Keynote Address

by

H.E. Yoweri Kaguta Museveni

PRESIDENT/ NRM NATIONAL CHAIRPERSON

to
THE JOINT POLITICAL LEADERSHIP: THE NRM CENTRAL
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE, CABINET AND PERMANENT
SECRETARIES

On
Re-focusing on the National Resistance Movement (NRM)
Ideological Orientation

KYANKWANZI

26th July, 2016

REFOCUSING ON THE NRMS IDEOLOGICAL

ORIENTATION
As we have repeatedly pointed out in all the NRM documents,
the NRM principles are four: patriotism (anti-sectarianism and
anti-gender-chauvinism); pan-Africanism; socio-economic
transformation; and democracy.
As the leader of the NRM and its precursors (Fronasa, etc), for
almost fifty years today, I must salute the Ugandans in general
and our supporters in particular because they have always
rallied around our cause. They listened to our message when
we were students. They supported us in the anti-Amin struggle
witness the Fronasa force we built up so quickly on the
western axis in 1978/79. In their millions, they supported us
in the anti-UPC war of 1981-86. Ever since 1986, the
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Ugandans, in their millions, have supported our anti-terrorism

military campaigns and our political struggles against
opportunism. The Ugandans always support Ugandas unity
against sectarian opportunism (tribal or religious). They
always support our stand on Pan-Africanist positions: our
support for the SPLM/SPLA struggle in South Sudan, our
support for the RPF in Rwanda, our support for the antiMobutu struggle, our support for the ANC struggle in South
Africa, our efforts in Somalia, our efforts in CAR (Central
African Republic), our efforts in Liberia, etc. etc. The people of
Uganda always support our stand on the EAC, the East African
Federation inclusive. As soon as the East African Anthem was
composed, Uganda, without my directive to do so, adopted it as
one of the anthems on State functions. Uganda always
welcomes the refugees from the African countries. As I speak
today, there are: 207,921 refugees from Congo, 257,171
refugees from South Sudan, 36,758 refugees from Somalia,
2,772 refugees from North Sudan, 39,608 refugees from
Burundi, 17,367 refugees from Rwanda, etc., etc. Accepting
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African refugees is part of the solidarity with our African

brothers and sisters. However, it is also a component of our
Pan-Africanist strategy to work for the unity of Africa in order
to ensure our prosperity and the prosperity of our African
brothers and sisters. In other documents, we have informed
Ugandans about unity, within Uganda and between Uganda
and other African countries, being a medicine against poverty
and under-development and for prosperity.

Our trade with our African brothers and sisters under EAC and
COMESA today brings in US$ 2 billion. Our trade with EU, on
the other hand, only brings in US$433 million per year; with
China, US$54.7millions per year; with India, US$24.8million
per year; with the USA, US$27.2 millions per year; etc. Yet we
import so much from China, India, EU, UAE, etc. As I told you
in the strategic guidelines, we must export more to the EU, to
the USA, to China, to India, to the UAE, to Russia, to Turkey
and Central Asia, to Japan and the Far East, etc. It is not
correct to support the prosperity of others by massively
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importing their products (goods and services) while they do not

support our prosperity through them importing our goods and
services. Our African brothers and sisters, however, are already
supporting our prosperity, as already pointed out above, by
giving us US$2 billions of goods and services bought from us.
This is in spite of the instability and the underdeveloped
infrastructure still to be found in the region. How much more
will they support our prosperity and we theirs when total peace
is restored in this area and infrastructure is developed in the
area?

Therefore, Uganda caring for the African refugees that are

brought here by adversity, is not just charity. It is also good
strategy. Our Banyarwanda comrades stayed here as refugees
for 34 years (1960-1994). We gave them all the support we
could afford. When they gained ascendance in Rwanda, they
opened up that country for interaction, including trade, with
East Africa. Today Uganda exports US$263 million worth of
goods and services to Rwanda. Rwanda, in turn, is exporting
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US$78 million worth of goods to Uganda. Through Rwanda

Airlines, Uganda is currently contributing about US$ 24.1
million to the prosperity of the people of Rwanda. South
Sudan, before the outbreak of the conflict in 2013, was
contributing US$ 700 million per annum (exports and
remittances) to the prosperity of the people of Uganda. You
recently witnessed the exodus of 40,000 plus Ugandans that
came back from South Sudan on account of the present
conflict there. What were they doing there? Looking for
prosperity. Therefore, Ugandans should know that unity within
Uganda and Pan-Africanism in the whole of Africa are not mere
acts of solidarity but are also investments to create a better
framework for the prosperity of all Africans.
I, therefore, salute Ugandans for welcoming our brothers and
sisters, the African refugees as well as other African business
persons. It is the cumulative, Pan-Africanist efforts of as many
Africans as are enlightened on this point that will guarantee
the prosperity of the African people.

