Uganda’s relationships with other states in the past six decades

Britain’s move to grant Uganda the much sought-after self-rule in 1962 couldn’t have come at a worse time, the period in which an ideological tug of war, which came to be known as the Cold War, ensued across the globe.

It was a struggle for world hegemony between the Global North, led by the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or the Soviet Union.

With African countries effervescing with anti-colonial jingoism while under Western European imperial control, the Soviets viewed the situation as being ripe for their ideological expansion.

Uganda by independence was a moderately small country by African benchmarks, gifted with conducive climatic and soil conditions, especially in the most populated area around Lake Victoria and to the west which birthed a prosperous peasantry which cultivated mainly coffee and cotton. 

The economy was also boosted by some minerals mined, particularly copper, but not enough to be imperative in world terms. However, in 1968 world powers were forced to pay attention to this tiny East African country when Apollo Milton Obote, its president at the time, proclaimed a shift to the left (Socialism) when he announced an ideological document he dubbed ‘The Common Man’s Charter’.

“The resources of the country, material and human, be exploited for the benefit of all the people in Uganda in accordance with the principles of Socialism,” the Common Man’s Charter partly read. “In our move to the left strategy, we affirm that the guiding economic principle will be that means of production and distribution must be in the hands of the people as a whole.”

Despite being the brain behind the Common Man’s Charter, Obote, like many Ugandan presidents who followed him, was couched in the language of non-alignment. Obote, for example, declared: “We in Uganda are against any political blocs in Africa or in the world. We don’t believe in a divided Africa or foreign bases… We believe in non-alignment.”

In her research entitled major shifts in Uganda’s foreign policy, Susan Aurelia Gitelson says in an indication of passive foreign policy advocated by Obote by 1963, Uganda had a representative only in the former colonial country, Great Britain, although six foreign powers had missions in Kampala: China, France, Germany, Great Britain, the Sudan and the United States. With the USSR, according to Gitleson, establishing an embassy in 1964 bringing the total to seven.

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Being non-aligned, which means not officially aligning with or against any major power bloc, is easier said than done and this became clear to Obote as realities set in forcing the West to play against the East.

In 1964, there was an attempted mutiny of the East African armies, forcing Uganda and Kenya, which was under Jomo Kenyatta, to strengthen their ties with the British army which had restored order. 

Obote went a mile further and requested the Israelis and the Russians to help train the Ugandan army and air force in an effort to be more autonomous both militarily and politically.

At the economic level, Uganda naturally had its main trade links with Britain from whom it received most of its technical assistance and capital aid, but the British were exasperated by Obote’s “move to the left” and by his vocal disparagement of British arms sales to South Africa which was under the apartheid regime.

“In the spirit of pan-Africanism, Obote decided to assist other countries break free from the shackles of imperialism. Take for example Obote facilitated training for South African antiapartheid fighters in Kampala. In the same spirit Obote made the decision to assist the Anyanya fighters of south Sudan who sought to secede from the north,” Miriam Kyomuhangi says in her PhD thesis entitled A Foreign policy determined by sitting presidents: A case study of Uganda from independence to date.   

Still, Obote’s intervention in Sudan had an invisible hand. Shortly after the 1967 Six-Day War – the war between Israel and a coalition of Arab states primarily comprising Jordan, Syria and Egypt – the Jewish state sold Uganda weapons worth $7m. 

By 1969, Israel was channelling weapons through Uganda into southern Sudan, where the Anyanya, a ragtag rebel outfit, had been fighting the Arab-dominated Sudanese government since the 1950s.

In the last years of his administration, Obote had taken strides towards developing strong bonds with the East - the Russians and the Chinese. 

“This coincided with his growing domestic concern with Socialism, his closer regional ties with Tanzania, which was becoming more dependent upon China, and his increasingly radical stance on African issues. By 1969 the Russians and Chinese were listed third and fourth in the amounts of loans offered to Uganda, following Britain and the World Bank, but Uganda was still unable to utilise their offers fully in actual projects,” Gitelson says.

Amin overthrows Obote

In 1971, while Obote was in Singapore attending a Commonwealth meeting, Idi Amin, the commander of the armed forces, turned against him.

Amin carried out a coup with the help of the British and the Israelis who had been put off by a number of Obote’s foreign policy moves. When Amin ascended to power he significantly expanded the number of diplomatic contacts that by 1975 Uganda had representatives in 12 countries: China, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Ghana, Great Britain, India, Rwanda, USA, USSR, West Germany and Zaire.

On the other hand, a full 58 countries were now accredited to Uganda, including eight from the West, seven Communist states, and 23 African countries. “This placed Uganda among the African states engaged most actively in international interactions,” Gitelson says.

Initially, Amin had many problems being accepted not only internationally but also regionally, with Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere’ who had harboured the now ousted Obote, leading the charge against the dictator’s presidency.

The Organisation of African Unity (OAU), now called African Union (AU), had snubbed Amin by moving the 1971 summit from Kampala to Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa.

Unsurprisingly only two countries – Israel and Britain – which had developed a loathing for Obote, seemed willing to recognise Amin’s regime without further ado.  

Soon after taking power Amin, who had suspended the Constitution, visited Britain in July 1971 where he was promised a lot of gifts. 

“….he was welcomed and offered sophisticated military equipment— but not Harrier jets—provided that he paid for it. Apparently, the British expected him to restore their traditionally prominent position in Uganda,” says Gitelson.

