The day had begun rather ordinarily. One of the soldiers involved in the coup, Samuel Doe, had reportedly received word from his village that a relative was critically ill. What was needed of him was money to bribe the doctor to treat him. Fortunately for Doe, he was part of the President’s security detail. All he had to do was wait until the big man was free and then ask him for some money. Until then, however, Doe and about twelve of his fellow soldiers decided to help themselves to a little drink.

In the early hours of the morning, the soldiers penetrated the Executive Mansion. Accounts of precisely what happened inside the presidential quarters differ, including over who fired the fatal shot. What is not in dispute is that President Tolbert was killed and that, by dawn, the political order that had governed Liberia for 133 years had been violently overthrown. When the first rays of sunshine began piercing the morning sky, Liberia had ceased to be the Republic it had been the night before.

But Republics rarely die in a single night.

When the Rwanda Patriotic Front captured Kigali in 1994, it is doubtful that Zaire’s (now known as the DR Congo) kleptocratic strongman, Mobutu Sese Seko, imagined that within two years he would face a rebellion unlike any he had ever confronted. For three decades, Mobutu had mastered the politics of survival. He had outlived enemies, manipulated rivals and presided over a state whose institutions had become increasingly inseparable from the man who occupied the presidential palace.

Yet on October 18, 1996, a group of Congolese exiles and political dissidents gathered in Kigali and formed the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo - AFDL. They chose Laurent-Désiré Kabila as their leader. The movement brought together Congolese opponents of Mobutu with Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundian interests, among others.

In Kinshasa, meanwhile, much of the conversation revolved around Mobutu’s failing health. He was receiving treatment in Switzerland for prostate cancer, and reports suggested that the disease had metastasised to his bones. Few people in the capital appeared to regard the rebellion gathering momentum in the east as an existential threat to the regime.

That would change very quickly. The eastern rebellion exposed something that had been concealed for years: the apparent permanence of Mobutu’s political order was not the same thing as its underlying strength. Once the foundations began to give way, the edifice that had appeared immovable collapsed with extraordinary speed. Within about seven months, the AFDL arrived in Kinshasa, and Mobutu’s thirty-two-year reign was over.

Meanwhile, just across the Congo River, another political drama was unfolding. In the Republic of the Congo, a simmering struggle between President Pascal Lissouba and the militia loyal to former Marxist ruler Denis Sassou Nguesso eventually erupted into civil war. With decisive Angolan military support, Sassou Nguesso captured Brazzaville in October and returned to the presidency. Only five years earlier, he had been compelled to surrender power and accept the country’s return to multiparty democracy.

While the two Congos burned, Liberia was making another turn in its own tragic history. Charles Taylor won the country’s July 1997 presidential election with more than three-quarters of the vote. His victory was an extraordinary illustration of what prolonged civil war can do to political judgement. Taylor had campaigned under the implicit threat that if he did not win, the seven-year bloody civil war, in which he was a principal actor, would continue. Exhausted by years of killing, many Liberians chose the man they feared in the hope that he could at least bring the war to an end. They would soon realise that he had no intention of confining his ambitions to Liberia when he exported violence into neighbouring Sierra Leone, where another political order had already begun to collapse.

In May 1997, the same month Mobutu’s reign ended, President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, democratically elected only the previous year, was overthrown by the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council led by Major Johnny Paul Koroma. The junta subsequently aligned itself with Foday Sankoh’s Liberian-supported Revolutionary United Front, an organisation whose brutality would become synonymous with Sierra Leone’s civil war. Sierra Leone’s diamond fields became the theatre of a particularly grotesque form of warfare. Diamonds financed armed groups; civilians were mutilated, terrorised and displaced; and a country’s natural wealth became an instrument of its destruction. The phrase “blood diamonds” entered the international vocabulary. A Nigerian-led ECOWAS intervention eventually helped restore Kabbah to Freetown in March 1998, although peace remained elusive for several more years.

Liberia, Zaire, Congo-Brazzaville and Sierra Leone were different countries, with different histories, different political systems and different actors. Yet beneath their differences was a common and disturbing pattern: political orders that had appeared permanent proved remarkably fragile; governments that had seemed immovable suddenly found themselves unable to command obedience; and presidents who had mastered the art of political survival discovered that the political world could change faster than their intelligence services could report it.

This is perhaps the first lesson of political history: the appearance of permanence is not permanence. A government can remain in office for decades and still become progressively weaker beneath the surface. A ruler may command the army, dominate the legislature, control the bureaucracy and win election after election while the foundations of political legitimacy quietly erode.

Often, this gives rise to a dangerous notion in which those in power mistake the absence of an immediate challenger for the presence of enduring consent. They are not the same thing. A frightened population can be silent, and so too can a politically exhausted population. Silence, particularly in politics, is a dangerous thing to mistake for loyalty.

Like Tolbert before him, Mobutu discovered this too late. The most important weakness of his regime was not necessarily that Kabila suddenly became extraordinarily powerful. It was that the Zairian state had become extraordinarily hollow. Institutions had been personalised, the economy had been devastated, the armed forces were demoralised, and political patronage had become an increasingly important instrument of survival. His palace at Kinshasa remained, but the state had disappeared.

This is perhaps the most unsettling feature of political decay. A state can possess all the outward symbols of sovereignty long after its inner capacity to govern has begun to disappear. The presence of a presidential palace, sometimes called State House, a parliament dominated by party sycophants, ministries and ceremonies of state beamed on radio, television and other media platforms all conceal the sad fact that the Republic itself is increasingly fragile.

This is why Africa’s post-independence political crises cannot simply be reduced to coups, dictators and rebel movements. Those are the visible eruptions beneath which lies a much deeper question about the construction of the African state.

The men and women who inherited independence inherited states whose boundaries were drawn for purposes other than the political organisation of the societies contained within them. They inherited administrative systems designed principally to govern rather than to cultivate Republican citizenship. They inherited economies structured around extraction and political institutions whose legitimacy was still young and fragile.

Their task was, therefore, immense. They had to turn territories into Nations, administrations into governments, subjects into citizens and independence into functioning Republics. A few, like Sir Seretse Khama and Mwalimu Nyerere, seem to have succeeded. Many failed spectacularly. Some began with genuine promise before succumbing to the oldest temptation in politics: confusing the survival of the government with the survival of the state.

This distinction matters enormously. A government is temporary; a Republic is supposed to endure. A government can be defeated; the political community should survive. A president can be replaced; the institutions of the state should outlive him. A political movement can rise, govern and eventually disappear; the country it once served must remain.

When these distinctions are lost, political movements begin to regard the State as their possession. The ruling Party becomes synonymous with government; government becomes synonymous with the State; and eventually the leader becomes synonymous with the Party. At that point, Republican politics has entered dangerous territory because the hardest task in politics is preserving the moral purpose for which power was captured.

Oftentimes on our continent, a liberation movement begins with courage, sacrifice and an authentic desire to transform society. Its fighters genuinely believe that they are acting on behalf of the people. They may overthrow a corrupt order and restore dignity to a Nation, but inevitably history asks a much harder question: What did you do with the power you won?

That question should haunt every revolutionary movement. It should haunt every political party that has governed for decades and, indeed, every generation that inherits a Republic rather than having to fight for one.

Yes, the battlefield rewards discipline, hierarchy, secrecy and obedience, but the Republic requires something different. It requires accountability, argument and institutions strong enough to restrain even those who control them. This is the great paradox of most African liberation movements. They are often born because existing institutions have failed. They, therefore, acquire legitimacy by standing outside, or against, those institutions. But once they take power, they must become the guardians of institutions themselves. The revolutionary must eventually become the constitutionalist; the guerrilla must eventually become the statesman; the movement must eventually become an institution; and the liberator must eventually accept that the country belongs not to the liberators, but to the generations that come after them.

This is where the African liberation tradition confronts its most difficult test. The generation that fought for liberation remembers the darkness from which the new order emerged. It remembers the dead, the suffering and the sacrifices. It remembers why the struggle was necessary. Those born afterwards, like most Gen Z, know only the Republic itself. Memory, therefore, becomes a political institution. When memory fades, gratitude can become entitlement, which in turn leads to a decline in strategic vigilance. This is when institutions begin to decay.

This is how Republics go to bed. Not necessarily with gunfire and tanks in the streets, but lulled by the comforting belief that because yesterday’s institutions survived yesterday’s crises, they will automatically survive tomorrow’s. History, however, offers no such guarantee.

Which brings us home.

Uganda’s own experience is instructive because the National Resistance Army and its political wing, the National Resistance Movement, did not emerge from a vacuum. It emerged from the wreckage of a country that had experienced the violence and institutional destruction of the 1970s and early 1980s. The NRA’s victory in January 1986, therefore, represented more than the replacement of one government by another. For many Ugandans, it represented the restoration of the possibility of a functioning state.

That achievement should neither be trivialised nor forgotten. The NRA/M, known simply as The Movement, inherited a country exhausted by violence. It restored a measure of order, rebuilt institutions and has presided over a period in which Uganda has acquired a degree of stability that was once thought of as an impossibility. The Movement also acquired something more valuable than coercive power: historical legitimacy.

But historical legitimacy is not an inexhaustible inheritance. If anything, it is capital that can be spent.

This is where the present challenge to the National Resistance Movement becomes particularly serious. The danger is not that the NRM suddenly forgets the history of the liberation struggle. No! Instead, the greater danger is that it remembers the victory while forgetting the principles that made the victory necessary. The most serious threat to the NRM’s long-term legitimacy is not necessarily the opposition but complacency. A movement that once built its legitimacy around resistance to corruption, abuse of power, institutional decay and political disorder cannot afford to become comfortable with precisely those tendencies in its own house.

Corruption is particularly corrosive because it does more than steal public money. It changes the citizen’s understanding of the state. When citizens begin to believe that public office is primarily an avenue for private enrichment, the moral authority of government begins to disappear. The result: a road that should be built with public money becomes someone’s commission; a public contract becomes an opportunity for patronage; and a government position becomes a reward. The state gradually ceases to look like a common inheritance and begins to resemble a marketplace for political privilege. That is how legitimacy drains away. It rarely happens all at once. It happens transaction by transaction, scandal by scandal, appointment by appointment, until the citizen begins to ask a dangerous question: What exactly is this Republic for?

Often when broad public support begins to weaken, governments often make another mistake. Instead of correcting the causes of declining confidence, they strengthen the instruments of control. This is where corruption and democratic decay become connected because a government that is losing moral authority may increasingly be tempted to compensate through administrative power, security power and institutional manipulation. Instead of persuading citizens, it becomes more interested in managing them. Instead of strengthening institutions that can expose wrongdoing, it becomes uncomfortable with institutions that can say no. The judiciary becomes inconvenient, Parliament becomes an obstacle, the media becomes an irritant, civil society becomes suspect, the opposition becomes an enemy, and eventually the constitutional order itself begins to be treated less as a framework within which government operates than as an inconvenience to be negotiated whenever circumstances demand it.

This is the point at which we must look beyond the individual examples with which we began. Liberia, Zaire, Congo-Brazzaville and Sierra Leone were not identical political systems, but each, in its own way, developed what political scientists describe as a prebendal architecture: a system in which public office becomes a means through which political actors distribute state resources, opportunities and privileges to themselves, their families, their factions or their networks. Under such an arrangement, the distinction between public and private gradually becomes blurred. The state remains formally intact, but its institutions are increasingly valued not for the public functions they perform but for the resources they control and the patronage they can dispense.

Prebendalism does not necessarily begin with a spectacular act of theft. It can begin innocently enough—with the expectation that one’s supporters should be rewarded, that one’s relatives deserve consideration, that one’s political allies should be protected, or that public appointments should strengthen the governing coalition. Over time, however, these practices become institutionalised. Public resources become political currency while State institutions become bargaining instruments. Loyalty to the political establishment becomes more valuable than competence, and the citizen’s relationship with the state changes from one of rights and duties to one of access and favour. Once that happens, corruption is no longer merely an individual moral failing; it becomes part of the architecture of governance.

Uganda should be especially wary of this creeping prebendalism. The danger is not that Uganda is already Liberia, Zaire or Sierra Leone. It plainly is not. The danger is that political systems do not have to reproduce another country’s history to reproduce some of its habits. A Republic can begin to weaken incrementally, as public institutions are quietly converted into instruments of political reward and protection. The process can occur beneath the language of stability, development, patriotism and national unity. Indeed, prebendal systems often survive precisely because they cloak private advantage in public rhetoric.

The warning, therefore, is not directed at one individual or even one political party but rather, it is a warning about the logic of political power itself. The NRM may have inherited enormous historical legitimacy from the liberation struggle, but that legitimacy cannot immunise it against the consequences of institutional decay. If corruption continues to become normalised, if public appointments are increasingly understood through patronage, if Parliament loses the confidence or independence necessary to scrutinise the Executive, if the judiciary is weakened whenever its decisions become inconvenient, and if political competition is treated primarily as a security problem, then the Republic will acquire precisely the habits that have historically made African political orders vulnerable.

Uganda should be particularly careful about this tendency. The Supreme Court’s January 2025 ruling against the trial of civilians in military courts was an important assertion of the principle that civilian justice belongs principally within the civilian judicial system. Yet Parliament subsequently passed legislation permitting military courts to try certain civilians, amid substantial criticism that the move undermined the Court’s authority and the separation of powers.

Whatever one’s political allegiance, this should trouble a Republican mind. The issue is larger than any individual defendant, political party or government. A Republic depends upon the confidence that institutions possess rules which apply even when those rules become inconvenient to those who wield power.

Judicial independence is, therefore, not a luxury for lawyers. Instead, it is protection for the citizen. Legislative maturity is not parliamentary theatre but the ability of elected representatives to scrutinise government without fearing that the exercise of that constitutional responsibility amounts to betrayal. Similarly, democratic opposition is not necessarily an existential threat to the state but one of the mechanisms through which a government discovers what citizens are thinking before frustration becomes rupture. In any case, a government confident in its legitimacy should not fear institutions capable of disagreeing with it. It should instead want them.

This is precisely why the NRM’s historical inheritance creates a particular obligation. The Movement did not come to power promising merely to occupy State House. It came promising a fundamental reorganisation of Uganda’s political order - what President Museveni referred to as “a fundamental change in the Politics of our country.” Its legitimacy was built, in considerable part, upon the argument that the old political system had failed because institutions had been abused, corruption had flourished and political violence had become normal. That said, the Movement cannot afford to become the custodian of the very habits it once condemned. Doing so would imply that it has lost the argument of history.

