PRESIDENT Yoweri Museveni took his re-election campaign to northern Uganda this weekend but seemed to make little impression in an area that has been ravaged by war and is traditionally hostile to him. Several thousand people turned out to see him at a rally in the northern town of Gulu but there was little enthusiasm, even as he listed the advances brought to the area by his government. Museveni said that, since he seized power in 1986, the number of people in Gulu district with access to clean drinking water and the numbers of children in primary school had risen almost five-fold. “We have done more good for the people of Gulu in the last 15 years than any previous government in the last 90 years,” Museveni said from atop a military jeep. But the message failed to impress most people. “We have known nothing but war in Museveni’s time,” said a local resident, Gabriel Otim, who left his village four years ago to find work as a bicycle-taxi driver in Gulu town. “Even if he builds all the classrooms — if there are no children to go, so what?”