Academic literature on the topic 'Uganda. President (1980- : Obote)'

The political history of post-colonial Uganda is about as fascinating as that of any post-colonial state. The styles of key political figures, including Milton Obote and Idi Amin Dada, who have had the privilege of leading the country, are central to this fascination. Yet, since becoming Uganda’s leader in 1986, President Yoweri Museveni appears to have outdone his predecessors so much so that an entire generation cares little of the country’s history before Museveni. In 2021, the Ugandan people are scheduled to go to the polls in a presidential election. Following the success of a bill in parliament to expunge an upper age limit to contest for the office of president, the seventy-five -year-old Museveni is set to seek an additional mandate. Unlike in his previous electoral contests, however, Museveni faces the challenge of a man less than half his age. Thirty-seven year-old Robert Kyagulanyi is among the most successful popular musicians in East Africa. Kyagulanyi has since exploited his success and fame to become an elected Member of Uganda’s Parliament. Barely two years after the artist materialised as a politician, the Ghetto President, as he is popularly known, has declared his intention to run for the office Museveni occupies, against Museveni. Since Museveni permitted electoral contests for the presidency of Uganda, he has remained defiantly invincible. How does Kyagulanyi propose to undo this, and why does he think he can, to the extent of daring? Drawing on a socio-biographical analysis of the celebrity MP, some strategic interviewing and student-participant observation, the article engages the dynamics inherent with some of these issues.

On 24 May 1966 the 500-year-old kingdom of Buganda came to an end. That was the day that Prime Minister Obote sent Colonel Idi Amin to attack the Mengo palace of Kabaka Frederick Mutesa, who was also the President of Uganda. A 120-man bodyguard defended the Kabaka; Amin had automatic and heavy weapons. Nevertheless, Obote was much annoyed that the palace held out against Amin's troops. An audience watched the battle from nearby hilltops, where expatriates and others brought out folding chairs, until a mid-afternoon thunderstorm sent everyone scurrying for cover. The Kabaka used this interruption to scale the rear wall of Mengo palace, where he hailed a passing taxicab and set off for Burundi and ultimately exile in London. Obote divided Buganda into two separate districts (East Mengo and West Mengo), promoted Amin, and gave him the palace as a barracks for his “paratroop” battalion, and more importantly also gave him Buganda's legislative hall—the Bulange—to become Amin's national military headquarters.The casualties in the “battle of Mengo” were certainly few in number compared to the destruction Amin would wreak after his coup in 1971. But one invisible casualty of the Bulange occupation was especially significant for historians. The Bulange was not only the seat of the Lukiiko, the Ganda legislature, it was also the storage building for the Buganda government archives, which went back to the 1890s, and were still well organized anu maintained in 1956-58 when Peter Gutkind made use of them for his doctoral research. By 1963 storage space was becoming scarce when Rowe made several visits to Shaykh Ali Kulumba, the Speaker of the Lukiiko. Shaykh Kulumba opened up cupboards and closets packed with archival folders from floor to ceiling. Clearly the archives were still being preserved, but organization and access had suffered. Three years later, when Amin occupied the Bulange, he simply destroyed the entire archive—the historical record of sixty years of Buganda government ceased to exist.

AbstractThe presence at Uganda's 1980 general elections of a Commonwealth Observer Group might be seen as a seminal moment. This was the first formal international observation of polls in a sovereign African state and the precursor of multiple similar missions that later became routine. Yet the 1980 mission sits uneasily in the history of election observation. The observers endorsed the results despite evidence of malpractice, and Uganda plunged into civil war within months. Internationally, the mission is now either forgotten or treated as an embarrassment. Within Uganda, it has been denounced as part of an outsider conspiracy to foist an unwanted president on an unwilling people. This article argues that the 1980 mission was neither entirely seminal nor an aberration, and that both the elections and observation were driven partly by actors within Uganda rather than simply imposed by outsiders. The availability of UK government records allows us to see the events of 1980 as a particularly clear example of a recurring “observers’ dilemma.” Ideally, elections combine democracy and state-building. They offer people a choice as to who will lead or represent them, and at the same time they assert through performance a crucial distinction between a capable, ordering state and a law-abiding citizenry. Yet these two aspects of elections may be in tension; a poll that offers little or no real choice may still perform “stateness” through substantial, orderly public participation. When that happens in what would now be called a “fragile state,” should international observers denounce the results?