155 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2021
J. Nemec, P. S. Reddy (eds.), Public Administration in Confict
Affected Countries, Governance and Public Management,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74966-8_8
CHAPTER 8
Thirty-Five Years of Reforms in Uganda: Is
the Glass Half Full or Half Empty?
Dmitry D. Pozhidaev
8.1 INTRODUCTION: OLD CONFLICTS AND NEW CRISES
This chapter explores the role of public administration in rebuilding and
re-constructing Uganda following the coming to power of the present
National Resistance Movement (NRM) government under President
Yoweri Museveni in 1986. Preceding this takeover was a turbulent period
of the birth of an independent Uganda in 1962. The government of
President Obote fell nine years later as a result of a coup d’état by Idi Amin
who unleashed a regime of terror against his own people characterized by
political repression, ethnic persecution, extrajudicial killings, nepotism
and corruption. International estimates put the number of people killed
by the regime as high as 500,000 (Keatley, 2003). Amin was ousted in
1979 and the next seven years saw fve successive regimes until the last of
them under Tito Okello was overthrown in 1986 by Museveni’s NRM,
which waged a bush war against those regimes from 1981.
D. D. Pozhidaev (*)
United Nations Capital Development Fund, Kampala, Uganda
e-mail: dmitry.pozhidaev@uncdf.org