Distinguished is level 3 of 4 in the Uganda Hall of Fame: sustained excellence over a career, widely honoured at home. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
He came to power at the head of a guerrilla army in 1986 and has governed Uganda ever since — longer than any other leader in the country's history.
Yoweri Kaguta Museveni was born in Ntungamo to a cattle-keeping family, studied at the University of Dar es Salaam under the radical politics of the late 1960s, and wrote his thesis on Frantz Fanon. He worked in Milton Obote's intelligence service, fled when Idi Amin took power, and helped organise the exile forces that returned with the Tanzanian army to remove Amin in 1979.
When the 1980 election returned Obote in circumstances he and many others regarded as fraudulent, Museveni took twenty-seven men and a handful of rifles into the bush and started the National Resistance Army. Five years of guerrilla war later, in January 1986, it took Kampala.
He inherited a country that had lost perhaps a million people to Amin and to the wars that followed, with no functioning economy, army or civil service. What he built from that is the basis of his standing. Uganda had sustained growth for two decades, rebuilt its institutions, and returned the Asian community's expropriated property. His response to HIV was the outstanding one in Africa: while other governments denied the epidemic, Museveni talked about it constantly and by name from 1986, and Uganda's infection rate fell from around fifteen per cent to five, a reversal nobody else achieved and public health scholars still study. He put in universal primary education, brought women into parliament in numbers, and made Uganda the regional military power, sending troops into Somalia when few others would.
He was, through the 1990s, the leading member of the generation Western governments called Africa's new leaders. He has now been in office for four decades.
When the 1980 election returned Obote in circumstances he and many others regarded as fraudulent, Museveni took twenty-seven men and a handful of rifles into the bush and started the National Resistance Army. Five years of guerrilla war later, in January 1986, it took Kampala.
He inherited a country that had lost perhaps a million people to Amin and to the wars that followed, with no functioning economy, army or civil service. What he built from that is the basis of his standing. Uganda had sustained growth for two decades, rebuilt its institutions, and returned the Asian community's expropriated property. His response to HIV was the outstanding one in Africa: while other governments denied the epidemic, Museveni talked about it constantly and by name from 1986, and Uganda's infection rate fell from around fifteen per cent to five, a reversal nobody else achieved and public health scholars still study. He put in universal primary education, brought women into parliament in numbers, and made Uganda the regional military power, sending troops into Somalia when few others would.
He was, through the 1990s, the leading member of the generation Western governments called Africa's new leaders. He has now been in office for four decades.
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