LONDON – I used to jog down the back roads of Jinja, the old cotton center laid bare by 15 years of murderous civil war. There was a dirt-covered sign pointing to a rutted road: “To the source of the Nile.” I would cut through the long grass and the sweet smell of jacaranda and frangipani, past the long abandoned Mango Café, and arrive at a sharp cleft in the hill. There, nestling below, the headwaters of the Nile burst into view. No wonder, I would think, that Winston Churchill called Uganda “the pearl of Africa, a fairy tale land”.
But in mind’s eye I could see the future and now it has arrived. Two hotels have grabbed the spot. And there is a plan, well advanced, to build a dam to provide electricity for Uganda’s rushing economic development. The country’s untamed beauty, preserved by misrule and war, is being transformed before the visitor’s eyes.
I was last here 17 years ago and my guide was a young Ugandan doctor who was not complaining about his salary of $17 a month. After the madness of dictator Idi Amin and his murderous sequel, Milton Obote, together with the likelihood of disease from unchecked sleeping sickness and Aids (Uganda then was the epicenter of Africa’s Aids epidemic,) if you had your life you were one of the lucky ones.
The rebel leader who helped overthrow Obote was a young man, Yoweri Museveni. Within a year he taken power and had purged the army and the civil service. Random killings were ended. So were executions. The markets were freed and the plethora of state companies privatized. The aid donors were invited back. The power lines were rebuilt, children were inoculated, drugs were shipped to derelict health centers and sleeping sickness was brought under control.
As for Aids, the warning sign in the Minister of Health’s waiting room seemed to work. “Beware of the sweetness and splendor of sex”, it read, “it could prove hazardous to your health and life”. Uganda now has made more progress in the fight against Aids than any other African country. The death rate has fallen sharply – and not just because of condoms but because abstinence has been encouraged from on high – by the president and his crusading wife – with telling effect.
The tourists are back in numbers. Hotels are sprouting all over and Kampala is barely recognizable. The Nile Mansions hotel, which once was requisitioned by Obote’s secret police, is being refurbished. Yet a visitor to suite 305 can still recall the images of the blood stained carpets and walls of what was a torture chamber.
No wonder the country is divided about the idea of Museveni running for another term of office next year. The fear of going back to the dark ages is one that Museveni’s admirers play on. Nevertheless, there are a good many Ugandans, including members of his cabinet, who feel the country should be today mature enough to emulate its neighbor, Tanzania, whose president has no doubts about stepping down this year after two terms in office.
When I put these questions to Museveni he dismissed them. “It’s not one-man rule if people vote for it.” And he points out that he can’t run again unless the constitution is altered and that can only happen if a democratically elected conference decides to do it. For Museveni, being president “is not about a career, as in Europe. It is not a job, it’s a cause.”
This reply begs the question, if the job of president is truly a vocation why did Uganda overstay its welcome in the Congo after it had driven the Sudanese out? There are well-documented reports that people close to him have benefited from the illegal exploitation of the Congo’s mineral resources. His answer is to say the matter has been referred to the director of public prosecutions. But he appears to be sitting on the case.
Western diplomats worry that if Museveni runs again popular agitation against him could take to the streets and if the army is called upon to continuously repress street demonstrations it could rebel and seize power as it has done before. “Uganda needs to see what it has never had – a peaceful handover of power”, said one ambassador.
Surely Museveni doesn’t want his country to repeat the experience of Africa’s earlier one-time economic success story, Cote d’Ivoire, where the country fell apart into feuding factions because President Félix Houphouët-Boigny decided to stay president until the day he died, without giving the opportunity for an elected successor to establish himself.
If Museveni repeats that mistake the dam at the head of the Nile might not be built and the frangipani will bloom unmolested, but the country will lose its remarkable momentum.
