|
|
|
Foreign Policy
Summer 1998
Sowing the Mustard Seed: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Uganda
by Yoweri Kaguta Museveni
Reviewed by Gilbert M. Khadiagala *
Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni was a prominent figure during Bill Clinton’s recent trip to Africa. That visit sought to highlight Africa’s political renaissance, particularly the role of leaders such as Museveni, in using state power to rebuild three decades of decaying political systems. While in Uganda, Clinton lent legitimacy to fragile, yet hopeful, trends of reconstruction by promising an American partnership with the new Africa. But most observers of the much publicized visit missed the unparalleled opportunity it gave Museveni to articulate themes dear to Africa’s new generation of politicians: responsibility and leadership.
Two examples from Clinton’s visit suffice to illustrate these themes. First, Museveni refused to be part of the bandwagon demanding an American apology for the ravages of slavery. Instead, with characteristic candor, he insisted that the primary responsibility belonged at the feet of the precolonial African chiefs who had sold their own people for trinkets. Second, while conventional wisdom decries the world’s marginalization of Africa, Museveni argued that it is local leaders who have marginalized Africa through their failed political and economic policies.
Sowing the Mustard Seed captures the broad outlines of Museveni’s vision of African leadership and responsibility. This vision emerges through a long-winded, historical narrative that catalogues his life from childhood in western Uganda, to the guerrilla wars of the 1970s and 1980s, and ends with the presidential elections of 1996. This is an autobiography written with a passion for detail, the inevitable result, perhaps, of a desire to want to tell all. If you are looking for the trees, you will need a lot of patience ploughing through the forest. For we not only see Museveni as a child herding cattle, but from an early age, as one educating his people, the Banyankole, about modern practices of cattle rearing and agriculture. From his youth, therefore, he was sold on the idea of modernization through formal education. But he is also skeptical of the Christian passivity that led many Africans to transfer their welfare and responsibility to God’s mercy, and during most of the independence period, to governments.
In his early days, Museveni forged close links with a cohort of "young nationalists" who were to join him in his political struggles during the tumultuous years following Uganda’s independence. Organized first as promoters of pan-Africanist ideals, the group broadened its concerns to the scourge of ethnic politics. The key to Uganda’s problems, Museveni says, stemmed from "opportunistic" and "sectarian" leadership. Before he led his National Resistance Movement to power in 1986, claims Museveni, "Uganda’s leaders had not been able to handle correctly the relatively simple problem of building national unity."
In his relentless search for what he describes as "principled politics," Museveni casts Milton Obote, the country’s first civilian president, as the villain of Ugandan politics. As early as 1966, when Obote plunged Uganda into chaos by suspending its constitution, Museveni notes that he contemplated going into exile with his friends to launch an armed struggle: "We knew that dictators had to be actively opposed and that they would not just fall off by themselves like ripe mangoes." Museveni vilifies Obote for exacerbating the country’s ethnic and religious differences and, more significantly, for creating the political conditions that led to the emergence of General Idi Amin and the subsequent militarization and destruction of the fabric of Ugandan society. This, in short, is the political crisis that the nrm has sought to reverse.
Obote and Amin, we are told, symbolize the larger problem of "the political bankruptcy of the independence generation of African leaders," who exploited sectarian differences for personal gains and, in turn, destroyed the foundations of nationhood. The bulk of the book describes how Museveni, imbued with a messianic zeal, sought to build a movement that sowed the seeds for new structures where future leaders could create national unity without the personal ambitions of self-advancement and corruption. In Museveni’s Uganda, the instruments of regeneration have been the army and the "no-party movement" system, which seeks to build a consensus across a wide spectrum of Ugandan society. The military has been the essential tool for recreating the state, restoring order and the rule of law. Yet, despite 12 years of rule, the army does not seem to be doing well in pacifying communal wars in northern and southwestern Uganda—casting doubt on Museveni’s image as a domestic modernizer and regional leader. Although Museveni attributes the northern insurgence to a lack of "individual entrepreneurial spirit" among its inhabitants, his critics have accused him of relying inordinately on military means to resolve the conflict. He might take seriously the recent advice of United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan that "Africa must demonstrate the will to rely on political rather than military responses to problems."
Yet, when it comes to Uganda’s future, the decisive struggle is on the economic front—a task that Museveni vividly depicts as jump-starting his backward country into a modern industrial society (a tall order for an agricultural society dependent primarily on foreign aid). One function of leadership in a backward country, he contends, is to disseminate the virtues of responsibility and wealth creation. Through rural "teaching sessions," he has exhorted Ugandans about poverty reduction, monetization of the economy, and the need for a new social contract between the individual and the state. Although he has won the hearts and minds of peasants whose lives have improved markedly, Museveni has invited the ire of "radical theorists" and bureaucrats who question his patriotism on everything from privatization to his decision to welcome back the Asians expelled by Amin. Museveni has nothing but praise for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which made "us realize the importance of macro-economic tools such as letting prices find their own level." As a star pupil of the Bretton Woods institutions with regard to economic reforms, Uganda has been rewarded with Western largesse and, more recently, debt relief.
Is economic reconstruction, at whatever price, a lesser evil than the perils of poverty? Museveni’s response is an unabashed "yes." This view stands in stark contrast with the opinions of South African president Nelson Mandela, who criticized Clinton following his visit to Cape Town for peddling interventionist economic policies that many South Africans believe are bound to erode what remains of African sovereignty. While Mandela has pointedly criticized the stringent rules contained within the U.S. African Growth and Opportunity Act, Museveni stands to be one of the beneficiaries of this legislation, which rewards countries that undertake fundamental political and economic reforms. These two differing positions reflect broader questions about the mode of integrating Africa into the global economy, questions that Africans have only now begun to confront. One suspects that Museveni will triumph in these debates, as he has done over his domestic critics who have often accused him of "betraying our principles and selling out to Western ideology."
Throughout this book, one senses Museveni’s yearning to fill the intellectual void left in eastern Africa with the retirement of Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere. Museveni seems to want to be the new philosopher-king, cajoling his people with presidential wisdom on all manner of things. But if this tome is his entry into the annals of philosophic presidencies, then he does not quite measure up to Nyerere’s legacy. The diatribes and invectives against his opponents that litter almost every page demean the philosophical tradition of moderation and caution. Besides, Nyerere’s leadership stemmed from deep-seated, yet unchanging convictions born of grand conceptions of the individual and society. Museveni’s ideas are limited and pragmatic, nurtured in the battlefields of Uganda’s rural Luwero Triangle and within the constraints of global capitalism. This book is steeped more in the narrow convention of a street fighter than the contemplative tone of a scholarly treatise.
Notes
*: Gilbert M. Khadiagala is an associate professor of African studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and author of Allies in Adversity: The Frontline States in Southern African Security (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994). Back.