And there are already reasons for caution. Uganda entered the 2026 election having experienced renewed concerns over political repression, restrictions on opposition activity and the erosion of democratic space. President Museveni, who came to power in 1986, secured another term, extending a political tenure that has now lasted four decades.

The point is not that longevity itself is illegitimate. Longevity can be earned. A political movement that continues to command public confidence has every right to seek electoral support. The problem begins when longevity becomes an argument against accountability. A government should never say, in effect, we have been here for forty years; therefore, we must be right. The proper Republican response is the opposite: Because we have been entrusted with power for forty years, we must be even more accountable for what we have done with it.

That is the distinction between legitimacy and entitlement.

The NRA/M’s historical achievement belongs to Uganda. It cannot belong permanently to one generation, one family, one party faction or one political officeholder. Its legacy will be measured not merely by the number of years its political heirs remain in power but by the quality of the Republic they leave behind. If corruption becomes normal, the legacy is weakened. If Parliament becomes timid, the legacy is weakened. If the courts become subordinate to political convenience, the legacy is weakened. If citizens become afraid to criticise their government, the legacy is weakened. If political competition becomes something to be managed rather than something to be respected, the legacy is weakened.

And if the institutions created to protect the citizens become instruments for protecting those in power, then the Movement would have betrayed the very historical justification upon which its legitimacy rested.

Which is why this is an argument to take the NRA/M legacy seriously by rejecting those who seek to turn its history into a permanent certificate of political entitlement. This is an argument that prays for the preservation of the principles that made its struggle meaningful.

To achieve this requires the NRM to wage another liberation struggle—not against an armed insurgency, but against complacency, corruption and institutional decay. It must liberate itself from the belief that political longevity is proof of political virtue. It must rediscover the humility that comes with knowing that every government is temporary. It also must understand that the strongest defence of its historical legacy may be the willingness to strengthen institutions that could one day constrain its own power.

That is the paradox of Republican government. The institution that protects your opponent today may protect you tomorrow. The court that frustrates your government today may protect your children tomorrow. The parliament that questions your decisions today may preserve the legitimacy of the state tomorrow. The journalist who criticises you today may be doing more for the Republic than the sycophant who praises you, and the opposition you regard as an irritant may be performing the indispensable Republican function of reminding those in power that sovereignty ultimately belongs to the citizen.

This is why the story that began in Tolbert’s bedroom is not really a story about Liberia. Nor is it only a story about Mobutu, Kabila, Sassou Nguesso, Charles Taylor, or Sierra Leone. It is a story about political orders everywhere. The precise circumstances differ, but the danger is familiar: when the state becomes a mechanism for distributing private advantage, when institutions become subordinate to political survival, and when legitimacy is replaced by patronage, the apparent strength of a political order can conceal a profound fragility.

Republics, therefore, require something more durable than political longevity. They require institutions capable of surviving the ambitions of those who govern them. They require citizens who believe that public office is a trust rather than an entitlement. They require political parties willing to lose arguments, governments willing to hear criticism, and leaders willing to accept that the state is larger than themselves.

Perhaps this is the real lesson of Liberia, Zaire, the two Congos and Sierra Leone: Republics rarely collapse when corruption first appears; they collapse when corruption, patronage and institutional decay become normal. That is when prebendalism ceases to be a collection of abuses and becomes a political culture.

Uganda’s challenge goes beyond preserving stability; it is preserving the Republican character of the state. The NRM’s greatest legacy will not be the length of time it remains in power, but whether it leaves behind institutions strong enough to outlive it.

At first hearing, it sounds like a contradiction. Surely, those who prepare for war invite it? Surely, peace is better preserved by avoiding the instruments of violence altogether?

History, however, is less sentimental. From it, we have learned that peace is not merely the absence of war but, as the Rev. Aaron Mwesigye, my Christian Religious Education teacher at Ntare School, used to say, a source of uneasiness. Peace is also the presence of institutions capable of preventing disorder, containing conflict and, where necessary, confronting those who threaten it. A society may love peace and still be conquered. A region may condemn war and still find itself consumed by one. Good intentions have never stopped an invading army, restrained a collapsing state or prevented a civil war from crossing a border.

The most reliable way to secure peace is to be fully prepared to defend it. This is why the 36th Ordinary Policy Organs Meeting of the Eastern Africa Standby Force (EASF) in Kampala reminded me of this timeless adage. The gathering directly addressed President Museveni’s recurring historical question: Who will secure Africa when Africa is threatened?

To answer this, one must look back to the pivotal year of 1979 when seemingly isolated global events triggered a chain reaction that continues to shape today’s geopolitical conflict zones.

On Christmas Eve of that year, afraid that their ally was in danger of losing power in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union invaded. Leonid Brezhnev and the Kremlin leadership could not have foreseen that their military intervention would set off a wave of consequences far beyond Central Asia, ultimately reshaping global security structures.

In response, the United States, together with its allies, armed and supported Afghan resistance fighters against the Soviet occupation. Eight long years later, the Soviet Union withdrew, but Afghanistan did not find peace. The conflict mutated and the mujahideen fragmented. From the ruins of that conflict emerged the Taliban, while another Islamist movement found sanctuary in Afghanistan. It called itself Al-Qaeda and, more than two decades after the Soviet invasion, on September 11, 2001, it arrived spectacularly on American soil.

Three decades of conflict had demonstrated a brutal truth: wars rarely end where their architects imagine they will. More often than not, a local conflict can become a regional conflict, which in turn can become an arena for great-power competition. Once external powers enter a war, the original causes of the conflict are often buried beneath new ambitions, new weapons and new grievances.

1979 was also a year of important shifts on our African continent. In the Central African Republic, Jean-Bédel Bokassa and the dictatorship he had presided over since New Year’s Day in 1966 were toppled when the French government withdrew its support for him.

In Ghana, on June 4, junior military officers led by the charming Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings overthrew Fred Akuffo’s corrupt Supreme Military Council. Eight senior military officers, including Akuffo, and top government officials were subsequently executed by firing squad. The streets of Accra welcomed these executions, and the people of Ghana turned a new leaf in their Republic’s young history.

But in East Africa, perhaps the most consequential military event of all had already concluded. On April 11, 1979, the regime of Field Marshal Idi Amin collapsed when forces of the Uganda National Liberation Army, supported by the Tanzania People’s Defence Force, captured Kampala.

Amin’s Uganda had become a threat not merely to its own citizens but to the security of its neighbours. Tanzania’s intervention was not because it had been invited to a conference on regional peace. It intervened because its relationship with Uganda under Amin had reached the point where military action was inevitable.

The circumstances of Uganda’s liberation from Amin exposed a deeper issue within our region: we had no known mechanism for addressing regional security threats. We had no established collective security mechanism capable of intervening before a crisis reached the point of full-scale war.

Yes, each country in East Africa had an army, a police force, a government and diplomatic relations. What East Africa lacked was an institutionalised mechanism through which its states could collectively prevent, manage or respond to threats to regional peace.

The old East African Community itself had disintegrated in 1977, partly under the weight of political differences and mutual suspicion. By the time Amin’s regime was collapsing, the institutional architecture of East African cooperation had already been badly weakened. In fact, if I may be bold, there existed no meaningful regional institutional architecture capable of addressing collective East African socio-economic issues, let alone security threats.

The region, therefore, had to improvise. Tanzania acted because Tanzania could act. Ugandan exiles and liberation groups participated because they had a cause to fight for.

But what if East Africa had possessed a credible collective security architecture before the guns finally began speaking? Could the crisis have been contained earlier? Could the region have developed mechanisms for collective deterrence? Could Amin’s aggression have been confronted through an established regional framework rather than through the eventual necessity of war?

These questions cannot change 1979. But they help us understand the price of a strategic vacuum and arrive at one certainty: a weak region does not remain empty for long. Sooner or later, once regional institutions fail, other powers arrive—with their money, their weapons, their advisers and, inevitably, their interests.

Afghanistan demonstrated this with terrible clarity. The Soviet Union entered to preserve a friendly government, while the United States, also pursuing its own geopolitical interests, entered the conflict by supporting anti-Soviet forces. Other regional and international actors followed. Eventually, Afghanistan became a battlefield upon which other powers pursued their own strategic interests.

Africa has experienced similar dynamics.

Where states collapse, neighbouring countries become vulnerable. Refugees cross borders. Armed groups move through forests and deserts. Small arms circulate. Extremist organisations establish sanctuaries and political instability reigns.

The Bahororo people have a saying that perfectly captures the height of strategic foolishness: “Ngu enju yasya, ati munyarire mbyaame.” It translates to: “They say the house has caught fire, and he replies, ‘Make the bed ready for me to sleep.’” When applied to the geopolitics of Eastern Africa, this proverb ceases to be a metaphor. It becomes a diagnostic tool for regional survival.

Somalia’s collapse did not remain Somalia’s problem. The current war tearing Sudan apart cannot and will not remain Sudan’s problem. On the other side of the region, the chronic instability in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has never stopped at the Congolese border.

Therefore, every military general worth his pips knows that insecurity is contagious and that geography is entirely unforgiving. No nation can truly close its borders to history. No state in Eastern Africa can afford the comforting illusion that the collapse of a neighbour is merely somebody else’s domestic affair.

This inescapable reality is the foundational logic behind the Eastern Africa Standby Force (EASF). Its very existence is an acknowledgement that peace cannot be outsourced and that African states must not wait for a crisis to become catastrophic before building the institutions capable of responding to it.

The purpose of a standby force is not to glorify war. Rather, it is to make war less necessary. Its ultimate success should not be measured by the number of battles it fights, but by the number of conflicts it helps prevent from becoming battles.

A credible regional force can deter aggression, support peace operations, assist in stabilising areas affected by conflict, and bring together military, police and civilian capabilities in responding to crises that no single government can easily manage alone.

Above all, it represents an important principle: the security of one East African state is increasingly connected to the security of all the others. This principle is not romantic Pan-Africanism. Indeed, in the years since Yoweri Museveni, Daniel arap Moi and Benjamin Mkapa gathered in Arusha to sign the treaty re-establishing the East African Community, our region has evolved from three members to seven and counting. Roads connecting our countries have been redesigned to facilitate trade and social interaction, while tax regimes have been harmonised.

On the continental level, the EASF, as envisioned within the African Union’s African Standby Force architecture, fits perfectly into our regional ambitions for socio-economic transformation. It acknowledges that as we increasingly integrate, those who seek to derail us may use the very roads, railways, ports and airports we have constructed to carry weapons and wage war against us. A weak state, as the rise of Al-Shabaab in Somalia shows, can become a sanctuary from which insecurity radiates into the entire region.

Therefore, economic integration without collective security is incomplete integration.

This realisation is what makes the just-concluded Eastern Africa Standby Force meetings in Kampala relevant and necessary. It is also why the ten-country membership of the EASF must reprioritise their respective national objectives and give the Force the political authority, resources, training, logistics and strategic clarity necessary to fulfil its mandate.

Indeed, Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Uganda’s Chief of Defence Forces and Chairman of the EASF Chiefs of Defence and Security Committee, captured this necessity when he reminded the meeting that: “Our region must remain ready for change. We cannot afford to depend on unpredictable circumstances. We must remain prepared to respond whenever the African Union and member states require collective action.”

But readiness itself is changing. The wars and threats of the twenty-first century cannot be understood using the assumptions of an earlier age. As Gen. Kainerugaba observed at the same meeting, “Conflicts are changing rapidly, extremist threats are evolving, illicit networks are becoming more sophisticated, and technology is reshaping the way operations are planned and conducted.”

This changing environment requires us to rethink what we mean by military preparedness. “Preparedness,” Gen. Kainerugaba reminds us, “is no longer measured by numbers alone. It is measured by agility, interoperability, foresight, and the ability to respond decisively under uncertain circumstances.”

These words go to the heart of the challenge before the EASF. A modern regional force cannot derive its credibility merely from the number of soldiers pledged to it. Its strength must also lie in its ability to bring together forces from different countries, train them under common doctrine, share intelligence, communicate effectively, adapt to new technologies and deploy rapidly when circumstances demand collective action.

There could hardly have been a more appropriate warning. History has repeatedly demonstrated that crises rarely arrive according to a timetable. States collapse unexpectedly. Conflicts mutate. Alliances shift. External powers change their priorities. What appears today to be a distant problem can, within a remarkably short period, become a regional emergency.

For the Eastern Africa Standby Force to become genuinely effective, however, these ambitions must be matched by practical commitment. Collective security costs money. Military readiness cannot be sustained through speeches or declarations alone. Troops must train, equipment must be maintained, transport and logistical systems must be available, and intelligence must be gathered and shared. Civilian and police components must equally be prepared.

But resources alone will not be enough. Collective security also requires trust. Member states cannot speak the language of regional solidarity in public while treating one another as permanent strategic adversaries in private.

Above all, the Force will require political courage because the real test of any collective security arrangement comes when intervention is politically inconvenient. It is easy to support regional peace in a communiqué; it is considerably more difficult when a crisis involves an ally, a neighbour or a government with which one has important interests. That is when institutions discover whether they were created merely to exist—or whether they were created to act.

Forty-seven years after the events of 1979, the world is once again entering an age in which military power matters. The certainties, some would say arrogance, of the unipolar moment have faded. Great powers and emerging powers are once again competing.

New military technologies are disrupting old assumptions about security and testing the alliances built upon them. Still, Africa’s post-independence history proves that regional wars have consequences far beyond their original borders. This should be a moment of sober reflection.

The continent must not become complacent simply because it desires peace. Peace is preserved by building states capable of protecting their citizens, institutions capable of managing disputes and regional mechanisms capable of responding before disorder becomes catastrophe.

The lesson of Afghanistan is that conflicts can escape their original geography. The lesson of Uganda in 1979 is that the security of one state can become the security concern of its neighbours.

The lesson of the decades that followed is that when regions fail to develop the capacity to manage their own crises, others will eventually attempt to manage them, usually for reasons that may have very little to do with the interests of the people who actually live there.

