Uganda is a nation numbed by past atrocities. But, despite a booming economy, the hard times are not over yet. Matthew Engel reports
On alternate evenings, everyone’s electricity is switched off for up to four hours at a time. North of the capital there is a savage war going on. There is another one to the west. There are epidemics of Aids, malaria and TB, with cholera lurking. The phone system is hopeless, the roads unspeakable.
To escape the power cuts, the expatriate crowd head for the club. They gather round the bar and sometimes – inevitably – talk of the man who presides over this troubled country. They think he is absolutely fantastic.
The man who basks in white adulation given to no African leader north of the Limpopo since the fall of good old Smithy is Yoweri Museveni, president of Uganda since 1986. One of his most charming attributes is that he accepts the applause modestly.
Unlike his neighbour, the wretched President Daniel arap Moi of Kenya, he has not stuck his name on the street signs or his face on the banknotes (thus increasing the chance that these things will happen after he has gone). He may feel it is inappropriate, anyway. Uganda has an overriding spiritual leader. And her name is Margaret Thatcher.
An aid worker I met in Nairobi says he can tell which African capital he is in by the smell: in Luanda it’s cocoa; Lagos reeks of petrol; Harare of chips. In Kampala you can sniff the money. My neighbours on the flight in were two Hong Kong-based Indian businessmen; these are not people who travel the world to take snapshots of hippopotamuses.
After an uncertain start, Museveni has pursued policies of economic liberalisation more vigorously and more certainly than any African leader. International Monetary Fund representative in Kampala Ulrike Wilson talks of him almost proudly, like a schoolteacher discussing her favourite pupil who not merely won a scholarship, but still remembers her birthday.
Some people refer to the Ugandan economy – 7% growth without rampant inflation – as the African tiger. The trouble is that everyone knows there are no tigers in Africa, real or metaphorical.
African leaders instead face a heffalump trap, which works roughly as follows. So- called African socialism has been a disaster, because state enterprises have invariably become incompetent and corrupt. To abolish these and bring in private capital means unemployment. In Africa, that equals desperate poverty.
The West may assist the process, but only to countries that democratise as well, and hold free elections. But it is impossible to face a hungry electorate, full of people turfed out of cushy jobs, and expect them to love you for a vague promise of good times later.
Museveni evaded the trap, partly by evolving his own system of party-less democracy, but mainly because he was operating in a country that expected nothing from its government anyway. Ugandans are pathetically grateful for a leader whose main object in life is not terrorising them.
This is among the most beautiful and most bloodthirsty places in the world. Visitors are stunned as soon as they arrive at Entebbe Airport. Lake Victoria glistens, the grass is lush, the houses are set amid banana plantations and mango trees. It looks more like the West Indies than Africa.
Upcountry it becomes like Switzerland. In between, it can resemble an idealised version of Surrey, shorn of suburbia and in perpetual summertime. No wonder this was the most coveted posting in the colonial service.
Which goes to show. Uganda was always murderous. Bishop Hannington, who came to offer Christianity, got a spear through his heart. Traditionally, several people had to die as ritual sacrifices to permit the coronation of the Kabaka of Buganda. Enemies got off even less lightly.
The British lasted barely a century, from first footfall to final flag-lowering. After they went in 1962, the first post- independence leader, Milton Obote, rapidly turned dictatorial. He was at a Commonwealth conference in 1971, grandstanding about the wickedness of the whites, when he was overthrown.
The new leader was Idi Amin, put in with Israeli assistance, British connivance and enormous popular goodwill. He turned viciously on all his early supporters after he failed to get his own way and is generally credited with killing half-a- million Ugandans. Some believe the figure to be more like 50 000.
Amin’s murders, though cruel even by Ugandan standards, tended to be targeted on real or imagined enemies. Many people say that Obote, particularly in his second coming after Amin was slung out by the Tanzanian army in 1979, was the more dangerous because the terror was more random.
This view is supported by Don Bowser, a retired British businessman who has been here since 1952, and stayed even when the white population went down to 10 at the height of Amin’s mania.
Bowser is an expat legend. During one of the coups – ”I forget which one” – he was on the golf course with his friend Neville the bank manager while gunmen fired at each other in the thick rough, and the other whites rushed for the airport.
An ITN camera crew came over and demanded to know why on earth they were playing golf. ”Because it’s Tuesday afternoon,” said Neville. ”We always play on Tuesday afternoons.”
The Bowsers were with some Asian friends when soldiers arrived to enforce Amin’s order expelling all the Asians. Bowser’s wife Mary answered the door. ”It’s cocktail time,” she told them. ”Now piss off.” They did too.
Don and Mary Bowser survived not through sang-froid, but by keeping their heads down. This did not save every Ugandan. By the time Obote was turfed out a second time, in 1985, the country was a total ruin. Museveni had some very easy acts to follow.
There is no question that some people, including many of the renewed Asian population, are now very rich. Some growers of coffee, Uganda’s staple export, have done well.
