A FEW kilometres from the equator, on the road from Kampala to Masaka in southwest Uganda, two enormous billboard posters featuring Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni and Muammar Gadafy stare out from the roadside.
They appear photoshopped, Museveni hovering an inch or two higher off the ground than Gadafy, who is rumoured to have left the country before the photo could be taken. But the message, spelt out in English and Arabic underneath, is pretty clear.
"Brother leader Muammar Gadafy and President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda in Lowero triangle – 150km north of capital city Kampala. Around the triangle, Libyan air force dropped in 1982 weaponry which proved in favour of the National Resistance Movement." Museveni's rise to power in 1986, when he toppled the murderous dictator Milton Obote, owes a lot to Gadafy. A hurried delivery of 96 rifles and 100 landmines was followed in 1985 with 800 rifles, 800,000 rounds of AK-47 ammunition and some SAM-47 launchers, as Museveni wrote in his book Sowing the Mustard Seed. And many Ugandans remain grateful.
“Why are they doing this to Gadafy?” says a Catholic nun, a member of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, near Kampala. “After years of war we have peace in Uganda. He gave so much to this country.” And to the rest of Africa. Spurned by the Arab world in his quest for Arab unity in the 1990s, Gadafy turned his attention to the continent, proposing the idea of a “United States of Africa” and even declaring himself Africa’s “King of Kings” at an African Union summit in 2008. Some $8 billion (€5.8 billion) of Libyan oil money was invested across the continent, in everything from the Kenyan hotel industry to water drilling companies in Ethiopia. He built stakes in telecommunications companies in Rwanda and Uganda, promised investment in oil pipelines and funded mosques from Liberia in West Africa to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.
Another $97 billion was promised by Gadafy last year.
“He contributed significantly to the African Union [15 per cent of the annual budget] and paid the membership fees of many countries such as Malawi that had fallen back on payments” says Dr Petrus
de Kock of the South African institute of International Affairs. “They could often call on him for discretionary funding for specific projects because he wasn’t afraid to dip into Libya’s huge foreign currency reserves, raising a bit of a question on where that money is going to come from in the future.” But if benefactors such as Uganda’s president Museveni and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe were quick to denounce western intervention in Libya, many ordinary people did not.
“All this talk about ‘King of Kings’ was self-serving nonsense. You can’t count the regressive impact he has had on the country,” says Jesmed
F Suma, executive director at
the think tank Sierra Leone Policy Watch.
In a bid to sever Africa's ties with the west, in the 1980s Gadafy invited many "radical thinking" Africans to his "World Revolutionary Centre" in Benghazi. The "Harvard and Yale of a whole generation of African revolutionaries," according to Stephen Ellis in his 2001 book, The Mask of Anarchy,it trained some of the continent's most infamous tyrants.
Among them was Foday Sankoh, the leader of Sierra Leone’s main rebel group and Charles Taylor, who is now on trial in The Hague for his role in the Sierra Leone Civil War. Some 250,000 died in that conflict between 1991 and 2002, with Gadafy arming Taylor to the teeth, regularly visiting to watch his progress in looting the country’s diamond fields.
“We were pursuing Gadafy for $10 billion in reparations, but his death might jeopardise our case” says Suma.
“But we’re glad he’s dead.”