from Africa Today Volume 50, Number 3

Excerpt from

The Changing Face of Authoritarianism in Africa: The Case of Uganda

Aili Mari Tripp

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As African countries moved toward electoral democratization in the 1990s, many countries remained basically authoritarian, but incorporated some democratic innovations to one degree or another. Thus, the rules for authoritarian regimes changed in fundamental ways so that such regimes differed markedly from the autocracies of the earlier post-independence period. Post-1986 Uganda is used in this paper to show how authoritarianism has softened under Yoweri Museveni when compared with the earlier regimes of Idi Amin and Milton Obote. However, as we also see in the Ugandan case, most rulers have only gone as far with political reforms as they have felt they have needed to in order to satisfy domestic and donor pressures. Enormous constraints on civil and political liberties persist. The article examines the nature of semi-authoritarian regimes using the case of Uganda.

Introduction

Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, who came to power in 1986 through a guerrilla war, has been widely acclaimed by foreign correspondents, foreign donors, diplomats, and even some academics as a new-style African leader, to be emulated in his almost singleminded pursuit of economic development, fiscal discipline, and the free market. They argue that he has sought to bring African solutions to African problems by making Uganda a "beacon of hope" in an otherwise unstable region. He has won points for aggressively tackling HIV/AIDS in a way that few African leaders have been willing to do. A scholar of African politics has hailed Uganda "as the model country in the reconfiguration of power in late twentieth-century Africa" because it has "enthusiastically adopted structural adjustment reforms, benefited from large inflows of development aid, introduced partial political liberalization, given early emphasis to human rights and popular participation at the local level, used military force to enhance state cohesion and stability without overt repression" (Joseph 1999:67). Even observers less sanguine about the prospects of democratic transition describe Uganda as having embarked on a "transition" to a new democracy (Barkan 2000:240).

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