Many people in the north, where a rather crazed group of guerrillas holds off Museveni’s flaccid army, have gained nothing. The mystery is what benefit has accrued to the average Ugandan.
Charles Onyango-Obbo, editor of the Kampala daily, The Monitor, insists that little money is trickling down from the very wealthy; instead it is the people who are falling through the cracks.
”I know many people who are having to sell everything because they have lost their jobs. And it is going to get worse. Makerere University used to have 2 000 students. Now it has 8 600. There are now nine other universities as well. The economy would have to grow 1 000% for these people to be absorbed. It’s not happening. All we are doing is increasing the ranks of the discontented.”
The Monitor published an officially sourced story earlier this year saying that farmers barely an hour from Kampala were selling off their daughters in return for sacks of maize: three for a girl with firm breasts, two for a less attractive one.
”Ugandans are so numbed by disaster, they read these stories and laugh. The government has not rebuilt the country the way it should have done, but Ugandans’ threshold of pain is so high it takes a lot to annoy them. At least, under Museveni, they are free to move about without being arrested. So it’s difficult for them to hate the government.”
In any case, Ugandans have one huge advantage over most Africans. Most of the country is fertile, warm and wet. Farmers can get two, even four, crops a year. Kampala has had less population pressure than almost any African capital because, even in the worst of times, it has been possible to eke out some kind of survival- existence in the villages.
”Reproduction and decay,” said Winston Churchill in 1908, ”are locked struggling in infinite embraces.” He was talking about the vegetation. These days it has extended to the humans. Kampala, said another writer, was one ”grand communal churning of the loins”. Not everyone has learned to churn less communally.
Dr Larence Kaggwa, director of Kampala’s big hospital, Mulago, says he would like to think that only about 8% of the population are HIV-positive. There is something in his tone which suggested he knew he was erring on the optimistic side.
One government official says that to fill one job, it is now necessary to train two people, because one will probably die. A local firm has imposed a rule which forbids employees to attend more than one funeral a week, because the constant absences were becoming disruptive. Whole departments of companies are believed to have been wiped out.
It is always difficult to authenticate such stories in Africa. But the danger here is not being too credulous; it is taking in the awful truth.
In the absence of money for sophisticated drugs, Mulago Hospital can do little for its Aids patients except try and ensure they get solace at home, and advise them to eat a balanced diet. Mulago is a Hogarthian sort of place. But increasingly, Dr Kaggwa’s staff find themselves doing the work of Western hospitals.
”As a middle-class emerges, we are beginning to see the troubles of the modern developed world: heart disease, appendicitis, gall-bladder diseases, cancers of the colon, ulcers. These have never been a problem before.”
He has his own Thatcherite dreams. ”The time will come when we will charge patients. My minister is trying to persuade the Cabinet now. We have a terrible funding gap. And that way, the individual patient would get a sense of ownership, and maybe they will take more care to prevent illness.”
He backs off a little when he considers all the people he would never dream of charging: ”TB patients, lepers, measles cases, complications of labour. We will have to work out a way of building a provident fund. Life is above money.”
It happened when left-wing ideology was fashionable. Now it is happening with right-wing ideology. Africa keeps getting in the way of theories.
But under Museveni the argument can at least take place. ”There’s nothing that is off-limits,” says Charles Onyango-Obbo. ”You can call Museveni a dictator a thousand times if you want. We won’t do it, not because we’re frightened, but because it’s so cheap and predictable. Anyway, I’d be more inclined to call him a stunted democrat.”
Museveni does seem rather admirable personally. He was furious when a paper accused him of stealing two bags of cement for use on his farm. It turned out a journalist had misread an official form, and he had done no such thing. Some leaders of neighbouring countries have had a good go at stealing much of the continent.
It might be rather important for Britain to have Uganda on-side. The source of the Nile is directly behind the 11th tee of the Jinja Golf Club. The Ugandans are contemplating a hydro-electric scheme that will put a stop forever to the power cuts, but destroy the lovely Bujagali Falls. This might further impede the flow of the river, which is already pouring more uncertainly than ever before into the Mediterranean, because so much is diverted to irrigate Egypt.
There is a theory that this is already over-salinating the Mediterranean, which could eventually change the flow of waters through the Straits of Gibraltar, pushing the Gulf Stream out to the west, and plunging Britain into the deep freeze while the rest of the world gets warmer. Some scientists think this may happen anyway. But it is lucky Amin never thought of it.
The jury is still out on Museveni’s contribution to Uganda. But the expatriates out there are happy again. Don Bowser bought a flat in Oxted during Amin’s time, just in case. He is glad he has never had to move into it: ”I don’t suppose anyone would speak to me at Oxted Golf Club.”
But not everything gets better. ”Mary’s a bit shaky today,” he confided. ”She’s just been mugged. Right outside Barclays Bank in the middle of Kampala. Knocked her over and stole her money, they did. Never had anything like that happen to us before. All these years.”