What Is Africa’s Problem?

2000
Author:

Yoweri K. Museveni
Elizabeth Kanyogonya, editor
Foreword by Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere

The president of Uganda addresses key questions about Africa’s future.

Edited by Elizabeth Kanyogonya

“I am very pleased that this book by one of Africa’s most important leaders now will be available to Americans. We need to understand what Africans think about Africa.”–Jimmy Carter

and/or

What is Africa’s problem? As one of the leaders expressing a broad and forceful vision for Africa’s future, Uganda’s Yoweri K. Museveni is perhaps better placed than anyone in the world to address the very question his book poses.

I am very pleased that this book by one of Africa’s most important leaders now will be available to Americans. We need to understand what Africans think about Africa.

Jimmy Carter

Recent seismic shifts in Congo and Rwanda have exposed the continued volatility of the state of affairs in central Africa. As African states have shaken off their postcolonial despots, new leaders with sweeping ideas about a pan-African alliance have emerged-and yet the internecine struggles go on. What is Africa’s problem? As one of the leaders expressing a broad and forceful vision for Africa’s future, Uganda’s Yoweri K. Museveni is perhaps better placed than anyone in the world to address the very question his book poses.

In 1986, after more than a decade of armed struggle, a rebellion led by Museveni toppled the dictatorship of Idi Amin, and Museveni, at 42, became president of Uganda, a country at that time in near total disarray. Since then, Uganda has made remarkable strides in political, civic, and economic arenas, and Museveni has assumed the role of "the éminence grise of the new leadership in central Africa" (Philip Gourevitch, New Yorker). As such, he has proven a powerful force for change, not just in Uganda but across the turbulent span of African states.

This collection of Museveni’s writings and speeches lays out the possibilities for social change in Africa. Working with a broad historical understanding and an intimate knowledge of the problems at hand, Museveni describes how movements can be formed to foster democracy, how class consciousness can transcend tribal differences in the development of democratic institutions, and how the politics of identity operate in postcolonial Africa. Museveni’s own contributions to the overthrow of Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko and to the political transformation of Uganda suggest the kind of change that may sweep Africa in decades to come. What Is Africa’s Problem? gives a firsthand look at what those changes might be, how they might come about, and what they might mean.

Yoweri K. Museveni is president of Uganda.

I am very pleased that this book by one of Africa’s most important leaders now will be available to Americans. We need to understand what Africans think about Africa.

Jimmy Carter

President Museveni of Uganda asks an intriguing question in his title. This collection of Museveni's writings and speeches exposes his dreams for positive sociopolitical and economic shifts in Africa. He engages in a rare phenomenon in Africa-he self-reveals, self-analyzes, self-discovers, and self-evaluates Uganda's plights and to a large measure, Africans' plights. He joins the class of Pan-African leaders and deep thinkers who have gone beyond their narrow confines to boldly ask a much-needed question, 'What can Africa do to solve its problems?'

MultiCultural Review

Contents

Foreword

Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere
Map of Uganda
Abbreviations
Glossary
Key Political Events in Upnia
Profile of President Ybweri Kaguta Museveni
Elimb^ JKmy&gdny<k

I. Ugandan Politics

1 Ouirs Is a itadamental Change
2 Th^ ^rtee of Bad Leadership
B Religion and Politics
4 Colonial versus Modern Law
5 Security Is the Key...
6 The State of the Nation in 1989
7 Why the Interim Period Was Extended
8 The Interim Balance Sheet
9 Where Is the Public Spirit in the Public Service?
10 Corruption Is a Cancer
11 Was It a Fundamental Change?
12 Building Uganda for the Future

II. Military Strategy in Uganda

13 Why We Fought a Protracted People's War
14 Who Is Winning the War?
15 The NRA and the People
16 How to Fight a Counterrevolutionary Insurgency

III. African Politics

17 What's Wrong with Africa?
18 Most of Africa Kept Quiet...
19 Self-Reliance Is the Way Ahead
20 Political Substance and Political Form
21 The Crisis of the State in Africa

IV. Africa in World Politics

22 Genuine Nonalignment
23 When Is Africa's Industrial Revolution?
24 Defending Our Common Heritage
25 The Economic Consequences of Coffee
26 Africa Needs Ideological and Economic Independence
27 Where Does the East-West Thaw Leave Africa?
28 The Need for North-South Cooperation
29 AIDS Is a Socioeconomic Disease

Appendix: The National Resistance Movement
Ten-Point Program