Uganda has many friends. North Korea has few. But what we do have--is each other. Uganda has enjoyed deep ties with North Korea, perhaps deeper than those of any African country [Zimbabwe and Ethiopia perhaps coming close], and, unlike many, has worked to improve these links since the end of the Cold War. In fact, President Museveni himself visited Pyongyang in 1992, a pleasant experience for him that, unfortunately, both his advanced age and the difficulty of North Korea's present situation render him unable to repeat. With Uganda at a crossroads, a fast growing economy, a powerful military and increasingly lofty dreams, it is time to revisit relations with a mind towards the future.

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Simultaneously, Museveni has increasingly turned his eye towards his legacy, at his advanced age. While some of this reflects in his cultivation of his son for leadership, other projects have come to mind. One of these is the Museveni Friendship Technical University, a reminder that while Uganda may not have vast budgets, what it does have is people. Uganda is capable of developing inexpensive, asymmetric capabilities based on this pool of manpower, especially if it improves its institutions and educational system. One of the best, especially in a continent that is increasingly networked and interconnected but lacks expertise in this domain, is in intelligence, and in particular cyber operations.

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North Korea is a natural friend to seek out in this endeavour. Their cyber program has generated frankly impressive results in garnering revenue for the regime, but also effecting attacks against political targets and even taking valuable military intelligence. While some of their approaches are interesting--especially in building new malware entirely from scratch, rather than reusing commercial off the shelf programs, often from fundamentals--there is no denying their success, even against relatively hard targets. The countries Uganda is interested in are soft targets. Very soft.

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So, in establishing the Museveni Friendship Technical University--a university for the technical sciences, focused on producing graduates in mathematics, theoretical physics, and computer science alone--Museveni has made a few phone calls to Kim Jong-Un, asking for a team of North Korean English-speaking professors to come and teach computer science their way--and, at nights and on breaks, train Ugandan intelligence officers and candidates in the art of hacking, the juche way. Of course, they [and hence the North Korean government] will be compensated generously for their time.

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We hope that this can provide yet another basis for the friendship between North Korea and Uganda, one of both mutual benefit and opportunity.