Leadership Quote by Yoweri Museveni

It lands like a shrug aimed at the entire post-World War II moral order. When Yoweri Museveni says, "What is the Geneva Convention on wars! I have never read it", the shock isn’t just in the ignorance being confessed, but in how strategically casual it is. International humanitarian law is designed to bind leaders precisely when war makes restraint inconvenient. By treating it as some irrelevant pamphlet, Museveni flips the burden: if he hasn’t read it, then its constraints can’t possibly apply with urgency, or at least he can perform distance from them.

The wording matters. "What is...!" isn’t a question so much as a dismissal, a rhetorical eye-roll that reframes the Geneva Conventions as foreign, abstract, even unserious. The second sentence completes the move: the speaker doesn’t argue against the rules; he sidesteps them. That evasion is the subtext. It signals to domestic allies and security forces that the state’s priorities are practical control and survival, not compliance with distant institutions that often arrive, in African conflicts, wearing the face of selective enforcement.

Context sharpens the intent. Museveni has long balanced a liberation-movement origin story with decades of hard-nosed counterinsurgency and regional military entanglements. In that world, "law" is frequently portrayed as a luxury of stable democracies and victorious powers. The line works because it’s brazen: it normalizes impunity through feigned naivete, converting what should be disqualifying into a kind of realist credential.