Uganda has about 5,000 troops putting out fires in neighbouring South Sudan and the Central African Republic. These latest operations follow a long trail of controversial interventions in other countries in the region, including the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Somalia. 

 

For ordinary Ugandans, struggling with low salaries, collapsing infrastructure and runaway corruption, the huge cost of these missions is hard to swallow. “Why is our military all over the place—even in countries that haven’t attacked us?” asked Cissy Kagaba, executive director of the Kampala-based Anti-Corruption Coalition of Uganda. “When the defence ministry comes seeking a supplementary budget they get it instantly, yet teachers have been demanding an increment for years and no one listens to them.” 

 

Shortly after Uganda sent troops to quell the civil war that broke out in South Sudan in December 2013, the defence ministry requested and received a supplementary 120 billion Ugandan shillings ($50m) to fund these operations by the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF). 

 

The defence sector has “consistently been overfunded”, wrote Uganda’s largest opposition party, the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), in its alternative budget proposal in July 2014. The FDC also called for “full accountability on our continued stay in Somalia and South Sudan” and demanded “the withdrawal of the UPDF from South Sudan”.

 

Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, in power for 29 years, often points to Ugandan security concerns and the “pan-African spirit” to justify these foreign adventures. Yet most analysts see these interventions as moves by Mr Museveni to strengthen his power at home and distract citizens from their domestic woes while carving out a role as the West’s point man in the unstable, resource-rich region.

 

Mr Museveni wants to be “a player for regional stability” but other motives closer to home are also at play, said Christoph Vogel, a regional political analyst and PhD candidate at the University of Zurich. “It’s helpful to use an external threat to distract from domestic problems. That’s a very old and very simple political strategy obviously used by Museveni.”

 

Opposition to Mr Museveni’s regime has grown in recent years. Shortly after the last elections in February 2011, widespread street protests broke out in the capital Kampala and other major towns. An ensuing crackdown left at least nine demonstrators dead, according to Human Rights Watch, the US-based pressure group.

 

Mr Museveni’s personal political ambitions were behind Uganda’s recent foreign military forays, particularly in South Sudan, said Moses Khisa, a political analyst and PhD student at Chicago’s Northwestern University. He shrouded Uganda’s involvement in pan-African rhetoric and used the Somali crisis to “keep in the good books of the West, especially the US”, Mr Khisa added. This also served to “leverage…peacekeeping funding to mollify his most important constituency—the military”. 

 

Uganda was the first country to send troops to Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, in March 2007 as part of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) to tackle the Shabab, the radical Islamist group. The UPDF’s 6,223 soldiers, according to the AMISOM website, made up the largest national contingent. Burundi, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Sierra Leone together sent another 15,341 soldiers. This AU force succeeded in expelling the Shabab from Mogadishu and much of Somalia. 

 

Mr Museveni was eager to send troops to Somalia at the time to repair his fraying relations with the West, said Godber Tumushabe, an analyst and associate director at the Great Lakes Institute for Strategic Studies (GLISS), a Kampala-based think-tank. The West had been displeased with the 2005 removal of presidential term limits freeing Mr Museveni for a potential life presidency.

 

“Somalia came in at a very opportune moment,” he told Africa in Fact. “Museveni found an opportunity to place himself in the middle of the war on terror. That gave him quite a lot of traction” in the West.

 

With east Africa emerging as an important front in the war on terror and Mr Museveni fashioning himself as a dependable ally, the West has maintained its warm relations and appears to overlook Mr Museveni’s excesses. “You really see that the international community is not very keen at pressing [Mr Museveni] on some of the democratic issues, human rights…because they think he’s fighting their war,” Mr Tumushabe said.

 

Kristian Schmidt, head of the European Union (EU) delegation in Kampala, denied that the West was soft on Mr Museveni, but acknowledged that the EU “appreciates the partnership” with him. 

 

South Sudanese rebels say Mr Museveni’s move in December 2013 to send troops to defend his long-time ally, President Salva Kiir, was self-interested meddling in a neighbour’s internal affairs. 

 

Mr Museveni’s involvement in South Sudan was “arrogant aggression”, the rebels’ military spokesman, Brigadier Lul Ruai Koang, told Africa in Fact. He accused the UPDF of using illegal cluster bombs and committing killings on a scale that constitutes war crimes. Ugandan troops are “paid in dollars” by Mr Kiir, the brigadier alleged. 

 

At the time of writing, 2,000 Ugandan soldiers were stationed in South Sudan and another 3,000 in the CAR, according to Paddy Ankuda, a UPDF spokesman. 

 

Mr Schmidt admitted that the EU is concerned about human rights violations allegedly committed by UPDF troops. A September 2014 report by Human Rights Watch accused Ugandan soldiers of demanding sex from Somali women in exchange for food. 

 

Similar accusations have trailed the UPDF’s actions in foreign countries. The DRC sued Uganda at the Hague-based International Court of Justice in June 1999 demanding compensation for Uganda’s “illegal exploitation of Congolese natural resources” during its occupation. The court returned a verdict in DRC’s favour in December 2005, ordering Uganda to negotiate with the DRC the amount of reparations to be paid. Talks on this issue continue.

 

Whether driven by personal ambition or greed, as his critics argue, or striving to keep regional peace, as he maintains, Mr Museveni is playing a dangerous game. With today’s rebels tomorrow’s potential leaders, Ugandan boots could be sowing seeds of future violence. In the words of a September 2014 Standard Chartered Bank report: “Uganda’s involvement in regional peacekeeping efforts may…contribute to security risks.” 

 

For example, the Shabab has repeatedly struck or threatened Uganda in retaliation for the UPDF’s 2007 incursion into Somalia. On July 11th 2010, the Somali militant group claimed responsibility for two suicide bombings in Kampala that killed at least 74 people, according to media reports. 

 

Mr Museveni is unlikely to heed these threats. He has much to gain from sending his troops abroad: diplomatic capital from the West that considers him an ally in the fight against Islamic extremists. As his grip on power becomes more and more tenuous at home, we can expect to hear again that familiar, distracting thump of Ugandan boots marching across the border.