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Throughout the 1990s, the international donor community hailed Uganda as Africa's leading postconflict success story.1 The country's achievements, so it was said, were both economic and political. Economically, the government of guerrilla-leader-turned-president Yoweri Museveni had taken giant steps away from state control and toward a more liberal and market-friendly system. Politically, the Museveni administration was praised for ensuring stability, respecting human rights, and putting in place a democratization process in a land still deeply wounded by the murderous dictatorship of General Idi Amin (r. 1971-79) and the years of bloody strife that followed his fall and flight into Saudi Arabian exile.
Overlooking the Museveni government's many unsavory deeds, observers invested further hopes in a constitution-making process that led to the adoption of a new basic law in 1995. With all its flaws-such as banning normal political-party activities-the 1995 constitution did set up a number of democratic guarantees as well as a few checks and balances against arbitrary uses of power.
A dozen years after the adoption of the new constitution, however, the democratization process has been thrown into reverse. Uganda today is sliding backward toward a system of one-man rule engineered by the recently reelected President Museveni, who has now been in power for more than two decades. Perhaps more disturbingly still, the stakeholders whom one would naturally expect to arise to denounce Museveni's sapping operation against free and open government-Uganda's oppositionists, civil society groups, middle-class citizens, and foreign donors and creditors-have been virtual no-shows.
Why has this been happening? The answer lies in Museveni's use of force and intimidation on the one hand, and his manipulation of patronage-much of it funded from abroad-on the other. The backsliding has gathered momentum over the last few years. In 2004, Museveni's administration proposed sweeping constitutional changes. These included a removal of the two-term limit on the president; a reduction in the number of years it takes for a lawyer to qualify for a seat on the High Court; the ending of Parliament's powers to vet the president's ministerial appointments and to censure ministers for corruption or incompetence; the granting to the president of new power to dissolve Parliament; a cutback in the authority of the Inspector General of Government, Uganda's national ombudsman; and abolition of the Uganda...