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What Museveni said on Uhuru 19 years
ago
On Friday, October 9, 1987, President Yoweri
Museveni who had captured power
the previous year addressed guests invited to a State House dinner at Entebbe on the occasion to mark Uganda's 25th independence anniversary. On Monday, President Museveni will deliver his 20th
independence speech for
Uganda's 44th independence anniversary. Below are highlights of the President's 1987 speech: Yoweri Museveni The Government,
Members of the National Resistance Movement, Diplomats, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen This is a simple reception which we organised here
to commemorate 25 years
of independence. We decided to have simple celebrations because we do not believe in squandering our resources on things like celebrations. Celebrations are good but they are not primary and we always emphasise what is primary and merely attend to what is secondary. That is why even today, although some people had
earlier on wanted
flamboyant celebrations, we rejected it. We shall simply have simple ceremonies which do not cost much. Today, although it is a Silver Jubilee, we had a
simple celebration. It was
deliberate. We think resources can be used for production and improvement of people's living conditions. Our team was in a coffee meeting in London and the
International Coffee
Organisations had to raise our quota from 1.9 million bags to 2.4 million bags. We can raise our production to 5 million bags and if you use the prices of $2.5 per kilo, that can give us an income of $750 million from coffee. It is amazing that the way the people of Uganda
have suffered, there are
some people in the world who do not want them to live a good life after 24 years of suffering. Well, you see when you are running a state; you
have no right to be angry
because a head of state has got a lot of power. So you must always put your head in a fridge and cool your anger if you happen to be angry. But it's incredible we have lost 800,000 people in
the past 24 years or so
at the hands of bad governments. On internal security, the situation is improving dramatically because if you remember insecurity started in the north last year. And the idea was that those bandits were supposed to make a base in the north, capture it, control it as the staging point to come and recapture power in Kampala here. They wanted to create permanent antagonism between
the people of the north
and the people of the south, the usual politics of the opportunists. But our counter-attack was so effective that first
of all we crushed the
bandits thoroughly and maintained and consolidated the good relationship between NRA and the people of the North. In fact, the relationship is so strong. I am a bit annoyed with the interference from some
quarters outside our
borders. Apparently when somebody is a humble man, and reasonable, people mistake you for being either a fool or a coward, or I do not know what they think. We have no expansionist interest. So we do not see why people should interfere in our affairs. There is no legitimate reason why any of the neighbouring countries or any country far should wish to interfere in our internal affairs. Five years from now, Uganda will not be what it
was. Our economy will be
restored, our people will be living a better life. I hope we shall have banished corruption, by that
time, so there is no doubt
that this is a revolution and will become deeper and deeper. We are not going to promote change anywhere else except within our own borders. Here we shall bring change, there is no doubt. Soon we are going to the Commonwealth Conference
and one of the subjects
that will be discussed will be South Africa. Another topic that will be discussed will be the
debts of the Third World. I
think these debts were incurred for no good reason, like the ones by Obote here. Obote incurred a lot of debts. He was given I think, $2,000 million by countries from outside and he never used this money paying his debts. Instead, he used it to import whisky. When I came
here, I found 6,000 crates
of Mateus. This is a form of wine. That is 72,000 bottles. We are paying the IMF and all this money because Obote imported and drank Mateus, and he only left 6,000 crates for us here. The Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy" Groupe de communication Mulindwas "avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans l'anarchie" |
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