Museveni’s ‘slow poison’ worse than Idi Amin’s – Prof Mamdani

Renowned scholar Prof Mahmood Mamdani has said President Yoweri Museveni and the often-vilified Idi Amin almost share a similar political legacy, which started and moved in different directions over time.

Speaking during the launch of his new book, Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, Mamdani argued that Uganda’s post-colonial history has often been simplified through distorted portrayals of both Amin and Museveni. 

Mamdani writes that, as a witness to East Africa’s endlessly intricate power plays, he says both Amin and Museveni are perhaps the most standout political heavyweights who have used and manipulated Uganda post-independence for political gain.

He says that while Amin has been internationally depicted as a ‘buffoon’ and Museveni, the ‘reformist’ and ‘revolutionalist’, the current 82-year-old Ugandan president has successfully transformed Uganda into a fragmented and militarised state sustained through violence and political patronage – a slow poison and the opposite of what Amin tried to achieve.

Both leaders, Mamdani says, were propped by Western powers and turned out to be slow poison to Uganda – with Museveni becoming worse. On page 233 of the book, Mamdani cites three examples of Amin and Museveni’s “slow poison.” 

The first was the directed mass murder unleashed in the Amin barracks under the guidance of Britain and Israel in the 1970s and the “genocidal” acts undertaken in northern Uganda by the Museveni army as part of the US-supported war on terror in the 1990s. 

He also cites what he described as the reversal of Amin’s nation-building project and the fragmentation of the polity into multiple tribalized districts. And according to the author, the third form of slow poison was in the form of privatisation, also state-directed.

While he notes that each leader made violence central to their political project, he sees a significant difference between Amin, who retained popular support to the end of his fall in 1979, and President Museveni who has become less and less popular. 

Last week, Mamdani was hosted by the Centre of African Studies in London in a conversation moderated by a Zambian Scholar, Prof Fareda Banda. During the conversation, Mamdani said that Amin’s political journey was more complex than the image commonly presented in Western media and popular culture.

“One of the responses to the book, especially in the British and the American press, has been that this is a ‘whitewash’…an attempt to tell a story of Amin which is completely untrue and which, for whatever reason, is self-serving for Amin,” Mamdani said. 

“My purpose was very different. My purpose was to show that people change. People change, and to trace that change in their lives. So one of these lives was Amin.”  

Mamdani noted that Amin’s early years in power were undeniably brutal, particularly following the 1971 coup that overthrew Milton Obote.

“The picture painted of Amin in the British and American press is basically a picture that stops in 1972,” he said.

“It’s a picture that portrays the massacre of Obote troops in different places where they lived in 1971 and 1972. It is a picture where the British and the Israelis are complicit. The British tell Amin, ‘Your best way out is to assassinate Obote.’ The Israelis say no. ‘If you assassinate Obote, you will still be left with Obote’s cohort. The best thing for you to do is to pick out members of the cohort one by one and finish them off,” he narrated. 

Mamdani said the violence that followed resulted in hundreds, possibly thousands, of deaths. 

“That is graphically described in several of these accounts,” he said. “Then Amin goes through the expulsion of the Israelis, and he goes through some kind of a Eureka moment. He begins to undertake a series of internal reforms in Uganda.”

Mamdani argued that one of Amin’s first major reforms was the abolition of kingdoms and the declaration of Uganda as a republic. 

“The first reform is to bring back the body of the dead Kabaka of Uganda from Britain,” Mamdani said.

“And when he brings the body back, he gives a speech at the funeral where he says, ‘We bury here not just the Kabaka, we also bury the kingdoms. Uganda will not have kingdoms. Uganda will be a republic.” 

He also credited Amin with introducing radical land reforms inspired by developments in Ethiopia. 

“The Ethiopian Revolution had taken place around this time, and he tells the cabinet, ‘We have to learn something from the Ethiopian Revolution. One thing we have to learn is land reform. We have to give the land to the tiller,” Mamdani said. 

“Buganda, especially, was that part of the country with miles of land given by the British to the Buganda aristocracy who became landlords. Amin conferred the land to the tenants.” 

Mamdani further described Amin’s commission of inquiry into the killing of civilians by soldiers as one of the earliest truth commissions in modern history. 

“When Amin came to power, he passed a decree which gave soldiers the right to arrest anybody without a search warrant purely on suspicion,” he said. 