Even to negotiate credible and durable trade deals with the

USA, the EU, China, India, Japan, Russia, Brazil, etc., we need
Pan-Africanism. It is only through the EAC (160 million people)
and the whole of Africa (1.25 billion people) that the other
foreign countries or trading blocs can listen to our voice in the
long run.
It is, however, not correct for the regulators not to take action
against the Chinese and Indian retailers who unfairly compete
against our retailers. Those foreigners should not operate at
that terminal level. They should be re-directed to
manufacturing in particular and other areas like construction.
Retailing should be preserved for the Ugandans or, possibly,
the other African immigrants as well.

Therefore, the Ugandans have internalized, generally speaking,

three of the four principles of the NRM: patriotism, PanAfricanism and democracy. Although there are still
opportunists who try to revive sectarianism, they are ever
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diminishing in importance. It is principle number three, socioeconomic transformation, that is still problematic. It is the one
we need to focus on vigorously. What, again, is socio-economic
transformation? It is the evolution of society from lower forms
of social organizations to higher forms. The universes (the
earth, the sun, the stars and the galaxies) have been in
existence for about 14 billion years. It is believed that the
galaxies came from an explosion of dense nucleus of
elementary particles of gas, a process known as the big bang.
Atoms were later formed as the gas expanded and cooled. Our
galaxy, the Milky Way, is comprised of billions of suns/stars
including our sun, as well as planets: such as Mercury, Venus,
Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, etc, rotating
around the galactic center. There are other galaxies such as
Andromeda, Magellan, Black eye, Cigar, Comet and many more.
The word galaxy is derived from the Greek word for milk and
is the reason that the band of light and stars across the sky is
called the Milky Way.

It is thought that our own planet, earth, solidified about 4.5

billion years ago. Unicellular creatures started emerging about
3.8 to 4 billion years ago. Multi-cellular creatures started
emerging about 700 or 800 years ago. About four million years
ago, the human beings started evolving from apes. This was
following the last glacial period the ice-age. The first humanlike creatures evolved in East Africa. Why? It was because it
was open grass land. In the grass land, walking on four legs
(Quadra-pedal) obstructed vision and could not allow
somebody to see far. That is how gradually, some of the apes
became bipedal (two-legged). Bipedalism is one factor that
distinguishes man from other mammals. The other two are a
hand that grips things and shapes tools and a large brain. The
average human brain for men is 1273.6cc and 1131.1cc for
women. It has been growing from 400cc, 4 million years ago to
the present size of 1350cc. Since 3100 BC, these human
groups started living in civilized societies. The early civilizations
were in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Babylon, etc, around the years
3000BC and 3500BC respectively. In all those millennia, the
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primer for social change is the advancement of science and

technology. The earliest example of technological revolution
was the invention of fire around 350,000 years BC.
With the invention of fire, the human beings could now move
from being tree-dwellers and become cave dwellers because
they could light the inside of caves and warm the caves. Karl
Marx pointed out that the human society had gone through five
social systems: primitive communalism, the slave state,
feudalism, capitalism and socialism.
Initially, society was classless all people were equal hunters
or gatherers. As time went on, differences in society emerged.
As you saw above, slave owners and slaves emerged. Later on,
the societies evolved into serfs and feudal land-lords. After the
middle-ages in Europe, the feudal society metamorphosed into
a capitalist society, culminating in the French Revolution of
1789. The French society of 1789 is always a very good
example of social evolution up to that time, reflecting what was
going on, at different paces, in other European societies. By
that time, France was a four-class society:
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1.
2.
3.
4.

The
The
The
The

feudalists (the Aristocrats);

middle-class (the bourgeoisie);
working class (the Proletariat); and
peasants.

Each of these social classes was maintained in different ways.

