Oil, Corruption And a 26-Year Regime: Uganda's Museveni Clings To Power After Wearing Out His Welcome

Kampala -- A year after winning a disputed presidential election, Yoweri Museveni, who has ruled Uganda for 26 years after wresting power as a guerrilla fighter, is facing his biggest challenge ever.

That challenge is a wave of mass protests that began last April when Ugandans, led by opposition leader and three-time presidential candidate Kizza Bisigye, took to the streets to protest swelling commodity prices, soaring unemployment and allegations that Museveni is a corrupt leader.

These complaints represent a sharp turnaround for Museveni, who was hailed as a reformer when he came to power in 1986 and was supported by the United States and other Western countries. At the time, he was lauded as a man who could oversee political liberalization and economic growth. But while Uganda has had many years of growth under Museveni, recently the economy has steadily worsened. Inflation was a staggering 18.6 percent in May, although it fell from 20 percent in the previous month. By comparison, inflation in the U.S. was just 1.7 percent that month.

And while the economy is still growing at a relatively fast clip, the pace is slowing: in fiscal year 2011, Uganda's GDP grew 6.7 percent. But in the current fiscal year, ending in June, GDP growth is expected to have slowed considerably to about 3.2 percent.

Still, Uganda's economy has a lot going for it. A landlocked country in East Africa, home to 34.5 million people, Uganda is rich in natural resources and mineral deposits. And early in 2010, 2.5 billion barrels of crude oil were discovered here.

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In years past Museveni would have been given plenty of credit for keeping the country's economy doing as well as it is, despite the downdrafts. But his black marks are adding up so quickly that these days he gets much more blame than accolades.

He has been accused of corruption, particularly over campaign financing and secretive oil contracts; in October, Uganda's parliament suspended all new deals in the oil sector after claims emerged that UK-based Tullow Oil paid multi-million dollar bribes to government ministers in order to influence decisions.

And the Ugandan president has been charged with nepotism.His wife, Janet Museveni, was given a cabinet position as minister. His son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, is a lieutenant colonel in the army, known as the Uganda People's Defense Force or UPDF, and commander of the Special Forces Group, which is responsible for the protection of the president.

"The point is that the protests would be completely ineffective if they were not popular. What makes them popular is that people have actual grievances that have made them have made them turn out in large numbers," Bisigye told journalists.

Museveni responded by threatening to eat the opposition "like samosas," a reference to the Indian food popular in a country where Indians are numerous. He's followed through on that promise by unleashing his police forces onto protesters, resulting in often violent confrontations that have left dozens dead and hundreds injured.

Despite this crackdown, the opposition isn't letting up; hardly a day passes here without the dispersing or arresting of protesters in Kampala. Uganda's Martyrs Day celebrations, held on June 3 of every year to commemorate a group of executed Christians, saw scores of opposition youth violently arrested after attempting to distribute anti-government stickers during the religious festival in Namugongo, a suburb of the Ugandan capital.

Those arrests came after an incident in which women demonstrators were arrested after stripping to their bras, a radical act in this conservative country, in protest against the alleged sexual assault by Museveni's police force on a high-profile female opposition politician, Ingrid Turinawe. The head of the Women's League of the Forum for Democratic Change, or FDC, was attacked in April, according to accusers.

Now, police brutality and Museveni's decision to use force to control his opposition are fueling his fall from grace. Ugandans just want to see him gone, a notion supported by an April opinion poll by the firm Research World International; 56 percent said they wanted Museveni to resign.

"Within the National Resistance Movement [Museveni's party] people have outgrown the personality of Museveni," Ugandan pollster Patrick Wakida said. "They think that they can live without him. This is very interesting because now Museveni is less popular than his party."

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