The author of this article states that Uganda is a "semi-democracy". How ridiculuous! It is like saying one is semi-pregnant. Who doesnt know that under Museveni, Uganda is a dictatorship?? I wish the UPC rally against Bush a success.
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From: Omar Kezimbira <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Subject: ugnet_: Latest update: Profiles of the African nations Bush will visit
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 04:21:33 -0700 (PDT)
REPORT: Profiles of the African nations Bush will visit next week -New Vision Web, 2nd July 2003
BY KEZIO D. MUSOKE
NEXT week, President Bush voyages to Africa, vowing to raise the profile of a vast continent that has stood small on America's radar screen since the end of the Cold War.
Beginning July 7, Bush's five-nation trip will spotlight the administration's new $15 billion commitment to battle the AIDS scourge that has left Africa the most infected region on Earth, according to a June 26 speech Bush made to African business leaders.
Bush also will emphasize the emerging importance of Africa in the U.S. war on terrorism and push for the end of bloodshed in Congo and Liberia. He will dole out both praise and aid to those nations that are cultivating free-market economies and democratic political systems.
"We will work as partners in advancing the security and the health and the prosperity of the African peoples," said Bush, who has been to Africa just once before, when he represented his father at a 1992 independence celebration in the Gambia.
Here's a snapshot of the five countries Bush will visit:
Senegal
ONE reason this French-speaking West African land of 10 million is a star on the generally unstable continent is because of its peaceful transition to democracy in 2000 after 40 years of socialist rule.
Since President Abdoulaye Wade's election that year, the country's peanut- and cotton-based economy has grown by 5 percent a year and media freedom has blossomed. Even so, one in four Senegalese live on less than $1 a day, and a 30-year, low-intensity guerrilla war for independence continues in Senegal's southern province of Casamance.
Considered a global role model in the anti-AIDS battle in developing countries, Senegal has managed to keep the disease at bay by an aggressive education and prevention program begun in the mid-1980s. In Africa, only Uganda is credited with comparable success.
Overwhelmingly Muslim, Senegal gained favor with the White House for convening an African forum on terrorism shortly after the 9/11 attacks. But, during the run-up to the war in Iraq, Wade criticized America for acting without United Nations support. Still, the Pentagon is considering putting a skeleton base in Senegal as part of the U.S. military's worldwide reorganization.
Following the footprints of then-President Bill Clinton who traveled there in 1998, Bush is slated to visit Goree Island, the site of a notorious former slave port that saw an estimated 2 million slaves pass through, many on their way to the American colonies. The White House says Bush will offer no apology for the U.S. history of slavery; Clinton didn't either during his visit.
Uganda
WINSTON Churchill once dubbed this East African country the "pearl of Africa." That was before dictator Idi Amin took power in the 1970s, triggering more than a decade of brutal state-sponsored violence that took the lives of as many as 500,000 people.
In one of Africa's biggest turnarounds, Uganda now is a relatively stable, semi-democracy, though its president, former guerrilla fighter Yoweri Museveni, is cracking down on political dissent. He has warned he will deal severely with members of the Ugandan People's Congress if, as they have vowed, they stage a demonstration against Bush's visit.
A tropical, English-speaking country of 23 million people who are a mix of Christians and Muslims, Uganda is also home to half the world's remaining mountain gorillas. Coffee and vanilla are top exports, as well as clothing. In April alone, Ugandan factories sent more than 88,000 shirts, dresses and pants to America for sale.
Bush has praised Uganda for managing the most dramatic decline in the rate of HIV infection of any country in the world - from 31 percent of its population in 1990 to about 15 percent now.
Uganda also is a White House favorite for joining the global "coalition of the willing" assembled for the war in Iraq. But the U.N. has slapped Uganda for arming fighters who are committing slaughter in Congo and pillaging the country.
For 18 years, Uganda has been fighting an internal rebel war - one of the longest ongoing civil conflicts in the world - against the rebel Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda, which has abducted and enslaved an estimated 20,000 children.
Botswana
Defying the foreign stereotype of the continent as one big banana republic, Botswana is fast becoming Africa's biggest success story. Land-locked and dominated by the Kalahari Desert, the southern Africa nation was just rated the least corrupt country on the continent by analysts at the World Economic Forum.
Botswana is also Africa's longest continuous multi-party democracy, and a haven of human-rights protections. Freedom of the press and criticism of the ruling government abounds.
Economically, the English-speaking country of 1.6 million people is blessed with abundant diamonds, and is led by Oxford University-trained economist Festus Mogae, one of the best-respected presidents on the continent. Children get at least eight years of schooling, and the average annual income of $3,100 is one of the highest in Africa and the developing world at large.
But Botswana is beset with one of the globe's highest incidences of AIDS; an estimated 300,000 people have the virus, and nearly 40 percent of those between 15 and 49 years old are infected. As many as 80,000 children have been left orphaned, and the average life expectancy has fallen to 39 years for men and 40 years for women.
Mogae has launched an AIDS education program and has promised all HIV-positive citizens will receive costly anti-retroviral medications for free.
Nigeria
After decades under the thumb of military governments, Nigeria made a bloodless turn to democracy in 1999 - when, ironically, the nation elected as president Olusegun Obasanjo, himself Nigeria's military strongman between 1976 and 1979.
Though he took office with allegations of human rights abuses clinging to him, Obasanjo released political prisoners and began a probe of past rights violations. But his re-election in April drew charges of widespread vote rigging.
Obasanjo is carrying out a massive privatization effort, turning over to private industry the nation's telephone, electrical power, oil refineries and ports. A crackdown on corruption is underway.
Even so, Nigeria - a sprawling West African land of 124 million, rich with oil resources but also faced with festering ethnic troubles - joins Chad as the most corrupt African nations, the World Economic Forum says. It also has been pegged as a world center of money laundering, and a hive of Internet financial scams.
For years, it has been oil that has drawn most U.S. interest in Nigeria, which now supplies 15 percent of U.S. imports. That amount is forecast to jump to as much as 25 percent in less than a decade - making political instability in half-Christian, half-Muslim Nigeria a potential threat to the United States.
Also worrying the Pentagon is the reported targeting of Nigeria by the al Qaeda terror network because of the country's connections to America. Not only are Nigeria's oil facilities vulnerable to attack, but terror kingpin Osama bin Laden has called on Nigeria's large Muslim population to mobilize.
South Africa
Of all the countries on Bush's itinerary, U.S. relations are most strained with South Africa, a country of 45 million people and 11 official languages that will mark the 10th anniversary of the end of apartheid next year.
President Thabo Mbeki has spoken out forcefully against Bush's Iraq war policy, and even sent a delegation to Baghdad to demonstrate his opposition. Anti-apartheid icon Archbishop Desmond Tutu condemned the war and former President Nelson Mandela threatened to snub Bush next week in indignation.
The administration also has denounced Mbeki's refusal to provide anti-retroviral drugs to AIDS victims, a policy contributing to the fact that South Africa has the highest number of its citizens infected with HIV and an exploding death rate. And Mbeki's reluctance to intervene in neighboring Zimbabwe, where a strongman leader is collapsing the country's economy and refusing to give up power.
On the other hand, Bush is a booster of Mbeki's free-market economic approach, though it has yet to produce significant benefits for the poverty-beset population.
Ends
Published on: Wednesday, 2nd July, 2003
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