The feudalists sustained themselves by taking rent on land
(busuulu and nvujjo) from the peasants. The bourgeoisie
sustained themselves by taking the difference between the cost
price and the selling price of a good or a service which is called
profit. This concept of profit was revolutionary because the
previous societies were not very clear on this point.
Even today, you can find some African societies that engage in
activities that are not costed. They cannot, therefore, know
whether what they are doing is profitable or not. How much
did the concept of profit help in the process of wealth-creation
and wealth expansion? All modern thinkers should reflect on
this. Islamic Banking is, for instance, apparently, against the
concept of profit (riba). They call it haram (abominable
unholy or whatever). Is this revulsion against profit correct?
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Our think-tanks should reflect over these issues; we should not

just go on without a historical compass. The Banyankore had
both a credit policy and an insurance policy. Credit had two
elements: Omukwaaato and Obunaku. Banyankore regarded
with revulsion the idea of selling female cattle. They only sold
or slaughtered either bulls or infertile cattle (enguumba or
emberera). If, therefore, one had an urgent need of cattle for
slaughter or sale and lacked one himself, he could approach
another person with one of the two offers. Either he would
offer omukwaato or obunaku. With omukwaato, you would give
the lender a female producing cow in exchange for an
appropriate slaughter or sale one. The omukwaato cow would
stay with the lender until it produced and weaned a female calf
(echukire). Then the omukwaato cow would redeem itself
(okwechungura). If it produced bull calves in the meantime,
they would, on weaning, belong to the borrower. The lender
would, however, take the milk for all the time until the
termination of the deal. With the obunaku, the borrower would
take a slaughter or sale cow (enguumba, etc) or bull (endaaho)
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from the lender. After a stipulated time, say three years, the
borrower would give a female cow (a weaner or a mature cow) to
the lender.
The solution for social insurance was to run to the aid of
somebody that had experienced calamity on account of the
death of ones cattle. This was called okushumbuusha. Your
friends would kushumbuusha you. After some years, you would
pay back to each of them a female weaner and the debt would
be over. There was also empaano. This was like entandikwa
(initial capital) for the poor beneficiary vis-avis a richer person
or it could simply be an exchange of gifts among rich equals.
As you can see, all these were the Islamic Banking of the
Banyankore. They were all the pre-capitalist forms of credit
among the Banyankore.
I have spent abit of time on the issue of profit as I reminded the
audience of the phenomenon of the middle-class (the
bourgeoisie) in the evolution of the society. This is because I
consider it crucial to understand the instruments the different
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societies used to generate and expand wealth (Obugaiga, LonyoLuo, Abar-Ateso, Lonyi-Lugbara).
The fourth social class during the time of the French
Revolution were the peasants as already pointed out above.
These depended on their sweat minus what the land-lord took
as rent (busuulu and nvujjo).
As capitalism developed, between 1400AD and 1800AD,
another ideology also came up. This was the ideology of
socialism. This was the ideology of the working class distilled
by the intellectual Karl Marx, Engels, etc and, later, Lenin, Mao
Tse Tung and others. On account of the concentration of wealth
in Europe in fewer and fewer hands, the vast majority of the
people came to the point of where they owned nothing no
land, no property of any type (house, hotel) and no business
(shipping, banking, transport, etc). As Hunt R. Margaret put it
in the Oxford Handbook of Modern European History, 13501750 Vol.1 on page 344 when she interpreted Karl Marxs
opinion on the Communist Manifesto of 1848, they owned
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nothing except their labour. The exact quotation goes as

follows:
In the early modern and modern periods, according to Karl Marx, the
bourgeois or capitalist class owned the means of production
(capital to invest, raw materials, the factories, the machines) while
working class people owned nothing except their own labour which
they found themselves having to sell for a pittance to capitalists.

The communists, therefore, believed that the State (the

Government), acting on behalf of all the people should take the
commanding heights of the economy (land, banking, etc),
otherwise capitalism, since it ever concentrated wealth into
fewer and fewer hands, would come into crisis and would stop
being rational (as it was at the beginning of its onset) and
become, not only irrational, but also, a fetter on the greater
productivity of society.
In 1917, exactly 128 years after the French Capitalist
Revolution, a Socialist Revolution took place in Tsarist Russia.
Rapidly, the Soviet Union emerged as a very powerful State
until it got into crisis in 1990. In 1949, the Soviet Union was

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joined by the Peoples Republic of China as another communist

country.
We the African revolutionaries, have been studying all these
phenomena and we have avoided the bigotry of some circles
and pointed out to all and sundry that both capitalism and
socialism are modern systems. They can help to advance
society to higher levels of production of wealth and affluence.
Capitalism uses the selfishness of people, driven by the profit
motive, to aggressively and efficiently create and expand
wealth. Since, however, capitalism concentrates on private
profitability in a single enterprise (a factory, a hotel, a
business), they can easily forget social profitability (collective
gain). A bar owner may get very good profits from selling
alcohol. Society as a whole, however, may lose on account of
the increased alcoholism in society. Private profitability vs
social profitability. You could also describe this as the
contradiction between micro-profitability vs macro profitability
for the whole economy. We in the NRM, therefore, have never
accepted the shallow social science of the Western countries
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that fetishized capitalism and elevated that useful social

