KAMPALA, July 17– Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has urged a visiting delegation of military officers from the War College of Mali to promote Africa’s strategic interests amid an increasingly complex geopolitical landscape.
According to a State House statement issued Friday, Museveni made the remarks on Thursday while delivering a lecture to the delegation, saying that Africa’s future depends on fulfilling the continent’s three historical missions of achieving prosperity, ensuring strategic security and advancing African unity.
Museveni said Africa’s liberation struggle was not solely about attaining political independence but also about creating sustainable prosperity for its people.
He said lasting wealth is created by producing goods and services for broader markets rather than for local communities alone, adding that “pan-Africanism is not just an ideology; it is an economic necessity.”
Museveni said prosperity cannot be sustained without the capacity to defend it, making strategic security the second historical mission. As modern warfare has expanded beyond the traditional domains of land, air and sea to include space, no single African country has the capacity to compete effectively across all four domains on its own, said the president.
He welcomed efforts by Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger to strengthen regional cooperation, saying deeper political and security integration would better enable African countries to safeguard their sovereignty and accelerate development.
According to the statement, the 37-member delegation, comprising staff, defense officials and student officers from Mali, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Guinea, Morocco, Senegal and Togo, has been in Uganda since July 12 for a study tour. (Namibia Daily News / Xinhua)