Amin, who was Muslim, also visited Israel in 1971 begging for weaponry. “Amin visited Israel twice in July 1971 to obtain support and arms. He wished at this time to invade Tanzania in order to gain an outlet to the sea through the Indian Ocean port of Tanga. He also wanted Phantom jet-fighters, armed boats to take his troops across Lake Victoria to Tanzania, helicopters, and a £10m grant,” Gitleson says, adding that the Israelis, however, could not meet his demands, although they did supply the small executive jet he requested.

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Amin was crestfallen and he decided to approach the Arabs, again, asking for arms. “The writing was now on the wall: The West would not supply him with the kind of arms and the amounts of money that he wanted,” writes Prof Phares Mutibwa in his book Uganda since independence: A story of unfulfilled hopes. “The only people to whom he could now turn were the Arabs who, being Muslims, were natural allies.”

But the move that was seen as a domestic policy would ultimately have ramification externally.

 Amin - in a popularity stunt alleging that he wanted to Africanise commerce - expelled over 40,000 Asians, with the majority having British passports, rubbing the British, who had initially warmed up to him, the wrong way.

The British Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, responded in November by declaring how Britain had decided to end all forms of financial aid to Uganda- including the £10m, which had been frozen in August, following Amin’s decision to expel the Asians. Britain also had no plans for replacing its High Commissioner.  

Amin would soon team up with Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi,  who in 1969 had led a bloodless coup in which King Idris was ousted, guaranteeing to base their regimes on Islam and expressing support for the Arab struggle against “Zionism and imperialism,” for the liberation of the captured Arab territories, and for “the right of return of the Palestinian people to their homes”.

Gaddafi agreed to sell jets to Uganda, but on one condition: Amin had to break off ties with Israel. The desperate Amin ejected all Israelis from the country, placed the Palestine Liberation Organisation in the former Israeli embassy, and began the construction of a giant mosque in downtown Kampala.

It didn’t come as a surprise when in 1976 Amin allowed an Air France jet carrying around 240 passengers, 12 crew members, and four hijackers that had taken off from Athens Airport, to land at Entebbe International Airport. 

Amin was overthrown in 1979 by a coalition of Tanzanian forces and Uganda rebels – the administrations of Yusu Lule and Godfrey Binaisa under the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF) were short-lived.

Enter Museveni

In 1980, Obote returned, won a disputed election, and ruled until 1985 when he was toppled by Tito Okello Lutwa, one of his Generals, who was in turn toppled the following year by President Museveni’s ragtag National Resistance Army (NRA) and he remains in power close to 37 years later.

When he was ascending to power, in early 1986, the Cold War was ending, with Socialism in retreat and Western liberal democracy in triumph.

In the mid-1990s, the West labelled Museveni as part of a new generation of African leaders. “To some, Museveni is a visionary strategist who helped topple three brutal dictators, revived Uganda’s economy, fought the Aids epidemic and played a steady-handed diplomatic role in a volatile region. But for others, Museveni is himself a brutal dictator, who deliberately provokes conflicts within Uganda and in neighbouring countries, brutalises Uganda’s political Opposition,” Helen Epstein, an American writer and journalist, says.

During the early years of Museveni’s leadership, Uganda was once more a pawn in the ostensibly interminable tacit war between the Arab world and the West. For instance, in 1994, the Bill Clinton administration in the US began funding Uganda and other countries to undermine the government of Sudan’s Omar  al-Bashir, whom it held comparatively accountable for the bombing of the World Trade Centre, in 1993.

Ugandan troops have also been deployed, at the West’s beckoning, in Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In return, the US gives roughly $750m annually in developmental aid into Uganda, including $170m in military aid.

In clearest sign that West had warmed to the charismatic Museveni, Western institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank introduced the Heavily Indebted Poor Country Initiative (HIPC), Uganda’s debt profile benefited from the credit lines released at the time. That was in the 1990s. The HIPC involved  waiving off loans from external debtors. Uganda was the first country to receive a debt relief of $650m in the 1990s and later in 2006 under the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI), Uganda generously received 100 percent debt forgiveness/cancellation. This condensed the stock of the country’s debt to $1.6b.

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But it’s the fight against terrorism that Museveni has exploited to have the West on his side even when they have had enough of him following the apparent suppression of Opposition, human rights abuses and editing of the Constitution to see that he remains in power. 

Epstein in her book titled Another fine mess: America, Uganda the war on terror narrates how Museveni exploited the West with his move to send Uganda People’s Defence Force’s (UPDF) into war-torn Somalia in the early 2000s.

In 2014, Obama’s administration authorised military aid for Uganda and consequently, a US congressional committee received a letter from the US Department of Defence which indicated that Uganda was eligible to receive military backing worth $12.6m for what they termed as “counterterrorism programmes”.

But by 2021 it seems the West had had enough of Museveni, with general elections marred by violence as security agencies disrupted Opposition rallies under the pretext of implementing Covid-19 guidelines and both the EU and the Americans for the first time refused to participate in observing the elections.

In 2021, Museveni further escalated his standoff with the West when he suspended the Democratic Governance Facility (DGF) which is funded by seven of Uganda’s international development partners - Austria, Denmark, European Union, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. Mid this year, DGF resumed operations after making several concessions but it will close shop in December rendering many unemployed. With a financial war chest worth Shs500b, DGF was providing funds to government ministries and CSOs.

As the West is seemingly getting disinterested with Museveni he has tilted to China, which has the second largest economy in the world, and has emerged in the recent years to challenge America global supremacy.

With Western countries placing a lot of emphasis on human rights, Museveni has conveniently tilted to the Chinese who are not interested in the so-called “the Western values.”