system, but one with limitations and weaknesses nevertheless,
to the high pedestal of a deity (God-like). The position that
capitalism was the only useful social system in the modern era,
was wrong. The dramatic rise of the Chinese economy, in
terms of GDP size, to the second biggest economy in the world
today is proof of the correctness of our position. By mixing
both the capitalist and socialist stimuli to the Chinese
economy, the Chinese Communist Party has lifted hundreds of
millions of Chinese out of poverty and registered gigantic steps
for the growth and transformation of the economy. In the
NRMs 10 points programme, point no. 10 was, indeed,
emphatically saying that, for us, we believed in the use of the
strategy of a mixed economy. Below are the NRM Ten Points
Programme:
POINT N0. 1
Restoration of Democracy
POINT N0. 2
Restoration of Security
POINT N0. 3
Consolidation of national unity and elimination of all forms of sectarianism.
POINT N0.4
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Defending and consolidating national independence

POINT N0. 5
Building an independent, integrated and self-sustaining national economy
POINT N0.6
Restoration and improvement of social services and rehabilitation of war ravaged areas
POINT N0. 7
Elimination of corruption and the misuse of power
POINT N0. 8
Redressing errors that have resulted in the dislocation of some sections of the population
POINT N0. 9
Cooperation with other African countries
POINT N0. 10
Following an economic strategy of a mixed economy

Therefore, when today we talk of the principle no. 3 of the

NRM, the principle of socio-economic transformation, we
should know that we are not treading on an un-trodden path.
Many societies have already trodden that path. Initially, it was
the societies of Western Europe that between 1400AD and
1900AD metamorphosed from feudal societies to middle-class
and skilled working class societies. Between 1945 and today,
huge sections of the Asian populations in China, India,
Malaysia, Indonesia have similarly done so. It is now the single
most important task of the NRM.

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The 23 points guidelines I gave you recently are in order to

achieve this by initially enabling Uganda to become a Middle
Income status country by 2020 and a First World country in
the next 30 years if not less. We have long started on that
journey. By identifying the ten strategic bottlenecks, we had
correctly diagnosed the sickness. In order to remind ourselves,
the 10 strategic bottlenecks are:
(i)
(ii)
(iii)
(iv)
(v)
(vi)
(vii)
(viii)
(ix)
(x)

ideological disorientation;
a weak state, especially the army, that needed
restructuring;
the suppression of the private sector;
the underdevelopment of the human resource (lack of
education and poor health);
the underdevelopment of the infrastructure (the railways,
the roads, the electricity, the telephones, piped water, etc);
a small internal market;
lack of industrialization;
the underdevelopment of the services sector (hotels,
banking, transport, insurance, etc.);
the underdevelopment of agriculture; and
the attack on democracy.

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By dealing with each of these strategic bottlenecks, we are

either directly or indirectly, contributing to the struggle for the
socio-economic transformation of our society.
Indeed, all of them impact on this struggle. Education for all
and improved health for everybody does. Educated people can
more easily move into the middle-class than the uneducated.
Emancipating the private sector through liberalization impacts
social evolution in two ways: by encouraging entrepreneurs to
emerge who, then, become employers and, then, the employers
taking on employees. With one stroke, two elements of two
social classes are created: the middle-class and the working
class. Handling strategic bottleneck no. 9, the underdevelopment of agriculture, will mean dealing with the 68% of
the homesteads that are still in subsistence agriculture. By
handling infrastructure, we are creating a modern base for the
economy that will enable entrepreneurs to produce goods and
services cheaply, which means that Uganda will be competitive.
If we produce expensive or poor quality goods, nobody will buy
them. If people, local and foreign, do not buy our products or
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use our services, our entrepreneurs will collapse or will not

expand. All that will negatively affect jobs , etc. It is a vicious
cycle one problem, leading to another.
In conclusion and simply put, socio-economic transformation
means discarding negative old traditions, going from manual,
non-skilled labour to skilled and intellectual labour.
We must move from feudal relationships and practice middleclass relationships and practices. The peasant class will be
phased out. A peasant should not produce another peasant in
the NRM era. A peasant should produce a skilled worker, a
middle-class entrepreneur, a professional able to market
his/her professionalism or an intellectual. In that way, as a
consequence of addressing the 10 strategic bottle-necks, our
society will undergo socio-economic transformation. Indeed,
that socio-economic transformation is already taking place. It
is a question of intensifying and expediting the process.
Uganda will become a middle-class and skilled working class
society based on the four sectors of our economy: a modern
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commercial agriculture, industries (factories), modern services

and ICT.

I thank you.
26th July, 2016

Kyankwanzi

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