That is why the Eastern Africa Standby Force matters. Not because Eastern Africa is preparing to wage war upon somebody, but because Eastern Africa must be prepared for the world as it is—not merely for the world we wish it to be.

I am, therefore, glad that the representatives of member states who gathered in Kampala last week remembered our violent history. I am glad that they recognised that history rarely announces the exact day on which an institution will be tested.

Indeed, the armies of 1979 did not know that they were creating lessons for 2026. The men who sent Soviet troops into Afghanistan did not imagine the full consequences of their decision. Those who watched the East African Community collapse in 1977 could not have predicted all that would follow.

Equally, the men and women who gathered in Kampala last week cannot know what crisis may test the Eastern Africa Standby Force tomorrow. But that is precisely the point: the purpose of an institution is not to be created after a crisis; it is to exist before it. A good builder does not wait for the fire before deciding where to place the exits, and a region that wishes to live in peace cannot wait until its cities are burning before deciding that collective security matters. Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war. But perhaps, for Eastern Africa, the old Latin adage requires a slight modification: if you want peace, prepare together to defend it. That is the burden before the Eastern Africa Standby Force, and perhaps, in an increasingly dangerous world, it is also its promise.

There is something almost comical about the sentence: a European traveller encountering an African product that was already known, produced and consumed by Africans, yet confessing that he did not know how it was made. He describes its colour, smell and taste. He compares it to the familiar olive oil of Europe. Its production process eludes him and remains a mystery.

Cadamosto was not the first European to be fascinated by Africa. Centuries before him, the Roman Emperor Nero is said to have sent an expedition down the Nile valley, reaching territories far to the south of Egypt. By then, of course, Rome had ruled the rich agricultural and coastal fringe of North Africa for two centuries.

When they first arrived in North Africa, the Romans encountered Africans living in societies with written languages, sophisticated systems of knowledge, advanced agricultural practices, medical traditions, commercial networks and political institutions. They encountered Egypt, whose civilisation was already ancient when Rome itself was still a young power. Carthage, one of the ancient Mediterranean’s great maritime powers, was among the cities they encountered, alongside Utica, Cyrene, and Leptis Magna.

Indeed, in the second century CE, the Greek scholar Claudius Ptolemy described a great snow-covered mountain range in equatorial Africa which seemed to reach towards the moon and which he associated with the sources of the Nile. He called them the Mountains of the Moon. But the Africans who lived around those mountains did not need Ptolemy to tell them that the mountains existed. They had already named them Ruwenzori, which in their Lukhonzo dialect means The Rain Maker.

Therefore, Europe’s discovery of Africa was, very often, Europe’s discovery of things Africans had known for generations.

The Ruwenzori mountains did not become real because Ptolemy put them on a map. Palm oil did not become useful because Cadamosto tasted it. African commerce did not begin when European merchants arrived on the coast. African political authority did not emerge when European explorers first encountered African kings.

Africa was already present and, more importantly, Africans were already doing things. They were already cultivating land, producing food, extracting minerals, manufacturing goods, trading across considerable distances, governing territories, waging wars, negotiating peace, building cities and developing systems of social and political organisation suited to their circumstances.

This does not require us to romanticise precolonial Africa. We know that it was never a utopia. African societies fought wars, enslaved people, conquered territories and committed many of the same cruelties that have accompanied human civilisation everywhere.

Civilisation is not perfection, but rather, it is a human society capable of producing institutions, knowledge, culture, political authority and economic systems that allow people to organise their collective existence.

By that definition, significant parts of Africa had been civilisations long before Europeans began describing themselves as its discoverers.

Consider: When Portuguese sailor Diogo Cão reached the estuary of the great Congo River (known as Nzadi to the BaKongo people) in 1483, he did not find an empty coastline. Instead, he encountered the Kingdom of Kongo - a vast, highly organized state governed by the Manikongo. This powerful kingdom possessed sophisticated political structures, thriving economic systems, and networks of authority stretching deep into the African interior. In fact, Cão’s emissaries were received with such courtesy and elaborate ceremony that it left a lasting impression upon them.

However, these same Europeans who were capable of recognising African political sophistication instead converted the opportunity of encounter into entitlement and erected carved stone pillars, padrões, along the river to assert Portuguese sovereignty over territories they had, in any meaningful sense, just encountered.

This act of erecting padrões was not unique to the Portuguese alone. It was part of a European pattern of discovery, claims, and eventually conquest. It was a pattern that would repeat itself, except for Ethiopia and Liberia, across all of Africa.

We must, therefore, be careful with the language of history and acknowledge that Europeans did not discover Africa. What they discovered instead was their own knowledge of Africa. In their dash for Africa, they encountered civilisations, kingdoms, communities, and commercial systems whose histories were already unfolding.

What the Europeans eventually brought was entirely different: a potent and unprecedented combination of commercial ambition, military technology, political domination, and territorial conquest.

Rejecting the language of “discovery” matters because such terminology attempts to position Europe at the genesis of African history. Historical reality dictates otherwise. In her acclaimed work, An African History of Africa, Zeinab Badawi highlights that the continent “has an extraordinary past: engrossing narratives of warrior queens, kings, chiefs, priests and priestesses; of mighty civilisations blooming on the banks of rivers or in the shade of sacred mountains; of lavish buildings hewn out of rock, exquisite libraries bursting with discovery, bustling caravan routes and market squares thick with the voices of traders, travellers, farmers and entertainers.”

Africa had a history before Europe arrived and Africa has a responsibility to history after Europe. Perhaps, more than this, Africa has a duty to legacy.

It is widely accepted that every generation inherits a legacy. The scholar and author Frantz Fanon put it succinctly when he charged each generation to discover its mission out of relative obscurity. Sometimes that inheritance includes institutions, territory, or political movements. Other times, it is an army, a Republic struggling to survive, or an uncompleted dream. Ultimately, the true measure of a generation is not simply what it receives, but what it leaves behind - its legacy.

Abraham Lincoln understood this perhaps better than most political leaders. He inherited a Republic torn apart by the question of slavery and confronted the possibility that the United States might cease to exist as a single political community. At his inaugural in 1861, Lincoln asserted his constitutional obligation to maintain the Republic, telling secessionists, “You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend it’”. Although his presidency did not produce a perfect America, it did, however, preserve the Union and transform the moral and constitutional trajectory of the Republic. His legacy is, therefore, larger than his personality because it left behind an idea of the Republic that subsequent generations could build upon.

Lee Kuan Yew presents a different example. He inherited neither an American-style continental power nor an established Western democracy. He helped build a small, vulnerable city-state into one of the world’s most capable and prosperous countries. Singapore’s experience is complicated, and Lee’s political methods have rightly attracted debate. Yet it is difficult to discuss modern Singapore without discussing the institutions, discipline, administrative culture and national identity that his generation helped construct.

His significance, and ultimately the real test of legacy, lies not merely in what he did while alive but in what continued to function after him.

Chairman Mao offers perhaps the most complicated example of all.

Few leaders in the twentieth century altered their countries and the international order as profoundly as Mao Zedong. He helped establish the People’s Republic of China and transformed a fragmented country into a centralised revolutionary state. Yet his legacy also contains enormous human suffering. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution produced catastrophes whose consequences remain part of the historical judgment of Mao’s rule.

Through Mao, we are reminded that a person’s legacy is distinct from their praise. An immense historical impact does not automatically equal an admirable one. Ultimately, history asks us to understand its architects rather than idealize them.

The purpose of remembering Lincoln is not to pretend he was flawless. The purpose of studying Lee Kuan Yew is not to declare every feature of his political system desirable. The purpose of remembering Mao is certainly not to excuse the catastrophes committed under his leadership.

In all cases, the purpose is to recognise that Nations and Republics are shaped by consequential human beings whose decisions create institutions, possibilities and constraints that outlive them. This is why the question of legacy matters so much for Africa - it is why, if I may be bold, the legacy of Yoweri Museveni deserves serious historical consideration.

One may disagree profoundly with the policies, decisions, or failures of his later government. One may, rightly, criticise his longevity in power, the corruption that has flourished under his watch, the failures of public institutions, or the political contradictions that have accumulated over his four decades at the helm of Uganda’s polity. However, none of this requires us to erase history.

Yoweri Museveni belongs to a generation that emerged from the violence and political disintegration of post-independence Uganda and sought to reconstruct the Ugandan state.

The National Resistance Army (NRA) was not simply another armed group seeking access to the state. It was the military expression of a political movement that had developed a particular conception of how Uganda ought to be reorganised.

Its victory on January 26th, 1986, represented a major rupture with the cycles of military coups, political violence and state collapse that had characterised much of Uganda’s post-independence history.

For many Ugandans, the subsequent restoration of order and relative stability offered a tangible triumph: the resuscitation of a state whose institutional dignity had been profoundly eroded. However, the ripples of this political and military metamorphosis extended far beyond Uganda’s borders. The NRA and, therefore, Uganda, quickly embedded itself at the vanguard of the Great Lakes region’s shifting security architecture. The Rwandan Patriotic Front’s liberation struggle was inextricably linked to Uganda, championed by actors whose military and political doctrines were forged within the country. Furthermore, Kampala played a decisive role in the regional coalitions that ultimately dismantled Mobutu Sese Seko’s kleptocratic regime in Zaire, anchored the protracted diplomatic and military efforts that culminated in an independent South Sudan, and, since 2007, has anchored continental peacekeeping operations to restore state authority in Somalia.

These are not insignificant episodes.

Whatever judgment history eventually makes about Museveni’s entire political career, it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend that his generation played no consequential role in the remaking of Uganda and the wider Great Lakes region.

But this is precisely where the question of legacy becomes more demanding. If we accept that the NRA generation made a consequential contribution to the reconstruction of Uganda, then we must ask what that contribution requires of those who are inheriting its political project. Why? Because a legacy is not simply an historical fact to be celebrated in speeches, but an inheritance that imposes obligations upon the inheritor.

Inevitably, the NRA generation cannot remain permanently responsible for Uganda’s future. Its founding vanguard is aging; many of its principal actors have already passed on. Eventually, the generation that bore arms in Luwero’s thickets, marshes and bushes will transition from active participants in our politics to subjects of historical study. The Nation’s political destiny will then rest entirely in the hands of those who inherit the Republic they labored to reconstruct.

What, precisely, is the nature of this inheritance?

Whatever its contemporary challenges, the Uganda we inherit today is fundamentally distinct from the fractured nation the NRA encountered in 1986. We inherit a state that has achieved four decades of constitutional continuity, breaking the historical cycle of military overthrows. We inherit a professionalized national army—an institution with a formidable regional footprint and a unique political doctrine unlike any of its predecessors. Furthermore, we inherit a vastly expanded economy, critical infrastructure, universities, industries, and robust diplomatic ties. Crucially, we inherit an entire generation of Ugandans who have come of age knowing a degree of political and economic stability that their parents could never have taken for granted.

We could also inherit a political movement with a very particular intellectual and historical vocabulary: resistance, patriotism, Pan-Africanism, strategic autonomy, regional integration, popular mobilisation, economic transformation and national consciousness. The question would then be whether we are preserving the substance behind that vocabulary or merely repeating the words.

This is where I believe Uganda’s present political class has a duty that transcends party allegiance. The preservation of legacy cannot be the responsibility of the NRM alone.

Indeed, if the NRM were to regard the NRA legacy as its exclusive possession, it would misunderstand the very meaning of a national liberation struggle. The sacrifices of the NRA generation were made in the name of Uganda. Whatever political party one belongs to today, one is a beneficiary of the stability and political order that followed that struggle.

Equally, the Opposition has a responsibility. To oppose President Museveni does not require one to despise Uganda’s recent history. To seek the replacement of the NRM does not require one to destroy everything that has been built during its period in government. A mature opposition should be capable of distinguishing between the interests of a political party and the interests of the Republic.

Indeed, the mark of a serious opposition movement is that it can say: we seek to replace you, but we intend to preserve and improve what is valuable in what you built. That is how Republican politics matures.

The NRM, for its part, must understand that preserving its legacy does not mean demanding that history suspend judgment. A movement founded on the language of ideological clarity, patriotism and sacrifice cannot demand that the public ignore corruption, patronage, primitive accumulation of wealth, or institutional decay simply because its leaders once fought a liberation war.

If anything, the historical legitimacy of the liberation generation rejects this prebendalism and instead imposes a higher standard upon its successors.

This is the great danger of liberation movements everywhere. The people who inherit a movement’s legitimacy can begin to consume the very moral capital upon which that legitimacy was built.

If the original generation pays for legitimacy through sacrifice and the succeeding generation opts to spend it through privilege, then the Movement ultimately decays and loses the support of its citizens.

When that happens, public office becomes an instrument of primitive accumulation. Political connections become more valuable than competence. Loyalty becomes more valuable than service. Sycophancy becomes more rewarding than intellectual independence. The language of patriotism becomes increasingly disconnected from patriotic conduct until at last, the movement begins to consume its own history.

A public servant who diverts money intended for a hospital does more than commit an economic offence. He diminishes the capacity of the Republic to care for its citizens. An official who steals money intended for a school does not simply deprive today’s children; he reduces the intellectual inheritance available to tomorrow’s Uganda. A politician who uses a liberation movement as a vehicle for enriching his family does not simply abuse his office; he converts a national inheritance into a private estate.

This is why the question of corruption or, more accurately, prebendalism, is ultimately a question of legacy. It is also why the political class must be careful about the kind of national consciousness it cultivates.

A country cannot build a durable Republic if patriotism is reduced to praise of the incumbent. Nor can it build one if patriotism is reduced to opposition to the incumbent. Patriotism must mean something larger: an attachment to the enduring interests of the Republic and a willingness to subordinate immediate political advantage to those interests.

This is the lesson that should unite Uganda’s political actors even when they disagree about almost everything else. The NRM should not need to fear an Opposition that genuinely wants a stronger Uganda.

The Opposition should not need to fear a ruling party whose historical achievements it is willing to acknowledge, and the civil servant should understand that his loyalty is ultimately to the Republic.

The soldier should understand that the institution he serves must outlive the political generation that created it, while the businessman should understand that productive wealth strengthens the Republic while wealth extracted through political patronage weakens it. For his part, the intellectual should understand that his first duty is neither to the government nor to the Opposition, but to truth.