“The result was that soldiers indeed began to arrest, but arrest for private greed. The police then came to Amin and said civic peace is disintegrating and there is no way of ensuring the country will remain peaceful.” 

According to Mamdani, Amin responded by appointing a commission of inquiry headed by a Pakistani judge who had tried Abu Mayanja under the Obote government.

“The committee of inquiry issued a massive report, more than 800 pages,” he said. 

“The committee of inquiry was the first truth commission that I know of in African history, even in Latin American history.” 

His assertion is likely to reignite debate over Amin’s legacy, especially given the continued trauma surrounding the expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972. Mamdani argued that public discussion of the expulsions has often ignored wider questions about colonial economics, race, and belonging. 

He described Amin’s worldview as shaped partly by his contrasting experiences with Asians during childhood. 

“The good Indians were soldiers. The first Indians who came to Uganda were brought by the British as soldiers in the late nineteenth century,” Mamdani said.

“The good Indians lived in proximity with African soldiers. Then came the experience of the bad Indian, the fellow who disciplines labour in the plantations. Amin works in plantations at the ages of five, six, and seven, and he is subjected to punishment. This informed his understanding of the world, this binary understanding between the good Indian and the bad Indian.” 

Mamdani also criticised Tanzania’s founding president, Julius Nyerere, accusing him of violating principles he publicly championed as a Pan-African leader.

“One of the fathers of Pan-Africanism was also violating one of the principles of the OAU Charter, which is the non-interference in the internal affairs [of other countries],” Mamdani said. 

“It was interesting that Nyerere, who is celebrated as this great Pan-Africanist, was also trying to arrange for the overthrow of Amin.” 

After painting the other picture of Idi Amin, Mamdani turned to President Museveni, whom he strongly criticised. He stated that Museveni’s political journey moved in the opposite direction from Amin’s. “Museveni had a reverse journey from Idi Amin,” he said.

“Idi Amin began as a mercenary, very cruel, thought violence was the answer to everything, and then he changed. He discovered politics. He discovered reform. Museveni began with an embrace of violence as a liberatory force.” 

Mamdani referenced Museveni’s student writings on revolutionary thinker Frantz Fanon during his years at the University of Dar es Salaam.

“Museveni wrote his undergraduate thesis on Frantz Fanon,” he said. 

“But then in Uganda, he discovered something else. First of all, he discovered he had no money in the treasury. And he would say in every public meeting, ‘I have no cadres.’ Then he discovered that the most important thing was to stay in power.”

According to Mamdani, Museveni’s relationship with Western powers fundamentally shaped the Ugandan state after 1986. 

“To stay in power, he had a rapprochement with the British and the Americans and the Western powers,” he said.

“And after this rapprochement, he discovered that violence actually had multiple uses. You could use violence not only to dismantle the state, but you could also use violence to turn the state into a private reserve.” 

Mamdani accused the Museveni government of overseeing atrocities in northern Uganda while also dismantling state institutions through privatisation and structural adjustment policies.

“I describe the killings in northern Uganda, which could legitimately be described as genocide,” he said. 

“But I also describe how he used structural adjustment as an opportunity to dismantle and distribute family jewels, state property, to his cohorts and his family.”

He further argued that Museveni revived colonial methods of governance by dividing Ugandans through ethnicity and administrative boundaries. 

“He came into power with maybe twelve or fourteen districts, and he chopped up the country into hundreds of districts,” Mamdani said.

“And these districts became units of governance. Each unit is distinguished between residents and migrants. So this whole idea of migrants and residents, which at independence divided people in Uganda from people outside Uganda, now began to divide people inside Uganda.” 

“This is what I call slow poison,” he added. “If you look at the larger trajectory, the British took cultural groups throughout the country and said these must be units of administration. Amin then comes and says, ‘No, we are one country.’ But Museveni disaggregates this nation into multiple tribes, British style, but even more extreme than what the British had done.” 

Responding to a question from the audience on where meaningful transformation could come from, Mamdani rejected the idea that Africa needed universal political solutions imported from the West.

“It has become very fashionable in academia, especially Western academia, to look for single answers in the name of excellence and transport them throughout the world,” he said. 

“I don’t believe in this at all.” Drawing from his experience at the University of Dar es Salaam during the height of radical African scholarship, Mamdani said the focus then was not abstract theory but confronting the realities produced by colonialism.

“We were not about the question of the good life,” he said. “We were about how the hell did we get here, and how do we get out of here?”  

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