Museveni: Uganda's ex-revolutionary entering 5th decade in power

Uganda’s incumbent president and National Resistance Movement (NRM) presidential candidate Yoweri Museveni speaks during a press conference after casting his ballot in Rwakitura on January 15, 2026 during Uganda’s 2026 general elections. [AFP]

Yoweri Museveni has been president longer than most Ugandans have been alive, and shows no sign of giving up his place among the world's longest-serving leaders after he won a seventh election on Saturday.

Shortly after Museveni took power in 1986, ending years of bloodshed and chaos under tyrannical rulers, the young president mused that leaders overstaying their welcome lay at the heart of Africa's problems.

But four decades later, the introspection is gone and Museveni, once hailed in the West as a model African leader committed to good governance, has joined the ranks of those he once criticised.

His genial demeanour and penchant for folksy parables belie a past as a wily guerrilla fighter and ruthless political survivor.

During his 40-year reign, Museveni has fused state and party, and crushed political opposition, to such an extent that any real outside challenge to him or his National Resistance Movement (NRM) has become impossible.

At 81, though some opponents say he is older, Museveni says he is fighting fit.

Having once promised to retire and tend to his cherished long-horned Ankole cows, he has instead outlasted every ruler on the continent bar Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea and Paul Biya of Cameroon.

Museveni was born on September 15, 1944, into a cattle-keeping family of the Hima community in Ntungamo District of southwestern Uganda.

He studied at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in the 1960s, then a kind of finishing school for anti-colonialists, where his thesis was on the revolutionary violence promoted by French philosopher Frantz Fanon.

British journalist William Pike, who interviewed Museveni in 1984, described him as having the "faraway look... of a dreamer, a revolutionary" who was "intensely serious but showed flashes of humour".

Challenger within

After returning to Uganda, he was forced back to Tanzania as an exile during the regime of Idi Amin.

Museveni helped form the Front for National Salvation, which played a part in Amin's overthrow in 1979.

Museveni took up arms after a rigged election in 1980 and led a guerrilla insurgency known as the Ugandan Bush War that finally captured Kampala in 1986.

A new constitution led to his victory in elections the following year, which he repeated in 2001, 2006, 2011, 2016, 2021 and now 2026.

He had the constitution changed twice to remove term and age limits. Rights groups have criticised the increasingly violent repression of any challengers.

Despite his radical past, Museveni proved a pragmatic leader, bending to Western demands that he impose stringent neoliberal reforms to stabilise the economy.

He made himself a useful military partner to the West at moments when they questioned his crushing of democratic rights, not least when he contributed significant troops to fight against Islamist insurgents in Somalia in the 2000s.

There was renewed criticism in 2023 over an anti-gay law seen as one of the world's harshest, but Museveni showed his knack for weathering the storm.