can hope for is that the United States Agency for
Development would make up for your shortfalls by financing essential public health necessities including meeting the medical and health requirements of our military services. Who is the neocolonialist in this situation?
When you reduce the size and cost of government and make loans available for useful purposes rather than patronage, any right-thinking Ugandan would take your claims of enhanced public sector efficiency seriously.
FAILED LEADERSHIP AND A LACK OF IDEOLOGICAL CONVICTION.
The three aforementioned weaknesses in your approach to handling public affairs are combined by your rejection of the ideas you espoused in two books and several speeches, especially What Is Africa’s Problem? In addition, you have disregarded Chairman Mao Zedong’s ideas, whose example you have often claimed to follow in terms of socioeconomic reform and national independence. Despite having previously accused others of lacking ideology and intellectual depth, you have been their primary spokesman in the Great Lakes region. What does that say about the ideological stance you hold?
You’ve also mixed up economic growth, which is about statistics, with economic development, which is about qualitative advancement. This is similar to equating a person’s age-based development with maturity and responsible adulthood. Due to the fact that economic growth is a function of numbers, it does not accurately reflect the distribution of wealth or noticeable improvements in quality of life indicators. The National Unity Platform (NUP) has consistently defended the logic and policy recommendations that are backed by the Bureau of Statistics findings, which vehemently contradict your claims.
Your claim that Uganda’s economy will pass the half trillion dollar mark “in a few years” is the height of falsification and lying as a result. The URA’s struggles with revenue collection over the previous quarters and the high rates of SME mortality make it clear that this estimate is false.
The truth is usually brief, so I don’t need to expand on these obvious difficulties the way you did when you wrote over 30 pages to defend your “successes” after nearly 40 years in power! The mere fact that you felt the need to ‘highlight’ for the public your alleged victories should tell you all you need to know.
I will thus make the following judgment based on the information I have provided: The use of a biblical phrase from the Common Book of Prayer to start your statement is the height of irony and hypocrisy. I’m wondering if you didn’t feel bad or contradict yourself by saying that.
You, Sir, are the one who acted improperly and neglected to complete tasks that you ought to have completed. Your lack of self-authenticity. Observe yourself in the mirror for a while.
