US President George Bush was due to pay a brief official visit to Uganda on Friday on the penultimate leg of a whirlwind five-nation tour of Africa.
During his four-hour visit, Bush will meet with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who has been in power since 1986, and will meet children orphaned by Aids and people living with HIV at a clinic.
According to a foreign ministry official in Kampala, the talks with Museveni will touch upon issues of trade and in particular US legislation offering qualifying African countries preferential access to US markets, education and the crisis in northern Uganda, which has been devastated by 17 years of rebel conflict.
Uganda has long been the darling of international donors and lenders because of its espousal of Western economic prescriptions such as privatising state enterprises, opening up markets and increasing fiscal prudence.
Some $800-million of overseas development aid are expected to flow to the east African state during the current financial year. Uganda has also won considerable praise for the way it has tackled the HIV/Aids pandemic, addressing the issue face on and engaging many sectors of the country in raising awareness.
As a result, infection rates have fallen from 1990’s 30% to around six percent today.
Aids activists in Uganda and elswhere have greeted a recent US pledge to spend $15-billion to fight Aids in Africa and the Caribbean over the next five years with suspicion, suggesting that Bush is more beholden to large pharmaceutical companies than those actually affected by the pandemic.
Uganda’s military involvement in the civil war in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo and support for rebels in Sudan have led it to be the target of considerable criticism.
On Thursday, Bush dropped in on Botswana. On Friday evening he is scheduled to wrap up his Africa tour, which has already taken in Senegal and South Africa, in Nigeria, before returning to Washington on Saturday.
His visit is seen as an endorsement of President Olusegun Obasanjo, just three months after he was re-elected in a poll which US observers said was marred by ”obvious premeditated electoral manipulation”.
Relations between Washington and Abuja have gone through a bumpy patch recently, with Nigeria opposing the war in Iraq and the US Congress cutting military aid in protest over the massacre of several hundred villagers.
But Nigeria is expected to become an increasingly important supplier of oil to the United States, and is to be a major player in any peacekeeping force in Liberia, where the White House has come under intense international pressure to intervene. – Sapa-AFP