This is what it means to become a custodian of legacy - this is what it means to truly be liberated from the past. In all cases, a genuine custodian preserves what is valuable precisely so that the next generation has the freedom to build upon it.

That is why Lincoln matters. Lincoln did not preserve the American Union so that Americans could remain permanently in 1861. He preserved it so that another America could become possible.

That is why Lee Kuan Yew matters. Singapore’s first generation did not build institutions so that Singaporeans could endlessly commemorate them. They built them so that subsequent generations could inherit a functioning state and improve upon it.

And that is also why the complicated example of Mao matters. The People’s Republic survived Mao, but it did not preserve everything Mao did. Subsequent Chinese leaders dismantled or substantially altered important aspects of his economic and political legacy while retaining the state and much of the national project he had helped create.

Therefore, the lesson is that every nation must learn to separate the enduring national interest from the particular methods and mistakes of the generation that came before.

Uganda should and must be capable of saying that the NRA’s historical contribution was significant without pretending that every policy of the NRM has been successful. We should also be capable of acknowledging Museveni’s role in Uganda’s political reconstruction without declaring him infallible.

We should be capable of criticising the failures of the present without pretending that the past contained no achievements. Above all, we should be capable of changing governments without destroying the Republic. This is the essence of political maturity and it is also what a progressive Republic, what Uganda requires.

A progressive Republic is not one in which one political party remains permanently in power. Nor is it one in which every new administration feels compelled to demolish whatever its predecessor constructed. It is a Republic in which each generation receives an inheritance, examines it honestly, preserves what is valuable, repairs what is broken and adds something of its own before handing it onward.

This is where the ancient African experience becomes relevant to Uganda’s present.

The civilisation that produced the palm-oil knowledge Cadamosto encountered did not emerge because Africans were uniquely virtuous. It emerged because people accumulated knowledge across generations and converted that knowledge into productive practices.

The Library at Alexandria in ancient Egypt became a symbol of civilisation because generations understood that knowledge should not die with its possessor.

The Kingdom of Kongo became a substantial political entity because authority, commerce and social organisation had been developed beyond the lifetime of any one ruler.

The great civilisations of Africa did not survive because every generation was equally brilliant, but because generations were able, at least for a time, to inherit something and add something to it.

Yes, it is ok for us, the Africans, to marvel at the wonders of ancient Egypt, to admire the great stone works of Great Zimbabwe, or even to look upon the achievements and delight in nostalgia for the great kingdoms of the past.

But in the grand scheme of things, the real burden of legacy is the civilisational discipline of building something that the next generation will consider worth inheriting.

Africa in general and Uganda in particular need that discipline now more than at any time in our recent history.

We have natural resources. We have a young population. We have strategic geography. We have agricultural potential. We have an increasingly educated population. We have, in the case of Uganda, an army with significant regional experience. We have a political history that, for all its contradictions, has produced lessons that should not be wasted.

What we lack is not necessarily the raw material but the seriousness with which a generation decides what it wants to leave behind. This seriousness, in the case of Uganda, cannot come from President Museveni alone. His generation, whether we like it or not, is nearing the end of its political life.

The responsibility now belongs to those who come after him, to those cadres who will inherit the movement. In equal measure, it also belongs to opposition politicians who seek to replace it.

It belongs to soldiers who will inherit the institution built by earlier generations, just like it belongs to civil servants who administer the machinery of the state.

It belongs to real business leaders whose strategic investments shape the economy, not those who use their closeness to the political elite to disadvantage fair business practice. It belongs to academics and intellectuals who shape the national imagination, not those who purchase the title “Dr” from unaccredited academic institutions.

In sum, it belongs to ordinary citizens, because no political system can preserve a legacy that society itself has ceased to value.

The question before Uganda, therefore, is whether the political elite can rediscover the distinction between power and purpose. It is whether the political elite is aware of the need for national interest to endure. Anything short of this, and the Republic will not endure.

This is why I believe that the legacy of Yoweri Museveni should be protected, not because he is beyond criticism, and certainly not because he should be above history, but because the historical project with which his name is associated produced an inheritance that belongs to Uganda.

If there are elements of that inheritance that are worthy, preserve them. If there are institutions that have become weak, strengthen them. If there are ideas that have become corrupted, recover their original purpose. If there are mistakes, acknowledge them. If there is corruption, confront it. If there is political opportunism, expose it. If there is primitive accumulation, stop it.

And if there are people who invoke the language of liberation while betraying its principles, then the most patriotic thing the rest of us can do is refuse to allow them to define the meaning of liberation.

This is the charge I place before every Ugandan and before every African: do not allow the sacrifices of one generation to become the private fortune of another. Africa was never discovered, and certainly, our civilization did not begin when Europeans arrived.

Cadamosto arrived in Africa and marvelled at something Africans had already learned to produce. Ptolemy imagined the Ruwenzori ranges and recorded what African communities had known for generations.

The scholars of Alexandria understood that knowledge acquired by one generation should become the inheritance of another, and the people of Kongo, like many other African kingdoms, built a political order before Europeans arrived to claim sovereignty over it.

The men and women of the NRA inherited a broken Uganda and believed that it could be rebuilt.

Now another generation is at the cusp of inheriting the Republic. Their task, more accurately, our task, is not merely to admire what previous generations accomplished. It is to understand its value and, having understood its value, to preserve it, improve it, and add something worthy of our own. This is the true meaning of legacy.

Legacy is not the glorification of a liberation movement but the transmission of something valuable from one generation to another. Uganda needs that understanding now more than ever.

Uganda’s political evolution presents a rather different, though equally instructive, story.

Sometime in 1999, the National Resistance Movement’s (NRM) then-leading ideologue, Col. Dr. Kizza Besigye, authored what would become one of the most consequential political documents in Uganda’s post-1986 history: How the NRM Lost the Broad Base. More than a simple memorandum, it was an indictment of what Besigye viewed as the abandonment of the Movement’s founding ideals.

His eventual fallout with Pres. Museveni and the Movement culminated in the fiercely contested presidential election of 2001. Museveni prevailed, but the contest fundamentally altered Uganda’s political landscape. The assumption that the Movement represented an uncontested national consensus was shattered. A debate that had simmered quietly throughout the 1990s on whether Uganda should retain the Movement system or embrace competitive multiparty democracy moved to the centre of national politics.

That debate ultimately produced the 2005 referendum, which restored multiparty politics. In 2006, Dr. Besigye stood as the presidential candidate and principal leader of the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), a party whose leadership included many former National Resistance Army and NRM veterans, such as Rtd. MJG Mugisha Muntu and Rt. Hon. Amanya Mushega, both of whom had also fought alongside President Museveni.

For 13 years, the FDC served as the country’s principal opposition party. It challenged government policy, mobilized citizens, contested elections, and provided an alternative political imagination, even when electoral victory remained elusive.

Today, however, it is a shadow of its former self. Internal divisions, organizational fatigue, and prolonged political pressure have diminished its influence. Its founding leader, Dr. Besigye, now belongs to the People’s Front for Freedom (PFF) and has spent more than twenty months incarcerated at Luzira Maximum Security Prison, facing treason charges. Whether one agrees with his politics or not, his imprisonment symbolizes something much larger than the fate of a single politician. It raises enduring questions about the relationship between state power, political competition, and democratic legitimacy.

Unfortunately, Dr. Besigye’s present circumstances are not unique to Uganda. Across much of Africa, opposition politicians routinely face detention, exile, judicial harassment, and, in some cases, outright violence. Elections are held with increasing regularity, yet the political environment surrounding them remains profoundly unequal. In too many instances, the state regards opposition not as an indispensable feature of constitutional governance, but as an existential threat to national stability or to the revolution itself.

The irony is striking. A liberation movement begins, by its very nature, as an opposition. It challenges existing authority in pursuit of political renewal. Yet Africa’s post-colonial history repeatedly demonstrates that once revolutionary movements assume state power, they often become uncomfortable with organized dissent. Yesterday’s revolutionaries become today’s custodians of order, while today’s opposition is cast as tomorrow’s destabilizer.

This post-colonial dilemma presents us with an interesting but unfortunate question: What binds a people together when the struggle for independence, or liberation, is over?

Some countries have answered that question by constructing strong national institutions; others have never quite escaped older, narrower loyalties.

Japan offers a clear example of institutional endurance. Following the devastation of the Second World War, it did not rebuild itself around military glory, regional identity, or hereditary privilege. Instead, it invested relentlessly in institutions, meritocracy, industrial discipline, and a shared national purpose. Governments changed and prime ministers continue to come and go, yet the Japanese state endures because public confidence rests upon institutions rather than personalities.

Singapore presents a similarly instructive case. During the long premiership of Lee Kuan Yew, the People’s Action Party dominated politics for decades. Critics frequently questioned the breadth of political competition, yet few disputed that the Singaporean state consistently delivered competent administration, integrity, and long-term planning. Mr. Lee understood that legitimacy could not rest solely upon revolutionary credentials or electoral victories; it had to be continuously renewed through performance. The citizen was expected to contribute, but the state was equally expected to deliver.

Botswana tells a remarkable African story. Under Sir Seretse Khama and later President Ketumile Masire, the country resisted the temptations that afflicted many newly independent nations. Diamond wealth was not treated as a prize to be distributed among political clients, but as capital for building public institutions. Respect for constitutional succession, prudent fiscal management, and an independent civil service gradually transformed Botswana into Africa’s most stable democracy.

Somalia, conversely, traveled in the opposite direction. Few African Nations possessed so many advantages at independence: a common language, a shared religion, a homogeneous population, and a strong sense of cultural identity. Yet those advantages proved insufficient. Clan loyalties repeatedly overwhelmed loyalty to the state. Political authority became fragmented, institutions weakened, and the state eventually collapsed. Where the Nation ought to have stood above kinship, kinship came to define the Nation.

The lesson is sobering. Nations are not held together by language, ethnicity, religion, or revolutionary mythology alone. They endure only when citizens believe that the institutions of the Republic belong equally to all, and that political competition exists to strengthen the Nation rather than destroy it.

It is here that Uganda’s political debate acquires its true significance. The central question is no longer whether one supports the government (the NRM-O) or the opposition. Rather, it is whether both are contributing to the gradual construction of a Republic whose institutions will outlive them.

Long before independence, some of the continent’s foremost political thinkers recognized this conundrum. The revolutionary intellectual Amílcar Cabral offered a profound reminder that Nationalism was never meant to be an end in itself: “In Africa, we are for an African policy which seeks to defend first and foremost the interests of African peoples, of each African country, but also for a policy which does not, at any time, forget the interests of the world, of all humanity.”

Cabral understood that genuine liberation required more than replacing one governing elite with another. Independence would possess little moral significance unless it produced institutions capable of protecting the dignity, freedoms, and aspirations of ordinary citizens.

Dr. Walter Rodney, after whom two of my brothers are named, advanced a similarly unsettling argument. Reflecting on the experience of newly independent African and Caribbean states, he warned against mistaking political symbolism for genuine sovereignty: “There is the mistaken belief that black people achieved power with independence... but a black man ruling a dependent state within the imperialist system has no power. He is simply an agent of the whites in the metropolis, with an army and a police force designed to maintain the imperialist way of things.”

While Rodney’s critique focused on external dependency, his observation invites a broader reflection: political authority cannot derive merely from occupying the institutions of State. Its legitimacy rests upon whether those institutions remain accountable to the citizens in whose name they govern.

In his seminal work The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon warned that after independence, a “national bourgeoisie” might emerge that merely inherits the machinery of the colonial state instead of transforming it. His concern was not simply external domination, but the possibility that domestic elites (whether in government or opposition) might become intermediaries for outside interests while claiming to speak in the name of the people.

In sum, Cabral, Rodney, and Fanon offer a cohesive philosophical framework: Cabral asks whether political movements remain faithful to the people they claim to liberate. Rodney asks whether political independence without economic and institutional sovereignty is genuine independence, whilst Fanon asks whether post-colonial elites merely replace colonial rulers while preserving the same structures of exploitation.

But if we are to be fully honest, then we must acquiesce to another observation: opposition movements rarely emerge in a vacuum. They are often symptoms before they become actors.

Where governments become complacent, corruption becomes systemic, institutions lose credibility, elections fail to command confidence, or political participation is progressively narrowed, opposition movements inevitably multiply. Some are patriotic; many more are opportunistic; still others become susceptible to manipulation by domestic or foreign interests. But their emergence is seldom accidental.

A wise government, therefore, treats the growth of opposition not merely as a security problem, but as a political diagnosis. It interrogates the conditions that have made alternative political organisations (parties) attractive to ordinary citizens. It also understands that the benefits of repression only silence dissent for a little while, but rarely does it eliminate the grievances that give rise to these alternative movements. In other words, repression only produces a situation of domestic fragility.

It is precisely under conditions of domestic fragility that external actors find fertile ground. Political organizations weakened by institutional exclusion or prolonged repression may become dependent upon foreign benefactors whose interests do not align with those of the Republic. Similarly, governments facing declining domestic legitimacy may seek external patronage to maintain their stability. In either case, the Republic pays a steep price.

Therefore, the primary defense against foreign interference can only be honest government. It cannot be the imprisonment of opposition leaders or the banning of political parties. Republics that are accountable, transparent, and constitutionally legitimate leave little room for external powers to exploit domestic discontent. They realise that corruption is not merely an economic crime; it is an existential threat. Every act of grand corruption weakens the moral authority of the Republic and enlarges the space in which both domestic opportunists and foreign interests operate.

Every Republic eventually confronts a fundamental choice, to wit: to build institutions stronger than personalities, or to allow personalities consume its institutions. It may cultivate citizens, or it may cultivate clients. It may encourage loyal opposition, or it may manufacture permanent enemies.

Either way, the greatest threat to Africa is, therefore, neither government nor opposition in isolation, but rather, it is the gradual erosion of institutions that command the confidence of both.

Governments that govern honestly need not fear opposition. Opposition movements rooted in genuine patriotism need not seek salvation from foreign patrons. Where both the ruling party and the opposition recognize that the Republic is greater than either, democratic competition becomes a cynosure of strength, not weakness.

Japan understands this. Singapore demonstrates it. Botswana proves it in Africa, and Somalia, like the Sudans, reminds us of the consequences when narrower loyalties triumph over the common good.

