As Ugandans prepare to cast their votes in the presidential and parliamentary elections on Friday, their president Yoweri Kaguta Museveni has assured them that the winds of political change that have swept through Tunisia, Ivory Coast and Egypt can not occur in Uganda.
Addressing the press at state house in Entebbe town Wednesday, Museveni said he is not worried that protests intended to remove him can succeed in any way.
“What happened in Tunisia and Egypt and what is happening in some Arab countries can not happen here. For us here we are friendly to our people. We know their problems and collectively work out ways to solve them,” Museveni told journalists.
According to him the reason behind the chaos in Egypt and Tunisia is because leaders there have failed to deal with the issues that affect their
people appropriately.
“The big problem in black and Arab Africa is that some of the leaders there did not correctly identify bottlenecks that have made Africa fail to transform
from 3rd world to 2nd world,” the Ugandan president asserted.
Arguing that he is far from being a dictator and that being overthrown like his counterparts from Tunisia and Egypt is not part of his worries, Museveni believes that people get tired of their leaders and end up protesting only when an economy gets stagnant for a long time.
“There is no slightest worry in me. I am the biggest enemy of dictators. I am a dictators’ buster. I am always with my people and they can not go against me”.
Despite claiming to be a non-dictator, Museveni, who has been in power for over 25 years, says that he is not yet ready to give up politics because he has not achieved his objectives of building the East African country’s into a middle class economy and making most Ugandans relatively rich.