In a few weeks' time, on October 9th to be precise, Uganda will celebrate only its 61st Independence anniversary. 

During these 61 years, Uganda has faced serious political challenges, that between 1966 and 1986 merged to deny the people their basic civil liberties, chief of which was the liberty to enjoy the pleasures of security of life and property. 

Today, thanks to his deliberate and “correct diagnosis” of our politics, first as a student at Ntare School and later on at the University Of Dar-es-Salaam, President Museveni has steered our hopeless politics to one that is now truly democratic. 

Picture if you will, the look on Janet Kataaha Kainembabazi’s face when she saw a young Yoweri Museveni emerge out of a tiny white Fiat 125S crammed with bags of clothing and other necessities, in the parking lot of Nairobi’s Hilton hotel in 1972 on his way from one of his numerous missions to “fight Idi Amin” in Uganda. 

In the culture of the Banyakore, like it is among the Bahororo and other Banyakigyezi, the birth of a child is one that is celebrated through an elaborate naming process. It is especially special when a man begets a baby boy and a baby girl in quick succession. Every true father wants to watch his children take their first steps, say their first words, and go on their first day of school. Today we take these seemingly simple happenings for granted and yet from 1979 until 1985, Yoweri Museveni never got to enjoy these happenings with Muhoozi, with Nyinacwende, with Kokundeka, and with Kyaremera. 
 

And yet through these hardships on family caused by love of country, Yoweri, as Maama fondly calls him, maintained “a calm certainty of character” because “he knew that everything would be fine and we would all go home to Uganda..and our lives would be normal again.”

Today Mzee Yoweri Kaguta Museveni turns 79. He presides over a country that has for the first time in its history enjoyed uninterrupted peace for 37 years, the years of rapacious insurgency in the North notwithstanding. 

Today, on this 15th day of Nyankaaga and surrounded by his much larger family of children, grandchildren, and in-laws, Maama Janet Kataaha Kainembabazi Museveni can yet again proclaim “O it is a new day for the one I love! The one my Father chose for me.”

It is also a day on which we at the Digital Media Unit and the wider Ministry of Information, Communications Technology, and National Guidance venture to say there is no man in our history with an admirable and felicitous combination of temperament, conviction, and ability to cause the realisation of our African hopes of universal socio-economic progress than Yoweri Museveni. 

Your Excellency, borrowing from Leo Tolstoy, your “supremacy expresses itself altogether” in your “peculiar moral power and in the greatness of your character.” 

Our support for you and the Revolution remains firm. 

May your 79th be of exciting cheer.