Uganda’s challenge is not merely to produce a stronger government or a stronger opposition. It is to build a stronger Republic because in the finality of it all, governments will change and the Revolution will be consigned to history books.

Only the Republic must endure.

In the tradition of Mpororo, as in all of South-Western Uganda, the family has long been understood through the obligation to preserve and expand a bloodline within the larger fraternity of the clan. Individual achievement matters, but it is ultimately judged by whether it strengthens the lineage that produced it.

It is perhaps for that reason that the intersection between family and political power fascinates me. It is a play on what has confronted every civilisation: where does legitimate influence end and dynastic ambition begin?

Early on the morning of Monday, 27 July, my X feed was inundated with an audio recording purportedly featuring Mr. Odrek Rwabogo. Speaking calmly and deliberately, he reflected on what he described as decades of work dedicated to the socio-economic transformation of Kiruhura and the wider Ankole region. He rejected allegations levelled against him by individuals aligned with a political pressure group based in the affluent Kampala neighbourhood of Naguru, arguing that his work should be judged on its own merits rather than through political prejudice.

Whether one agrees with Mr. Rwabogo or not is almost beside the point.

His remarks have reopened one of the oldest debates in political history: Can members of influential families ever escape the weight of their surnames? Can citizens separate merit from ancestry? And when does suspicion of inherited influence become just as unfair as blind loyalty to it?

More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle the Greek observed in Politics that man is, by nature, a political animal. He did not mean simply that human beings enjoy elections or debate but rather that our first political education occurs within the household. Before we encounter constitutions, courts, or parliaments, we learn authority, obligation, loyalty, and justice around the family table.

The Chinese philosopher Confucius also arrived at much the same conclusion from a very different civilisation. Good government, he argued, begins with the cultivation of the family. A ruler incapable of governing his own household could scarcely be trusted with governing a kingdom. In both the East and the West, therefore, the family was understood not as the enemy of politics but as its first school.

The question has never been whether families should produce leaders. Every civilisation has expected them to do so. The question is whether public office remains open to talent wherever it is found, or gradually becomes the preserve of a fortunate lineage.

History offers no easy answers.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Europe remained a continent governed by ancient dynasties. Among them stood the House of Habsburg, whose imperial authority stretched back to 1282 when Rudolf I, elected King of Germany, purchased the Duchy of Austria for the Habsburgs. Magnificent though it appeared, the Austro-Hungarian Empire increasingly seemed an ageing political order struggling to reconcile imperial tradition with rising nationalism.

It was in this atmosphere that Gavrilo Princip, a young Bosnian Serb nationalist, together with six fellow conspirators, resolved to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Habsburg throne.

On the morning of 28 June 1914, Ferdinand arrived in Sarajevo to inspect imperial troops. A bomb thrown at his convoy failed to kill him. Visibly irritated, the Archduke interrupted the Mayor’s welcome. “Mr. Mayor, I came here on a visit, and I get bombs thrown at me. It is outrageous.”

Later that afternoon, believing the conspiracy had failed, Princip wandered into a nearby café. Fate’s vicissitudes intervened, and owing to a wrong turn by Ferdinand’s chauffeur, the Archduke’s open-top motorcar stalled almost directly before the still-angry young assassin. Princip fired twice and within minutes, Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were dead.

The First World War did not begin because one man pulled a trigger. Europe had long been a continent stacked with combustible alliances, competing nationalisms and imperial rivalries. Yet Ferdinand’s death became the spark because he represented something larger than himself.

He embodied a political order that millions had already begun to question and, therefore, history does not remember Sarajevo merely as the city in which Ferdinand and Sophie were assassinated. Instead, it remembers it as the moment when accumulated frustrations found a symbol.

Writing nearly a century before Sarajevo, Alexis de Tocqueville observed a paradox of democracy: it abolishes hereditary aristocracy, yet citizens continue searching for familiar names they believe they can trust. Democracy, he observed, never entirely eliminates elites; it merely changes the means by which elites are produced.

The assassination of Franz Ferdinand, therefore, represented something larger than the death of an heir. It demonstrated what happens when a ruling family comes to symbolise an entire political order. Gavrilo Princip did not fire at the Habsburg household simply because it was a household. He fired because millions had come to associate that family with an empire they believed had exhausted its legitimacy.

Political families have often carried that burden.

However, history also teaches another lesson. Not every influential family destroys republican government. Some strengthen it. The Romans understood this dilemma better than most. Augustus founded an empire while preserving the outward appearance of a republic. The genius of Augustus was not merely that he acquired power, but that he understood the importance of preserving the appearance of republican continuity while concentrating authority in his own hands. Thereafter, succession increasingly became a family affair. Rome remained powerful, but every transition of power reminded citizens that republican institutions had quietly yielded to dynastic politics.

Edmund Burke argued that society is a partnership “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born.” Families naturally carry that continuity. They preserve memory, transmit values and accumulate experience across generations. Not so for Thomas Jefferson who offered an opposite warning: every generation must be free to determine its own political destiny. No generation, he argued, could permanently bind another.

There is ,therefore, nothing inherently republican or anti-republican about political families. Their legitimacy depends entirely upon whether citizens remain free to reject them.

Perhaps nowhere illustrates this better than the United States. From the earliest years political families have emerged with remarkable frequency. John Adams became America’s second president. His son, John Quincy Adams, later became its sixth. Yet no constitutional privilege elevated him. He fought elections, suffered defeats and eventually earned office through the same democratic process as every other candidate.

The Roosevelt family produced both Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, two presidents whose legacies transformed America. Although related, each forged an independent political identity separated by a generation and by distinct historical circumstances.

The Kennedy family became the closest thing America has ever had to political royalty. Joseph Kennedy dreamed of creating a dynasty. John reached the White House. Robert seemed destined to follow before an assassin’s bullet ended that possibility and Edward Kennedy spent decades shaping legislation in the United States Senate.

Again, bullets interrupted succession and history echoed Sarajevo—not because America ceased to be a republic, but because violence sought to redirect its political future.

The Bush family later produced two presidents and another serious presidential contender. George H.W. Bush served one term. His son George W. Bush served two and Jeb Bush entered the presidential race only to discover that even one of America’s most recognisable political surnames could not substitute for electoral conviction.

The Clintons offered another variation. Bill Clinton became president. Hillary Clinton, his wife and former first lady, came within touching distance of the presidency, only to lose before the electorate.

Today, attention increasingly turns to the Trump family. Several members have become prominent political figures. Whether any ultimately succeeds Donald Trump will depend not upon hereditary right but upon persuading millions of voters.

Clearly America’s genius has never been the absence of political families. It has been the absence of hereditary entitlement. The Adamses, the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, the Bushes, the Clintons and now the Trumps have all benefited from famous names. Yet every generation has had to persuade voters anew. The ballot box has repeatedly demonstrated that recognition may open a door, but only public confidence permits one to walk through it.

On the other hand, Africa’s experience has often been more complicated.

Julius Nyerere deliberately resisted creating a family dynasty. Despite immense personal prestige, he never attempted to elevate his children into national political succession. His greatest political inheritance was not a surname but institutions capable of surviving his retirement.

Nelson Mandela exercised perhaps the greatest moral authority of any African statesman in the twentieth century. Neither his children nor his grandchildren inherited the presidency. Mandela understood that liberation movements become republics only when authority passes through institutions rather than bloodlines.

Kenya illustrates a different trajectory. Jomo Kenyatta became the republic’s founding president. Decades later, his son Uhuru Kenyatta ascended to the same office through elections. His presidency demonstrated both the opportunities and the burdens borne by political families. Every achievement was attributed to privilege by critics, every failure magnified by inherited expectations.

Gabon travelled further towards dynastic politics. Omar Bongo governed for more than four decades before being succeeded by his son Ali Bongo. Whatever constitutional procedures accompanied the transition, many citizens increasingly perceived the republic itself as belonging to a single family. Institutions inevitably weakened under that perception.

Togo followed a similar path when Faure Gnassingbé succeeded his father, Gnassingbé Eyadéma. The constitutional legality of succession never entirely extinguished public suspicion that power has become hereditary rather than republican.

Rwanda complicates the discussion. President Paul Kagame’s family is well known, yet succession has not formally become hereditary.

The lesson is that public debate is often driven less by family relationships than by perceptions regarding the openness of political competition itself.

Botswana offers perhaps the clearest reminder that the strongest inheritance a leader can leave is not a child prepared to succeed him, but institutions strong enough to survive him. The ultimate achievement of any statesman is not to make himself indispensable, but to make the republic independent of him.

Uganda’s own political history reminds us that political families are not an invention of the modern republic. Long before colonial rule, the kingdoms of Buganda, Bunyoro, Toro, Ankole and the smaller polities of the south-west, such as Rujumbura, were governed through hereditary institutions. Royal households were expected to produce rulers, military commanders and custodians of tradition. Independence did not erase that historical memory; it merely sought to replace hereditary legitimacy with constitutional legitimacy. But history rarely surrenders its habits overnight.

President Yoweri Museveni did not emerge from a political dynasty in the conventional sense. His rise was forged through student politics, armed struggle and four decades of public life rather than inherited office. Yet he also emerged from a society whose historical imagination remained deeply shaped by royal lineages and clan identity. That tension between republican institutions and older traditions of inherited authority continues to shape how Ugandans debate political succession, legitimacy and continuity today.

Across the continent, therefore, influential families have frequently become controversial not because Africans instinctively oppose successful families, but because political institutions have too often remained weaker than political personalities.

Niccolò Machiavelli appreciated that rulers often rely on fear to obtain obedience. Modern republics, however, teach a complementary lesson: fear may secure obedience for a season; institutions secure obedience for generations.

Ultimately, families may inherit influence but they cannot inherit legitimacy. Whether Mr. Odrek Rwabogo deserves praise or criticism is ultimately less important than the larger question his public life presents.

Can a Ugandan related to power ever be judged entirely on the evidence of his own work? Equally, should family association become grounds for automatic condemnation? A mature republic answers both questions in the negative. Merit should neither be presumed because of ancestry nor denied because of it.

Why? Because if we condemn every citizen because of the family into which he or she was born, we abandon justice. Yet if we excuse mediocrity merely because it arrives bearing a familiar surname, we abandon republicanism.

The challenge before Uganda is, therefore, not to prevent political families from participating in public life. To do so would be both foolish and profoundly unjust. Rather, the challenge is to build institutions sufficiently trusted that no family, however influential, can ever stand above them.

Aristotle reminded us that governments exist for the common good. Burke taught that every generation inherits a civilisation built by those who came before it. Saint-Just warned that nobody can rule guiltlessly.

History, however, adds one final lesson, to wit: Republics do not ask citizens to forget their families, but rather, they ask them to remember that the nation is a larger family still.

Every political family must, therefore, submit itself to the same test as every ordinary citizen— not the accident of birth, but the discipline of merit; not the comfort of inheritance, but the judgement of free institutions.

Whether one ultimately agrees with Mr. Odrek Rwabogo is, by now, almost immaterial. His remarks have merely reopened a debate that has accompanied every republic since antiquity. Families may inherit surnames. They may inherit property, memory and influence. Yet there remains one inheritance that will always be beyond the reach of bloodlines. Legitimacy.

Legitimacy, again and again, is earned patiently and publicly and renewed by every generation. This is the burden carried by every political family and it is also the promise of every republic.

Lt. Gen. Kavuma’s lament echoes an earlier one by prominent businessman Hassan Basajjabalaba, who, last year at the funeral of his mother, spoke out about the worrying state of our healthcare system and the rwogyera maganya occasioned by the absence of a National Health Insurance Scheme.

Both complainants are, by their own admission, wealthy supporters of our ruling National Resistance Movement Organisation, and their concerns affirm observations made by Dr. Olive Kobusingye in her seminal work, The Patient. In it, Kobusingye demonstrates that the real crisis in Uganda’s healthcare system lies in the experience of the ordinary citizen at the point of care.

She writes of patients who walk into hospitals with hope but are received by a system that “treats illness as an inconvenience and the sick as intruders.” She describes corridors where people wait not for treatment but for someone, anyone, even a cleaner, as the New Vision once reported, to notice that they are deteriorating. Absenteeism is rife.

The tragedy, she argues, is that many deaths in our hospitals are not caused by disease alone, but by delays, missing supplies, and a bureaucracy that has perfected the sadistic art of forgetting the human being lying on a hospital bed or waiting in an outpatient ward.

Last Sunday, a young friend of mine was rushed to a prominent hospital in Kampala. He had suddenly collapsed, struck the back of his head, and was bleeding profusely. He was unconscious.

Our friends with whom he was, many of whom feign disinterest in politics and, therefore, fail to appreciate how ideological disorientation eventually infects every sphere of our society, rushed him to the hospital, only to be shocked when they were asked for money before he could be attended to.

By any stretch of the imagination, this is bad manners.

But it is also something more profound than bad manners. It is the collapse of a moral order.

The decline of morals in our society has reached a point where institutions, some bearing holy names and proclaiming religious mission statements, can turn away an unconscious man (or a patient in so much distress) because payment has not yet been made. We have forgotten the African ethic of Ubuntu: the belief that our humanity is bound together, that a stranger’s pain is also our concern, and that life itself possesses a sacred dignity.

Increasingly, Ubuntu has been replaced by a harsh and transactional individualism. Compassion has given way to indifference, and communal responsibility to negligence.

To rectify the state of affairs in our hospitals, and, therefore, in our healthcare system, is not a task for the State alone. Governments can build hospitals, procure equipment, and increase budgets, but no ministry can legislate compassion or decree moral conduct.

A doctor who betrays the Hippocratic Oath and allows tribal prejudice, greed, or indifference to dictate how he treats a patient commits a failure that lies beyond the remit of the Ministry of Health. A nurse who neglects a patient because no money has changed hands is not merely exposing weaknesses in public policy; she is exposing a deeper moral decay.

Likewise, the civil servants who steal medicines and the citizens who remain silent in the face of such conduct are all participants in the corrosion of our healthcare system.

Part of this decline can be attributed to the ideological disorientation, perhaps a lack of national consciousness, that has overtaken our society. For years, institutions charged with nurturing national values, civic responsibility, and a sense of common purpose have been weakened or neglected. The National Guidance Department, for example, was intended to spearhead conversations on citizenship, patriotism, and shared values; yet today, we appear to have a generation increasingly unsure of what obligations it owes to its fellow citizens.

