By Milton G. Allimadi, Black Star News —
There are Uncle Toms in Africa as well. Gen. Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s dictator of 32 years, is a first class version.
He’s an anti-African African who will do anything and say anything, including praising a racist and kissing his rear-end, so long as he believes it could help him prolong his regime.
“America has got one of the best presidents ever. I love Trump,” Gen. Museveni said, while addressing lawmakers for East Africa’s regional body, and referring to Donald Trump’s comments about African countries being shitholes, “He speaks frankly. Africans need to solve their problems.”
Before addressing Museveni’s praise of Trump, and his other outrageous past comments, including calling enslaved Africans “stupid,” let’s examine some of Africa’s problems.
Gen. Museveni is a prime example of the cause of Africa’s many woes.
Museveni has been Uganda’s dictator for 32 years now, routinely rigging elections, and assaulting and brutalizing political opponents. He most recently stole the 2016 elections from Dr. Kizza Besigye.
In 2005 Museveni removed presidential term limits from Uganda’s constitution and last year removed the age-75 cap for presidential candidates. This has paved the way for him to steal elections again in 2021 when he would be 77 years old and no longer eligible. So, unless he’s removed through a popular rebellion, he is effectively life-president.
Museveni is one of Africa’s most corrupt rulers and runs Uganda like a personal business. His wife Janet is the Education minister; until recently his son, Muhoozi Kaenerugaba, promoted overnight to Brigadier General, ran the presidential special forces; and his brother Gen. Salim Saleh is a top advisor. The presidential family was also involved in plundering the country’s employees’ pension fund, according to one of Museveni’s former ministers Zoe Bakoko Bakuru, now exiled in the U.S.
Gen. Museveni’s tyranny and brutal militarism has led to the deaths of millions of Africans. In Uganda at least one million have died. In the Congo an estimated 7 million people have died as a result of multiple invasions and war of plunder by Museveni’s army, including in 1997, 1998 and multiple times thereafter, and as recent as this month.
In 2005 the world court awarded Congo $10 billion in reparations; not a dime has been paid. Museveni also asked then U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to block a separate ICC criminal investigation of alleged Uganda war crimes in Congo.
Gen. Museveni’s army invaded South Sudan in December 2013 and inflamed a domestic political crisis between President Salva Kiir and Vice President Riek Machar into a full-fledged war with his military fighting on behalf of Kiir.
There was no war in Rwanda until Museveni’s army invaded on October 1, 1990. The fighting inflamed ethnic hostilities between the majority population Hutus and Tutsis. When Rwanda’s President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundi’s President Cyprien Ntayamire were assassinated when Habyarimana’s plane was shot down, the genocidal massacres erupted leading to a reported 800,000 to a million deaths. Had Museveni not invaded in 1990 and sparked the war the genocide may never had occurred four years later.
So the most critical reasons behind Africa’s problems are well known. They are dictatorship, corruption, and militarism. Gen. Museveni epitomizes the disaster.
Let’s now address some past outrageous comments from the demented mind of Gen. Museveni:
There is a reason his regime has lasted for 32 years. He gets about $1 billion in U.S. taxpayers’ money in annual support as well as weapons and training for his army. He is brilliant when playing the role of the stooge.
When he wanted to develop support from U.S. conservatives and racists, this is what he said in an interview published in the September 1994 issue of The Atlantic Monthly magazine (Vol. 274 Issue 3 page 22): “I have never blamed these whites for colonizing Africa. I have never blamed these whites for taking slaves. If you are stupid you should be taken a slave.”
Four years later, this is what he said in comments published in The Shariat, a Ugandan newspaper in its April 15- 21, 1998 issue: “As Hitler did to bring Germany together, we should also do it here. Hitler was a smart guy, but he went a bit too far by wanting to conquer the world.”
In terms of Museveni’s Tuesday comments praising Trump, it’s possible he also has in mind a bribery and money-laundering case now being tried in federal district court in the U.S. Museveni and his foreign affairs minister Sam Kutesa are implicated.
According to an indictment unsealed in November 2017 by the Department of Justice, a Chinese businessman named Patrick Ho, seeking concessions on behalf of a Shanghai -based oil company gave Gen. Museveni and Kutesa “special” gifts in 2016 as bribes. Patrick Ho also wired $500,000 from a U.S. bank to a Ugandan account designated for Kutesa who created a fake charity to receive the funds. An FBI agent who tailed Kutesa to Uganda found out that no such charity existed. Kutesa, according to the U.S. indictment, also solicited an additional $500,000 for Gen. Museveni from Patrick Ho.
By kissing Trump’s rear, Gen. Museveni may be hoping his role and that of Kutesa in the bribery and money-laundering case could be made to disappear.
Whatever his immediate motives, Gen. Museveni has proven time and again that he represents the worst of Africa.
His departure would represent a huge step forward for Uganda and Africa.
Also sign the Petition Demanding apology at change.org by clicking here.
