This is the last column I am writing. I leave the country early next week for Stanford University in the United States where I will be a research fellow for one year.

I leave at a sad time when there is increasing personalisation of the State in Uganda by President Yoweri Museveni. To understand this process is to study the trends in the budget of State House, which is the residence of the President and which is also his private office.

In Uganda’s budget, State House has its own vote. The official office of the president is called “Office of the President.” It too has a vote. This financial year, the budget for State House is Shs48 billion, Office of the President, Shs40 billion.

This gives the presidency a budget of Shs88 billion, ten times the size of the recurrent budget of the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries (Shs9.6 billion), a sector that contributes 34 percent of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and employs 73 percent of Uganda's citizens. In 1997/98, the budget of State House was Shs11 billion. Today, it is Shs48 billion - an increase of more than 450 percent.

Financial indiscipline
State House has also been the most indisciplined institution in managing its budget -- always asking for large supplementary budgets. The variance between actual budget and budget outturn are very big - sometimes by 25 percent. Just check the books!
It should be intriguing that the private office of the President receives more budget allocation than the official office.

Indeed, if you subtract the budget for the Internal Security Organisation (Shs18 billion) and the External Security Organisation (Shs9 billion), which fall under the vote of Office of the President, then the official Office of the President was allocated only Shs13 billion.

Why does the private office of the President take four times more money than his official office? This reflects the increasing informalisation of power. The President hardly goes to his official office. Therefore, official business is always conducted in his residence and private office!

Visitors to the President's country home in Rwakitura, for example, are now telling stories of how Mr Museveni holds meetings with officials of government in his nightgown. Twenty years in power, and perhaps subconsciously, Museveni no longer distinguishes his private life from his official duties. But this personalisation of the State has gone hand in hand with growth in its arbitrariness.

The recent spate of land give- away deals is one example. The allocation of State enterprises to "investors" for free is another. Instructing army officers to take bribes from arms dealers is third.

Writing letters to officials of government instructing them to give cash bailouts to favoured businessmen is a tragic fourth. Granting tax rebates to favoured businessmen is a filthy fifth. Using the presidential jet to ferry his daughters to Europe to deliver babies is a disturbing sixth. Sending non-legal military/security outfits to invade courts of law and hold judges and diplomats hostage is a catastrophic seventh.

Journalists can write all about the ethnic conflicts between the Basamia and Bagwere, but get arrested when they write about the Bahima-Bairu differences in the President's ethnic region. The list goes on and on.

The Presidential Guard Brigade - is over 10,000 troops strong and growing. When UPDF was about to launch Operation Iron Fist in February 2002, it carried out an audit of the strength of the Fourth Division - the army deployed to defend the people of northern Uganda against the LRA rebels.

The audit, carried out in Aswa Ranch found that out of a declared strength of 7,200 troops, the Fourth Division actually had only 2,400. The rest were ghosts! That is why whenever the President travels to war-torn northern Uganda, it is the PGB that is deployed to fight rebels and ensure his safety.

This means that the President of the Republic is aware that the regular army is ill trained and ill equipped to contain the rebels. Apparently, the security of one man - "the leader of the resistance" - is more important for this country than the security of millions of his citizens in northern Uganda who live in squalid conditions in concentration camps.

The official convoy of the President is often more than 10 cars. His wife rides in yet another motorcade of eight cars. I recently counted the number of vehicles, which the First Lady had travelled in from State House to Parliament, a distance of less than one kilometre.

There were two luxurious black Land Cruisers, three sleek Mercedes Benz saloons, and three pick-up jeeps for the soldiers.
The President of Rwanda (we are told by our intelligence services is hated by the majority of his citizens) travels in a convoy of three vehicles. His wife has only two.

More intriguing, State House provides one sleek Mercedes Benz saloon car to each of the three daughters of the President, costing Shs400 million each, and a pick-up truck with military escorts.

The taxpayer also pays for their drivers, shamba boys, cooks, cleaners, etc. So are the maintenance and fuel costs of their cars. All this in spite of the fact that the Constitution of this republic is clear: married daughters of the President and his grand children are their own responsibility with their husbands; not the taxpayer.

Personalised state
This is partly because Museveni has an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. He believes that because he led the struggle to "remove dictators," he should hold the country at ransom for it. To complete this personalisation of the State, a cousin of the First Lady, Ms Hope Nyakairu, formerly from the household staff, was made under secretary for finance and administration at State House -- to take care of the payments.

If this is the price we have to pay for being "liberated from swine leaders," then we are better off un-liberated. When one raises these issues, the response is characteristic - "you hate the first family." Of course this is obvious!

The State has been personalised: matters of State and matters of the First Family are intertwined. What we have now is a government of the First Family, by the First Family and for the First Family. Even Idi Amin did not rival this record!
God bless Uganda! Goodbye dear readers!

andrewmwenda@yahoo.com