Nor can our religious institutions escape scrutiny. The embrace of the corrupt by some of their leaders has profoundly weakened the moral authority of the Church and the Mosque. Why are individuals whose wealth is widely suspected to have been accumulated through plunder so readily welcomed into the front pews, invited as chief guests at fundraisers, and celebrated as philanthropists? When religious leaders bless ill-gotten wealth, they inadvertently teach society that integrity is secondary to affluence and that the source of one’s riches matters less than one’s generosity to religious causes. In doing so, they participate in the normalisation of corruption and contribute to the erosion of the very values they are meant to defend.

But, even as we speak of moral restoration, we must not neglect the practical reforms that could ease the burden on Uganda’s healthcare system.

One such reform is the cost of capital. Healthcare infrastructure is expensive. Building hospitals, acquiring diagnostic equipment, and maintaining specialised facilities require enormous investment.

No country has built a robust healthcare system by relying solely on the State. The private sector has a role to play, but it cannot effectively perform that role if the cost of borrowing remains prohibitive. Lower-cost credit, targeted financing schemes, and investment incentives for healthcare facilities would significantly expand the country’s medical capacity.

Equally important is the welfare of healthcare professionals themselves. Lower taxes on the incomes of doctors, nurses, laboratory technicians, and other healthcare workers could serve as an incentive to retain talent and reduce the exodus of skilled professionals seeking better opportunities abroad. A nation/republic cannot aspire to quality healthcare while steadily exporting its best medical minds.

Research, too, deserves greater attention. The medical schools in our public universities should have increased access to research grants and dedicated funding for innovation. Strong healthcare systems are built not merely on treating disease but on producing knowledge, improving diagnostics, and developing local solutions to local problems. The next breakthrough in combating Uganda’s disease burden may well emerge from a laboratory at Makerere, Gulu, Mbarara, or Busitema—provided our researchers are adequately supported.

Finally, we must confront the inefficiencies embedded within the wider civil service structure. Delays in procurement, bureaucratic inertia, corruption, and poor management often consume resources that should reach the patient. Reforming these inefficiencies may not attract headlines, but it could produce more meaningful improvements than the construction of another building or the purchase of another fleet of vehicles.

Taken together, moral renewal, affordable financing for healthcare investment, incentives for medical professionals, increased support for research, and a more efficient public service may constitute the remedy we so desperately need.

Ultimately, the crisis in Uganda’s healthcare system is not the consequence of a single failure. It is the product of many small failures: of policy, of leadership, of institutions, and of values. And if those failures came together to create the present predicament, then perhaps their collective correction may yet point us toward recovery.

The sickness afflicting Uganda, therefore, is not merely one of misdiagnosis, inadequate equipment, or the absence of health insurance. Those are symptoms. The deeper disease is moral: a society that no longer pauses when a fellow citizen is in distress; where commerce increasingly triumphs over conscience and where the suffering of another is viewed not as a call to action but as an opportunity for payment.

The finest hospitals and the most sophisticated machines cannot save a Republic whose moral fabric has been so badly damaged.

Ps: I must thank professionals like Dr. Ida Ntozi - a physician whose Family Doctors Clinic has served thousands of people for over 40 years, Dr. Gladys Atto, the only ophthalmologist serving the Karamoja sub-region, Dr. Stephen Watya - a renowned urologist, Dr. Victoria Walusansa - a passionate oncologist at Mulago, Dr. Frank Asiimwe - a surgeon; Prof. Josephat Byamugisha - leading researcher in Obs & Gyn at Makerere University; Prof. Arthur Kwizera - a researcher in critical care medicine; Dr. Christine Namatovu - Atuhairwe a Burns Care and Plastic Surgery Specialist, and countless others who continue to serve with distinction. They are the Ursa Minor of what our healthcare system can become.

The first: Public outrage over the manner in which Kampala’s immediate former Lord Mayor, Erias Lukwago, was arrested. As the controversy grew, a passionate member of the Patriotic League of Uganda circulated a recording of an alleged telephone conversation between MJG Kahinda Otafiire and Ambassador Mirjaam Blaak. According to him, the recording proved that Otafiire dislikes Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba and does not wish to see him succeed his father, Gen. Yoweri Museveni, as Commander-in-Chief.

The second: The resurfacing of remarks also attributed to Otafiire, in which he lamented the hijacking of the National Resistance Army’s ideals by opportunists. Referring to the excesses associated with the 11th Parliament under the now embattled Anita Annet Among, he warned against grafting “backward ideologies” onto the NRA’s historical mission.

The third: An exchange on X between veteran journalist Kalundi Serumaga and Gen. David Sejusa, prompted by Kalundi’s review of William Pike’s memoir, Combatants: A Memoir of the Bush War and the Press in Uganda.

Drawing on an interview given by Winnie Byanyima and other historical accounts, Kalundi argued that the NRA was less an indigenous revolutionary movement and more a project ultimately embraced and financed by British interests after the collapse of their relationship with the UPC government. To him, the NRA and the story of its founding in 1981 amount to little more than a “twenty-seven guns foundational myth.”

The Outlier: Not a retired general, not a veteran journalist, but a young Ugandan named Elijah Mwesigwa.

Following Lukwago’s abduction from his home by UPDF soldiers and the circulation of humiliating images of him on social media, Elijah penned a thoughtful essay titled Bro, I Did Not Fight Your War.

Unlike Otafiire, Kalundi, Sejusa, Pike, myself, or even President Museveni, Elijah belongs to a generation with no living memory of Amin, Obote II, the Bush War, or the NRA’s entry into Kampala in January 1986. His generation inherited the Uganda that emerged from those events, but not the experiences that shaped them.

My charge to him that the Bush War was and remains his war notwithstanding, Elijah’s complaint was both simple and profound:

“The dividends of that war were never shared with my generation. The ideals of the Ten-Point Programme weren’t betrayed by the youth; they were auctioned off by the very people who fought for them. The generals and revolutionaries of 1986 didn’t just capture power; they captured the economy, the land and the future. They turned public office into a family business and patriotism into a loyalty test.”

Whether one agrees with Elijah’s conclusion is beside the point. What makes it significant is that it exposes a widening generational divide in Uganda’s political discourse.

For me, these episodes are not really about Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Mirjaam Blaak, Anita Among, Kalundi Serumaga, William Pike, or even Erias Lukwago. They are about a deeper question: who owns the legacy of the NRA revolution?

Like many Ugandans, I often find myself disillusioned by the distance between the ideals that animated the NRA struggle and the realities of contemporary governance. Many, including members of my family, rallied around the NRA because it represented a compelling alternative to the instability, violence, and political decay that had come to define Uganda’s post-independence experience.

The frustration expressed by Elijah is, therefore, not entirely misplaced. It reflects a growing sentiment that some of the aspirations embodied in the Ten-Point Programme have been compromised by patronage, corruption, and the emergence of a political class more concerned with preserving privilege than advancing the public good.

Yet acknowledging these shortcomings should not require us to abandon historical honesty.

Many Ugandans who lived through the years preceding and during the Bush War regarded the NRA not merely as the most visible anti-Obote force, but as the best organised, most disciplined, and most politically coherent. At a time when numerous groups opposed the government, it was the NRA that developed durable structures, articulated a clear programme, and built support among significant sections of the population.

Foreign governments may well have sought to influence events, as they often do during periods of conflict. But to reduce the NRA’s victory primarily to foreign sponsorship is to overlook the agency of Ugandans themselves and the genuine appeal the Movement commanded at the time.

The NRA inherited a country devastated by political violence, economic collapse, and institutional decay. Faced with a choice between ideological rigidity and pragmatism, it largely chose the latter.

Rather than treating East or West as articles of faith, the Movement pursued economic recovery, welcomed investment, restored macroeconomic stability, and reconnected Uganda to regional and global markets. Whatever one thinks of the Movement today, it is difficult to deny that the Uganda of 2026 bears little resemblance to the bankrupt and fractured state of the 1980s.

Roads, telecommunications, financial services, educational opportunities, regional trade, and a degree of economic stability are all products, in part, of decisions made during the Movement’s formative years.

Yet acknowledging those achievements should not blind us to the growing crisis of purpose confronting the Movement today.

Many Ugandans increasingly question whether the promise of “fundamental change” has given way to a political elite content to feed off the state rather than reform it. Public office is now perceived as an avenue for personal enrichment. Patronage flourishes, corruption persists, and public confidence in institutions continues to erode.

Perhaps most troubling is the growing distance between the state and the citizens.

For decades, the UPDF has enjoyed a level of public goodwill unmatched by most institutions in Uganda. It is, to an extent, seen not merely as a military force but as one of the greatest achievements of the NRA revolution.

But reputations, like revolutions, require constant renewal. When citizens are abducted rather than arrested, when due process appears secondary to displays of force, and when humiliating images of suspects are circulated for public consumption, institutions inevitably risk undermining the trust upon which their legitimacy depends.

This, perhaps, is what MJG Otafiire’s warning and young Elijah’s frustration ultimately have in common.

Otafiire speaks as a custodian of the revolution. He worries that the ideals which animated the struggle have gradually been displaced by opportunism, patronage, and the pursuit of personal enrichment. His concern is not merely about succession or personalities. It is about whether the Movement still recognises the historical mission that justified its rise to power.

Elijah, by contrast, speaks as an heir to the revolution. He inherited the Uganda that emerged from 1986 and asks a different question. If the revolution transformed Uganda, what part of that transformation belongs to his generation? And if its ideals still matter, where are they to be found in the conduct of public affairs today?

Their perspectives differ, but together they expose the central challenge confronting the Movement four decades after its victory. A revolution cannot survive indefinitely on memories of past achievements. Nor can it rely solely on the legitimacy earned by those who fought its battles.

As President Museveni embarks upon what may prove to be the defining chapter of his presidency, the challenge before him is not merely one of succession, economic growth, or electoral victory. It is the challenge of renewing public confidence that the principles which inspired the NRA struggle still have meaning in contemporary Uganda.

Ergo the greatest threat to the legacy of the NRA revolution is neither Kalundi’s revisionism nor Elijah’s impatience. It is the possibility that the Movement itself may cease to embody the values that once distinguished it from those it replaced.

History has already recorded the NRA’s victory. The more difficult question is whether the revolution can still command the loyalty of those who never fought its war. Otafiire’s warning and Elijah’s challenge are, therefore, not opposing arguments. They are two sides of the same question: who owns the legacy of the NRA revolution, and what must be done to ensure that future generations regard it as an inheritance worth preserving rather than a history lesson to be endured?

Two or so of them, overcome by intoxication, wandered across the border into Tanzania. There they encountered Tanzanian border patrols and, in their stupor, opened fire. 20 days later, Uganda was at war with Tanzania.

Seven months later, Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada fled Kampala. His regime toppled.

In the years since, Uganda has struggled to shake off the notoriety associated with Amin’s rule. It is a notoriety stained by the murder of, among thousands, a promising civil servant from Kisoro and DC in Toro Everest R Mulekezi, a sitting Chief Justice, Benedicto Kiwanuka, and an Anglican Archbishop, Janani Luwum. All men paid with their lives because they insisted upon a simple truth: that every human being possesses an inherent dignity, and that no individual should be above the law or beneath its protection.

It was for this reason that, encouraged by Mwalimu Julius Nyerere and the Tanzania People’s Defence Forces (TPDF), Ugandan exiles joined the struggle to liberate their country. From Mutukula through Mbarara to Masaka, onwards through Kampala and beyond, advancing anti-Amin forces were welcomed by ordinary citizens exhausted by fear and arbitrariness.

On 24 March 1979, as the war progressed, delegates from Uganda’s various political organisations gathered in Moshi, Tanzania, to establish a united political front for the liberation struggle. At what became known as the Moshi Conference, a relatively unknown delegate named Paulo Kibukamusoke, representing the Freedom From Oppression Organisation, made a modest contribution. He proposed that the umbrella movement be named the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF) — in layman’s speak, the Front. Its military wing would become the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA).

The legislature would be the National Consultative Council, whose first chairman, following an election by delegates, was Prof. Edward Rugumayo.

For leadership of the Front itself, delegates rejected Paulo Muwanga and instead elected Prof. Yusuf Kironde Lule, whom Dr. Martin Aliker described as “a man of substance and circumstance.”

Yet Uganda’s political memory is often short.

Between June 1979 and December 1980, the promise of Moshi was steadily undermined. Through political manoeuvring, the governments of both Prof. Lule and Mr. Godfrey Lukongwa Binaisa were short-lived, benefiting President Milton Obote and his Uganda People’s Congress. In their place emerged a Military Commission chaired by Paulo Muwanga and including an increasingly disillusioned and alienated Yoweri Museveni, leader of the Front for National Salvation (FRONASA).

The UNLA, once envisioned as a national army, gradually abandoned that ideal. Rather than serving the country, it became entangled in partisan political struggles. In the disputed elections of December 1980, Paulo Muwanga, backed by elements within the UNLA, effectively overrode the authority of Electoral Commission Chairman Mzee Kosiya Seneca Kikira and announced fictitious results.

The consequences would shape the next generation of Uganda’s history.

Forty-five years later, Uganda is governed by President Yoweri Museveni. The National Resistance Army, born on 6 February 1981 when Museveni and thirty-nine companions and one 13-year-old child soldier (Kadogo), Andrew Kangaho, launched an attack on Kabamba Barracks, is now the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF).

The name itself reflects a deliberate shift in philosophy. Championed in the Constituent Assembly by the late Brig. Noble Mayombo, the title UPDF echoes the example of Tanzania’s TPDF, emphasising service to the people and their country.

For much of its existence, discipline and a clear understanding of Uganda’s civil-military history have been central to the UPDF’s identity. Officers and soldiers are taught that their ultimate loyalty is owed not to a president, a party, or an individual, but to the people of Uganda and the Constitution they collectively adopted.

Ugandans are, by nature, a peaceful people who seek solidarity with others. Consequently, wherever Ugandan forces have served (whether supporting regional stability efforts in Liberia, participating in the transformation of the Great Lakes region, or helping the people of Somalia confront the menace of Al-Shabaab), they have often been viewed as representatives of a broader African spirit of responsibility and sacrifice.

At home, too, many citizens have come to appreciate the stabilising role the UPDF has played in preserving national unity and protecting Uganda from the cycles of military adventurism that once plagued our politics.

