What the US is ignoring in Uganda

Last year, the Parliament of Uganda debated a law that would make habitual homosexual behavior punishable by death. Americans and Europeans were outraged. This East African nation is one of our closest African allies, and the recipient of some $16 billion in foreign aid during the past two decades.

Activists staged demonstrations outside Uganda’s embassies, organised petitions, sent funds to Ugandan gay rights groups, and denounced American fundamentalist Christians who were linked to the Ugandan pastors and politicians behind the bill. Western diplomats threatened to cut off aid to Uganda if the Anti-Homosexuality bill passed, and the bill died in Parliament in May.

What I’d like to know is this: where are those activists and diplomats now that the Ugandan government is inflicting even worse abuses against all Ugandans, gay and straight?

Since national elections in February, Uganda’s security forces have fired on peaceful demonstrators—killing at least nine people including a toddler—and imprisoned hundreds of others; the opposition leader Kizza Bessigye was shot in the hand and doused with so much tear gas and pepper spray he nearly went blind; soaring inflation, in part due to the looting of the Treasury to finance the ruling party’s election campaigns has caused the number of children hospitalised with malnutrition to triple.

Ruthless spending
Meanwhile, President Yoweri Museveni just spent $50 million of British development aid on a private Gulf Stream jet, described by its manufacturer as “the world’s most versatile and stylish” on the market.
When I was in Uganda last summer, I happened to pass a newsstand selling copies of Bukedde, the main Luganda-language paper.

On the cover that day were two images side-by-side: one showed Obama wagging his finger; the other showed Uganda’s President Museveni looking surprised and worried. “Obama Embarks on Uganda!” the headline read.

The story concerned a new US State Department report criticising government corruption and urging reform of the Electoral Commission—which was stacked with officials associated with Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM) party. Ugandan journalists wondered whether the Americans would impose sanctions if the elections were deemed unfair.

In other words, were Americans now going to take all human rights abuses as seriously as they took abuses against gays? Apparently not. Election related “irregularities” commenced at once.

The electoral register was bloated with dubious “voters”: 300 people with the same name and birth date were registered in one village, and over 200 people over 100 years of age were registered in another (Uganda’s average life expectancy is 53 years). When opposition groups complained, American and European embassies purchased millions of dollars worth of electronic equipment for registering voters—but no machine can correct a rotten system.

When I toured the country last summer, I saw ruling party candidates passing out Uganda shilling notes hand over fist. Some even used donated medicine to win over voters.

Police warning
Most of this money came directly from the Treasury and foreign aid programmes, but when journalists and civil society activists launched a “Return Our Money” campaign in protest, the police warned them to stop or they’d be charged with treason.

Days before the election, enormous tanks, fighter jets and anti-riot vehicles roared through the countryside, warning voters of what would happen if the elections didn’t go Museveni’s way.

On election day itself, soldiers reportedly advised people to vote NRM if they wanted to avoid a war. There were also reports of army involvement in ballot stuffing, multiple voting, and theft of ballot boxes. As expected, Museveni’s party won by a landslide.

However, opposition leaders claim that the votes announced at many of the polling stations, in the presence of both opposition and ruling party observers, didn’t match up with those announced by Museveni’s Electoral Commission.

The flood of cash into the economy during the elections amplified inflation, and the price of beans and matooke—the savory bananas that are the nation’s staple food—doubled. For the first time in living memory, the people of this fertile, rainy country are facing widespread food insecurity. Even in the days of Idi Amin and Milton Obote, this never happened on such a scale.