“Clinton to monitor Uganda’s elections” ran the headlines of a recent Ugandan daily (Daily Monitor, January 15, 2010).
The US Congress has directed the Obama administration to closely watch Uganda’s preparations for the presidential and general elections in early 2011. This “unprecedented directive” (text of press story) requires the Secretary of State, working through the US embassy in Kampala and the Ugandan authorities to create an accurate verifiable voter register; scrutinize the candidates; ensure security during the elections, media freedom and citizens’ rights to assembly, and a timely announcement and posting of the election results. (The news was first broken on 13th January on Voice of America’s “Straight Talk Africa” show).
The Ugandan government said Thank You anyway, but we’ve already started putting these measures in place; and the opposition crowed that at least next year the government would have to ensure truly “free and fair” elections. The rival daily added that Ms Clinton will be working also with the European Union and Canada. Both papers mentioned that the directive comes alongside a Congress approval of $70.6m. to Uganda for development assistance.
The other story that made the front page that day was that the Speaker of the House (of Parliament), Edward Ssekandi, “opposed” President Museveni on the “Gays Bill.” This proved untrue, since the Bill is now being studied by a parliamentary committee for possible amendments, and won’t become law yet. The Speaker had only said that the President was giving an opinion when he recommended “going slow” on the Bill.
However, in this same article a more hostile tone prevailed. The US government, it went on, had threatened to expel Uganda from the African Growth and Opportunities Act (AGOA), an agreement the US had made with several African countries in 2000, to get leeway to export products duty-free to the US market. The newspaper had seen a letter written by US Congressman Ron Wyden, to Hillary Clinton on January 12th (this year) saying: “I strongly urge you to communicate immediately to the Ugandan government and President Museveni directly, that Uganda’s beneficiary status under AGOA will be revoked should the proposed legislation (the Gays Bill) be enacted.”
The letter added: “Beneficiaries of AGOA must meet certain eligibility criteria, one of which is to not engage in “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights””.
But, precisely, Uganda is not among the nations that accepts gay behaviour as a human right. As Ssekandi put it, albeit bluntly (for some tastes): “As Black people the way we understand this issue (homosexuality) is not the same way the Whites understand it, and we should be able to decide our own ways without being influenced.”
All this is a far cry from when Uganda was a darling of the new post-Cold War Africa, and aid was dished out with no questions asked. A US newspaper (Washington Post) ran this story on 29th March, 1997: “Hillary Clinton held up Uganda today as a “model of economic and social reform” –even as she essentially ignored its reported involvement in neighbouring Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC) that threatens to destabilize the entire central African region.” Which in fact it did; the following year began Africa’s “World War” when in the span of some five years, an estimated four million people died in DRC, from starvation, disease and war injuries. (Twelve years later Ms Clinton was to see for herself some of the terrible after-effects in Goma, eastern DRC, when she visited a displaced persons’ camp where many women had been raped – and men, though this was not reported at the time).
The newspaper report continues: “At the end of a 2-week “goodwill mission to Africa”, she kept her emphasis on the positive as she toured (this lush capital city), Kampala, hailing Uganda’s progress in educating young girls, fighting AIDS and expanding work opportunities for women.”
The honeymoon is over, no more the emphasis on the positive. In a 45-minute phone call to Museveni very recently Ms Clinton made clear her own views, and those of the Obama administration, on the homosexual issue and why Uganda should toe the line, or else. Was she so explicit on human rights when she spoke with the Chinese Premier on her visit there recently? Two cases of selective amnesia?
An instance of really welcome intervention has been the impressive response of the US and other nations, rich and poor, to the Haiti catastrophe. This is the kind of intervention the countries of the “economic South”, like Haiti, need, expect and appreciate because of their poor infrastructure and low living standards. Why they are like that is another matter. For now, the hospital ships and sniffer-dogs are what’s needed.
The developing countries, especially those with deeply-rooted traditional cultural values, strongly resent “Western” interference in their own internal affairs, and Uganda considers the present media onslaught and political arm-twisting unjustified invasions of privacy. The colonial presence here was mild, compared to Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa, and Ugandans clung to their culture as a way of resisting “new values”, since their own, with exceptions like witchcraft, were serving them pretty well.
The African dislike of homosexuality has its explanation. This behaviour is contrary to openness to life; it is sterile, infertile. It fractures the link with the ancestors. Ugandans also remember why their 30 Catholic and Anglican martyrs died in 1886: for resisting the homosexual advances –totally exceptional, given the cultural circumstances, of the king, the Kabaka, (a demi-god with power over the lives of his subjects)-, towards his pages and attendants. And they don’t want to forget that.
A further, less-publicised, instance of US and UN interference occurred the previous week, when Ms Clinton announced in Washington that the US would engage in a massive funding push over the next five years to promote “reproductive health care and family planning as a “basic right” around the world. She had previously stated for the record that this includes abortion. The plan means siphoning off funds currently directed towards fighting HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, the real killers in Africa. In 2007, Museveni was one of the African presidents who refused to sign the Maputo Protocol, one of whose points was to push the legalization of abortion throughout Africa.
Who, then, can blame Africans for wanting to keep out this new kind of cultural, economic and social imperialism, especially when it smells of double standards, and fails to address real needs?
Martyn Drakard is SperoForum correspondent in Africa.
(The article corrects an earlier version in which US Trade Representative Ron Kirk was erroneously attributed, instead of US Congressman Ron Wyden, as author of a letter to Secretary Hillary Clinton. The article was based on a report that appeared in Ugandan newspaper The Monitor - which has also been corrected.)
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