Uganda Is Not a Personal Property of Anyone

On 29 January 1986, Yoweri Museveni was sworn in as President of Uganda at Kololo Independence Grounds before tens of thousands of jubilant Ugandans. The NRM had just ended five years of guerrilla war against the Obote II and Okello governments, during which an estimated 500,000 Ugandans perished in the Luwero Triangle massacres.

In this inaugural address, Museveni delivered one of the most quoted lines in Ugandan political history: "No one should think that what is happening today is a mere change of guards. It is a fundamental change." He laid out the NRM's Ten-Point Programme and committed to restoring security, eliminating sectarianism, and building a self-sustaining economy.

The speech is significant because it set the ideological framework of the NRM government — pan-African, anti-sectarian, and pro-peasant — that would shape Ugandan politics for decades. Museveni's declaration that "Uganda is not a personal property of anyone" was a direct rebuke to the ethnic patronage politics that had destroyed the country under previous regimes.