Yet it is precisely because of this history that caution is necessary.

The greatest danger facing any successful institution is the temptation to forget the lessons that made it successful in the first place.

Increasingly, many citizens express concern about reports of opposition politicians being abducted, detained outside established legal processes, or subjected to treatment that appears inconsistent with constitutional guarantees. Whether justified or not, public perceptions matter. Equally concerning are growing questions about the expanding visibility of military actors within spaces traditionally reserved for civilian democratic institutions.

Parliament exists to exercise oversight. Political parties exist to compete for power peacefully. Courts exist to interpret the law. The military exists to defend the Republic. History teaches us what happens when these boundaries become blurred.

The tragedy of the UNLA was not that it lacked brave men and women. Its tragedy was that it became entangled in political contests that it was never designed to adjudicate. Once an army begins to view itself as the custodian of political outcomes rather than the protector of constitutional processes, it risks undermining the very nation it seeks to defend.

Uganda’s democracy remains imperfect. It is noisy, frustrating, occasionally chaotic, and often disappointing. Yet those imperfections can never become an excuse for any political party, government, or military institution to use the armed forces as a weapon against civilian oversight or democratic accountability.

The strength of our Republic so far has not been measured by how effectively it has silenced dissent, but rather, by how President Museveni has confidently and strategically accommodated it.

The UPDF’s most enduring legacy will not only be found in battle honours or military parades. It will also be found in its continued commitment to remaining a professional national force that stands above partisan competition. Future generations should never have reason to wonder whether the army belongs equally to all Ugandans.

Regardless of one’s disagreements with President Museveni’s 40-year rule, there can be no denying that the political stability and economic policies he has pursued stand in sharp contrast to the turbulence that followed Amin’s fall.

The men and women who resisted Amin did not struggle merely to replace one ruler with another. They struggled because they believed in the dignity of every Ugandan. Janani Luwum and Everisto Mulekezi did not surrender their lives so that power could become sacred. Benedicto Kiwanuka did not die defending legality so that constitutionalism could become optional.

Their message remains as relevant today as it was then.

Now that President Museveni’s seventh term is underway, Uganda finds itself at a moment of reflection. The question before us is not whether one man has secured power, but whether the values that emerged from Moshi, shaped the liberation struggle, and found expression in our Constitution remain alive within our institutions. Recent events, coming 47-odd years after Moshi, suggest that the Republic must not forget the ghosts of Amin’s recklessness, the intrigues that destroyed the UNLF experiment, and the electoral disputes that ignited the Bush War. These should remind us all of the consequences of placing a faction above a country.

They should remind us of history’s lessons, one of which is this: States endure when institutions are stronger than men; when patriotism goes beyond green khaki fatigues at Kyankwanzi and runs deeper than politics; when armies remain subordinate to constitutional authority; and when citizens remain vigilant custodians of their own freedom.

Each one of us ought to know that history is not always kind to the powerful. “Many a knave”, as the abolitionist Rev. Theodore Parker long ago observed, “has been rich, celebrated, and honoured in his own time, while the just man has been poor, despised, and made to suffer. Yet the verdict of posterity is rarely rendered in favour of those who abuse power. It is usually reserved for those who restrained themselves when they possessed it. The moral universe is often difficult to discern. Its arc is long, and no generation sees its full curve. We cannot always calculate its direction through experience alone. But conscience allows us a glimpse of what lies beyond our immediate interests and temporary victories. And conscience tells us that, in the end, the arc bends toward justice.”

May those entrusted with arms never forget that their highest duty is to the Constitution and the people. May those entrusted with legislation never place faction above country. May those entrusted with public office remember that authority is held in trust and not in ownership. And may those who vie for power remember that all life is sacred, especially that of those who defeat them in a fair electoral contest.

For God and My Country - and a Republic worthy of both.

Over the last week, Ugandans have been inundated with excitement, speculation, and no small measure of intrigue over President Museveni’s newly unveiled cabinet. Familiar faces have exited the stage. Gen. Abubakar Odongo, Mzee Matia Kasaija, Evelyn Anite, John Mulimba, Godfrey Kabbyanga, and several others were dropped. In their place stands a fresh cast of political actors whose collective story reads less like a government gazette and more like the opening chapter of a political drama.

Ms. Namere, who earned public notoriety for her spirited confrontations with the ever-vocal Full Figure, now serves as Deputy Minister under Mr. Balaam Barugahara at the strategically important Ministry of Local Government. Meanwhile, Allion Yorke Odria, whose relentless criticism of former Speaker Anita Among made him a familiar voice in public discourse, assumes responsibility for National Guidance at the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance, an institution many would agree has struggled to define its purpose in an era dominated by social media and decentralized information.

At Mbuya, seasoned advocate Kiryowa Kiwanuka now assumes the portfolio of Minister of Defence and Veteran Affairs, inheriting a ministry whose budget has crossed the one-billion-dollar threshold and whose importance to the stability of the state can scarcely be overstated.

Taken together, these appointments appear designed to advance President Museveni’s stated ambition of transforming Uganda’s economy from approximately USD 50 billion to USD 500 billion within the next ten years. By any measure, that is a bold target. It demands not merely economic growth, but structural transformation on a scale unprecedented in our history.

Of course, Uganda today is significantly different from what it was in 1986. The economy is many times larger than it was. Major highways now connect regions that were once isolated. Electricity generation has expanded dramatically. Telecommunications have revolutionized commerce and communication. School enrollment has increased. Regional infrastructure projects, the emergence of the oil and gas sector, and the growth of urban centres all testify to a nation that has moved forward in important respects.

Indeed, President Museveni’s supporters would argue, with good justification, that many of these achievements are the product of strategic consistency sustained over four decades. Few African leaders can point to such longevity accompanied by relative political stability, sustained economic expansion, and the preservation of national unity in a region often characterized by conflict and fragility.

Yet acknowledging these successes only sharpens the question confronting Uganda today. If the foundations have largely been laid, why does corruption continue to undermine public confidence? Why do service delivery failures persist? Why does institutional performance so often depend on the intervention of powerful individuals rather than the reliable operation of systems? The challenge facing Museveni’s seventh term is, therefore, not merely to celebrate past achievements, but to consolidate them through stronger institutions capable of outlasting any single leader.

And it is here that Karr’s famous observation becomes difficult to ignore. For 40 years, but especially over the past thirteen, each new cabinet announced is presented as the Ursa Minor of the National Resistance Movement’s continuing promise of fundamental change in Uganda’s political and economic affairs.

Each new term (Kisanja) brings with it familiar and unfamiliar faces. New slogans are carefully coined, and fresh task forces constituted. Still, the fundamental question confronting Uganda remains remarkably constant: can the state generate the discipline, competence, and institutional integrity required to convert ambition into achievement?

It is here that the insights of the renowned American geopolitical strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski become relevant. Writing in the aftermath of the Cold War, Brzezinski identified the defining challenge of modern states as managing political and socio-economic turmoil. His proposed remedy was deceptively simple: Strategic vision, firmness of Purpose, and a clear sense of Values.

Uganda today requires all three.

Strategic vision means moving beyond announcements and appointments to a coherent national plan capable of accelerating industrialization, increasing productivity, and creating wealth at scale. Firmness of purpose requires confronting corruption wherever it resides, whether in ministries, local governments, procurement entities, Parliament, or the broader political ecosystem. A clear sense of values demands that patriotism triumph over patronage and that public office once again be regarded as a trust rather than an opportunity for accumulation.

If Uganda is truly to become a USD 500 billion economy, the challenge will not be finding ministers. Uganda has never lacked ministers. The challenge will be building institutions capable of delivering results regardless of who occupies ministerial offices.

That is why, amid the excitement of a new cabinet, one cannot help but return to Karr’s old wisdom. The names may change. The seating arrangements around the Cabinet table may change. The slogans may change. The task forces may change. But unless our politics becomes more disciplined, our institutions more effective, and our public service more accountable, the underlying challenges of governance will remain stubbornly familiar.

President Museveni’s seventh term will ultimately be judged not by the novelty of its appointments, but by whether it succeeds where previous administrations have struggled: breaking the cycle in which personalities change while outcomes remain the same.

In an age defined by global turmoil, economic uncertainty, and geopolitical upheaval, Uganda’s greatest challenge is not changing faces. It is changing results.

Recently, Defense Public Information Officer Col. Chris Magezi shared images and video footage of the project, revealing that the tallest flagpole south of the Sahara had already been erected between the twin towers. Upon its completion, later this year, it will hoist the largest rendition of Uganda's national flag ever flown.

For some, this is simply another impressive piece of infrastructure. Others see it as a symbol of military prestige. Yet, for many of us, its significance runs much deeper than architecture, engineering, or ceremony.

To understand the meaning of the flag that will soon rise above Mbuya, we must return to another date - another journey.

On February 6, 1981, the then Mr. Yoweri Museveni led forty men into the bushes and forests of Luweero to wage war against the government of Milton Obote. The five year struggle that followed was not merely a contest for power. Rather, it became the cynosure for the struggle to restore ideals of Patriotism, Nationalism, and Democracy in our country.

Ugandans, we all know, had lost their dignity. The country's institutions had been weakened, hollowed out by their capture by backwards and often illiterate state operatives . Ugandans were once again refugees in distant lands. The national flag, once a symbol of hope and possibility lost its lustre.

The men and women who joined the struggle believed they were fighting to restore that meaning.

Forty-five years later, the giant flagpole at Mbuya stands as evidence that those ideals have not perished in the pages of history. They endure. More importantly, they continue to shape the institutions that emerged from that struggle.

Yet there is an important misunderstanding that often clouds discussions of patriotism and nationalism.

Many people (including the quiet folks at our National Guidance department in the Ministry of ICT&NG and at State House’s Patriotism desk) assume patriotism means loving one's country and little more. Others assume nationalism requires suspicion of foreigners and hostility toward neighbouring peoples. Such ideas may have gained currency elsewhere, but they have never been central to Uganda's revolutionary tradition.

The generation that emerged from Luweero understood patriotism differently.

To them, patriotism meant building a strong Uganda capable of securing its own future while contributing to the liberation and prosperity of the wider African continent. They understood that the diversity of the peoples of East, Central, and Southern Africa was not a threat. It was a civilisational asset.

This understanding transformed nationalism from a narrow doctrine of exclusion into a broader project of African cooperation and liberation.

The history of Uganda's flag demonstrates this point better than any speech.

It was Uganda that provided sanctuary and support to those who would eventually become the Rwanda Patriotic Front. When Rwanda descended into genocide, it was Ugandans who stood among those determined to ensure that such barbarity would not triumph.

Following Rwanda's liberation, Uganda and Rwanda worked alongside Congolese in support of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo, whose campaign culminated in the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997.

A decade later, when Somalia stood on the brink of collapse, it was Uganda that became the first nation to deploy troops under the African Union mission. Long before others arrived, Ugandan soldiers were already in Mogadishu, fighting Al-Shabaab and helping create the conditions for the re-emergence of a functioning Somali state.

In each of these cases, Uganda acted not because Rwanda, Congo, or Somalia were Ugandan territories. It acted because instability in one part of Africa inevitably threatens prosperity in another.

This is the patriotism that the flag at Mbuya represents - Not the patriotism of fear. Not the patriotism of exclusion. Certainly, not the primitive nationalism that seeks to divide Africans into competing camps, treating neighbours as enemies and foreigners as threats.

Indeed, the resurgence of such attitudes should concern all who care about Uganda's future.

Whether expressed through xenophobic rhetoric, through attempts to pit African nationalities against one another, or through corruption within institutions responsible for citizenship and immigration, primitive nationalism ultimately weakens the very nation it claims to defend.

A confident nation does not fear interaction with its neighbours. It definitely does not retreat behind walls of suspicion.

A confident nation recognises that its sovereignty is strengthened, not diminished, by mutually beneficial cooperation.

This is precisely why the giant flagpole at Mbuya matters. It is not merely a military monument but rather, it is a declaration of strategic intent.

It signals that Uganda intends to remain an active participant in shaping the future of East Africa, Central Africa, and the continent as a whole. It reminds us that the UPDF was not built simply to defend borders, but to safeguard the conditions necessary for peace, stability, and prosperity within the wider region.

The flag that will soon fly above Mbuya therefore carries a message.

It tells us that patriotism is not the opposite of African solidarity.

It tells us that nationalism need not descend into chauvinism.

It tells us that Uganda's interests are best secured when Africa is peaceful, prosperous, and free.

And perhaps most importantly, it reminds us that the black, yellow, and red has never flown merely for Uganda alone.

For decades, it has flown wherever Africans have struggled for security, dignity, and self-determination.

That is why the flag at Mbuya rejects primitive nationalism.

It flies for something larger.

It flies for a confident Uganda in an Africa whose destiny remains intertwined with our own.

Indeed, as I have noted in previous essays, Uganda, under President Museveni, has registered significant economic growth. On average, Ugandans are wealthier today than at any time in our 65-year history as a Republic.

Yet in conversations with many young Ugandans over the past few years, I have noticed that there exists a growing disconnect between them and the body politic’s endless insistence on “In 1986 …”! Perhaps, “In 1986 …” has itself been abused by those who invoke it too often and too carelessly.

However, let me now add my own voice to that of Andrew Mwenda and millions of Ugandans, young and old, who increasingly question the choice of beneficiaries of state largesse for their enterprises.

In 1987, armed with about 21,000 Yuan (then valued at roughly USD 5,000), Mr. Ren Zhengfei established a small company in the Shenzhen Economic Zone. At the time, his enterprise merely resold imported telephone switches. Yet through strategic state support, disciplined reinvestment, and relentless research and development, that small company would eventually partner with the Chinese state and construct the first telecommunications network for the People’s Liberation Army.

Today, we know that company as Huawei.

Huawei is now valued at approximately USD 191 billion. Its portfolio spans telecommunications, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, consumer electronics, and even automotive manufacturing through the Huawei Smart Selection Car Business alliance. Huawei is now present in over 100 countries, including Uganda.

Likewise, in 1953, after the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement, China emerged strategically awakened. Ten years later, in the inland province of Henan, a modest enterprise called Zhengzhou Bus Repair Factory was established with support from the local government. Through reform, discipline, and productive growth, it evolved into Zhengzhou Yutong Bus Co. Ltd.

Today, Yutong is the largest bus manufacturer on earth by volume, producing over 150,000 buses annually. Indeed, as I write this while travelling to Mbarara aboard a Global Coaches bus, I am seated inside a Yutong.

The Chinese state did not merely distribute money to politically connected individuals. It nurtured productive enterprises. It built national champions.

Now the Bahororo have an interesting ism, to wit: Twigaane etaha aha marwa — equality only exists around a beer pot. Another proverb common among the Bahororo, Bakiga, Banyankore, and Banyarwanda communes warns thus: Kuribusheshera ehi butasheshera, amamanzi n’amafura garya hemuka. That is to say: if the sun ever rises at the wrong time, both the rulers and the ruled shall face great shame.

And indeed, Uganda has often faced great shame.

In 2003, there was a vigorous national debate surrounding President Museveni’s decision to fund an outfit called Tri-Star Apparels. The old Coffee Marketing Board structures in Bugolobi were hastily transformed into a garment factory. Television screens and newspapers of the day were flooded with images of bewildered young women seated behind sewing machines.

We were told Tri-Star would earn Uganda billions through exports to the United States under AGOA. Three years later, it collapsed. Kapish! And just like that, Uganda’s investment in Vellupillai Kananathan yielded almost nothing of lasting national value.

Yet fairness demands honesty.

I was among those genuinely excited when President Museveni arrived at Makerere University on 24th November 2011 to launch what we now know as Kiira Motors Corporation. For years, many questioned the wisdom of annually allocating public funds to the project. Yet today, Kiira possesses a respectable factory sitting on 100 acres in the Jinja Industrial Park, with the capacity to produce approximately 2,500 vehicles annually.

Through purchases by the Uganda Civil Aviation Authority, Uganda Airlines, Kampala Capital City Authority, and private operators such as Kalita Bus Services, Ugandans have been able to see and appreciate the Kayoola EVS and Kayoola Diesel Coaches.

Whether Kiira ultimately succeeds or fails remains to be seen. But at the very least, it reflects an attempt at productive industrial ambition.

Now let me speak of the Rolex.

To foreigners, the word evokes an expensive Swiss watch. But in Uganda, the Rolex is something far more democratic — eggs, vegetables, and sometimes meat wrapped inside a chapati.

Heavy. Tasty. Economical. It is perhaps Uganda’s most successful indigenous fast-food innovation.

Its rise was not born from a presidential handshake or state bailout. Rather, it emerged from the ingenuity of ordinary Ugandans like Sula, the famed chapati seller from Busoga, whose stall near University Hall at Makerere became one of the early epicentres of the Rolex boom.

Today, the Rolex appears on high-end restaurant menus. It is served aboard Uganda Airlines. Tourists arriving in Kampala eagerly devour it, occasionally to the horror of their doctors back home.

And what was the government’s contribution? Municipal harassment of street vendors. Poor sanitation. Pollution from taxis and boda bodas parked beside roadside cooking stalls.

Yet despite this neglect, the Rolex economy thrives. Indeed, I personally know three young operators who used Mzee’s kasiimo from the Parish Development Model (PDM) to establish their own booths.

Then there is the case of Uganda Waragi.

Whenever my friend Obi (now a foreign national) lands in Kampala, one of the first things he purchases before departing Entebbe is a case of Uganda Waragi. Across Europe and North America, especially within Ugandan diaspora communities, it enjoys remarkable cultural and commercial appeal.

Yet Uganda Waragi itself is now effectively foreign-owned.

Uganda Breweries Limited, once one of Uganda’s notable state enterprises, was among the many assets disposed of during the privatisation era. Today, Japan’s Asahi Group Holdings controls a majority stake in East African Breweries Limited, the parent company of Uganda Breweries.

And herein lies the contradiction at the heart of Uganda’s political economy.

When the Chinese state invested in Huawei and Yutong, it was building long-term industrial power anchored in national control and productive capacity.

But in Uganda, too often, state intervention degenerates into the hurried enrichment of politically connected individuals with little accountability, little technological transfer, and little strategic return to the nation itself.

The question, therefore, is not whether the state should intervene in the economy. IT MUST.

Every successful modern economy, as Elison Karuhanga correctly states, from South Korea to China, from Singapore to even the United States during its industrial ascent, was shaped by deliberate state action.

The real question is this: Who benefits?

Is public capital being used to build productive national enterprises capable of surviving generations?

Or is it merely being converted into temporary political patronage masquerading as industrial policy?

For Tri-Star and, perhaps even Atiak Sugar factory, the sun rose at the wrong time, and if it continues to do so, as the old Bahororo warned, then both the rulers and the ruled shall continue sharing in the shame.

By all accounts, this is a powerful statement. Indeed, it is one that many of us have long prayed for. Here is why.

In June 2022, after she acquired a Mercedes-Benz reportedly worth UGX 1.4 billion and while I was still employed at the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance(MoICT&NG), I wrote about the dangers of runaway corruption to the legacy of President Museveni. I specifically singled out our Parliament, referring to it as our once august House.

At the time, I also pointed out to the leadership of the Ministry and staff within the National Guidance Department that it was incumbent upon us to restore public confidence in the Presidency of Yoweri Museveni by openly condemning House Speaker Mrs. Annet Among Magogo’s insensitive display of primitive accumulation of wealth, especially because many were still recovering from the economic disruptions of Covid19. I pointed out that it was, as Frantz Fanon put it, a pitfall to national consciousness.

Two years later, following a raid on our offices by operatives of the State House Anti-Corruption Unit, I found myself out of a job, punished under suspicion that my colleagues and I were responsible for exposing corruption within the Ministry.

Yet in the years since, as part of revolutionary responsibility, I have remained steadfast in my conviction regarding the ideals that caused Ugandans to rally around the National Resistance Army/Movement (NRA/M) beginning on 6th February 1981. These ideals coalesced around a promise to restore national consciousness - the dignity of Ugandans and of our Republic through universal socio-economic transformation.

At a meeting in Kapeeka sometime in 2023, we discussed Gen. Salim Saleh’s novel idea of “Musevenomics.” At its heart, Musevenomics is an attempt to describe and advance President Museveni’s economic vision for achieving universal socio-economic transformation. In many respects, it mirrors the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s economic doctrine, now famously known as Abenomics.

During that meeting, I pointed out that unless corruption within the civil service and among the political elite seated upon our once-noble green benches in Parliament was decisively confronted, Musevenomics would never realise its full potential.

To support my argument, I demonstrated that the gains of the Parish Development Model, like those of many government programmes before it, are steadily eroded by corruption.

Here is how.

Since its launch, the Government of Uganda has disbursed approximately UGX 3.63 trillion to last-mile beneficiaries across 10,589 parishes. Yet over the same 4-year period, if we are to rely on the Inspectorate of Government report published in January 2023, nearly UGX 40 trillion has been lost to corruption.

In effect, this means that every shilling invested through the Parish Development Model immediately loses at least a quarter of its intended value to the corrosive effects of corruption. Consequently, the 2.63 million Ugandans drawn from 1.6 million households enrolled under the programme may never fully realise the true dividend of their PDM projects.

Beyond the theft of public funds, corruption also erodes trust and undermines the institutions of the state. It converts patriotism into cynicism and public service into private enterprise. It disfigures economic activity. Eventually, it destroys the moral contract between the citizen and the State. This is what qualifies it as an existential threat.

And perhaps that is why so many Ugandans have received Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba’s recent signals and deployment of part of his armamentarium with genuine excitement and renewed hope.

For years, we, the citizens, have cried out not merely for speeches against corruption, but for consequences. We have prayed not only for the prosecution of Anita Among, but also for the investigation and prosecution of permanent secretaries who preside over looting ministries, Board Executives of Public Institutions, Members of Parliament on the powerful committees who turn oversight into extortion, and local government officials who suffocate service delivery before it ever reaches the ordinary Ugandan.

What we, the Ugandans, seek today is not selective justice, but a national reckoning.

There is now a growing belief among many citizens that Gen. Muhoozi’s campaign against corruption represents an opportunity to cement President Museveni’s legacy, not merely as the man who brought peace to Uganda, but as the leader who finally confronted the internal decay threatening to consume the gains of the Revolution itself.

The truth is simple: no economic doctrine, no patriotic chorus, no development programme, and no revolutionary history can survive if corruption becomes the operating system of the State.

A nation cannot appear to endlessly reward thieves and still expect the population to believe in the ideals of sacrifice, patriotism, or national transformation.

And so, from trading centres to taxi parks, from villages to the corridors of government itself, the prayer of many Ugandans has become clear: Let the fight against corruption become real by going beyond speeches and promises.

Let nobody be untouchable. Not ministers. Not permanent secretaries. Not Members of Parliament. Not politically connected businessmen. Not local government officials. Not even those within the ruling establishment itself, because if the Gains of the Revolution are to survive, then corruption must be confronted completely, decisively, and without fear or favour.

On X: @BesiAndrew

Yet for some, his continued stay in power remains a stain on his legacy, and I am, to a point, inclined to agree with them.

Here is why.

When he first came to power in January 1986, he assured Ugandans that the National Resistance Movement was a “clear-headed movement with clear objectives and good membership.” He promised that the NRM had a “deliberate policy to ensure that we uplift the quality of politics in our country.” “We are,” he added, “quite different from the previous people in power who encouraged evil instead of trying to fight it.”

Four decades later, however, one is compelled to ask whether the quality of politics he promised to uplift has, instead, steadily deteriorated. In nearly every country where constitutions have been amended to extend the rule of a leader and his political establishment, the gains in institutional maturity and political culture have eventually been undone. Uganda is no exception. Indeed, the quality of debate in Parliament and, at times, the conduct of its leadership stands as an indictment of this decline.

Politics today is heavily monetised. Each new cluster of leaders appears determined not merely to govern, but to out-earn those who came before them. Public office, once viewed as a platform for service and sacrifice, is increasingly treated as an avenue for accumulation. Parliament, in particular, (“like the previous people in power who encouraged evil,”) has become synonymous with extravagance, patronage, and transactional politics, all of which continue to fuel the corruption that now permeates nearly every layer of public life.

Yet perhaps the gravest failure lies within the civil service itself. By and large, it has refused to adapt to changing global realities in science and technology, particularly the revolutionary developments in ICTs and digital governance. Ours remains a civil service trapped in the colonial-era absurdity of “permanent and pensionable,” insulated from competition, innovation, and accountability. The result is bureaucratic indolence: institutions that move slowly in a century that demands speed, creativity, and technical competence.

At a time when nations across Asia and parts of Africa are restructuring their bureaucracies around efficiency, data, artificial intelligence, and digital productivity, Uganda still struggles with paper files, endless procurement delays, and a culture where procedure too often triumphs over results. A state cannot aspire to middle-income transformation, let alone a USD 500 billion economy, while its administrative machinery remains philosophically anchored in the 1950s.

This, then, is the contradiction of Mr. Museveni’s seventh term. Uganda may indeed have “gains” worth protecting: macroeconomic stability, improved infrastructure, regional influence, and a more diversified economy than the one inherited in 1986. But the institutions required to sustain those gains: strong democratic culture, ethical leadership, meritocratic governance, and an efficient modern civil service, appear weaker today than the ideals once proclaimed at the dawn of the NRM era.

And so the central question of this new term may not simply be whether the gains will be protected, but rather: protected for whom, and by what kind of state?

When he was first sworn in on January 29, 1986, Uganda was a country battered by years of conflict. The economy had collapsed, institutions were fragile, and hope was in short supply. In the four decades since, President Museveni has overseen a period of recovery and sustained economic expansion. It is perhaps in recognition of this journey that his seventh-term theme, “Protecting the Gains,” has been presented as a continuation of that legacy.

Yet, modest as the slogan may sound, it carries within it an uncomfortable contradiction. For if there are gains to protect, then there must also be clarity on what threatens them most. And among all the challenges Uganda faces, corruption remains the most persistent and corrosive.

In January 2023, the then Inspector General of Government, Mrs. Betty Kamya-Turomwe, released findings from a three-year study into corruption in Uganda. The report estimated that the country loses approximately UGX 10 trillion annually to corrupt practices. This translates into nearly UGX 933 million stolen from each one of our 10,717 parishes every year—resources that could otherwise transform livelihoods, build infrastructure, and restore dignity to public service.

This figure stands in stark contrast to the approximately UGX 3.22 trillion so far disbursed to 10,589 parishes under the Parish Development Model (PDM). The implication is troubling: far more is lost through corruption than is invested in grassroots transformation.

Recent actions, including the arrests of senior security officials reportedly under the direction of Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, suggest that the state is not blind to the problem. However, episodic enforcement, however dramatic, cannot substitute for systemic reform.

The Question of Discretionary Giveaways

Equally troubling is the continued pattern of discretionary allocations of public funds to select individuals and enterprises—among them Mr. Magoola, Ms. Pinetti, Ms. Amina Hersi, and Mr. Nelson Tugume. These interventions are often framed as strategic support for local enterprise or national development priorities. Yet, they are rarely accompanied by clearly articulated frameworks for accountability, performance benchmarks, or recovery of funds.

In principle, state support to domestic capital formation is not inherently problematic. Indeed, many successful economies have relied on deliberate state intervention to nurture strategic sectors. The difficulty arises when such interventions are opaque, personalised, and detached from institutional discipline. In such circumstances, what might otherwise be developmental policy begins to resemble patronage, thereby undermining both public confidence and fiscal prudence.

Musevenomics vs. Practice

This tension becomes even more pronounced when viewed through the lens of the emerging doctrine often described as “Musevenomics,” articulated by Gen. Caleb Akandwanaho (Salim Saleh). At its core, this policy orientation advocates for a more assertive role of the state in steering economic transformation—prioritizing industrialization, supporting indigenous entrepreneurs, and reclaiming policy space from external orthodoxy.

In many respects, this marks a departure from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank-backed liberalization policies of the 1990s, which emphasized privatization, deregulation, and a reduced role for the state. Musevenomics, by contrast, seeks to reinsert the state as a central economic actor.

However, for such a model to succeed, state intervention must be rules-based, transparent, and anchored in measurable outcomes. Otherwise, it risks devolving into ad hoc disbursements that contradict its own philosophical foundations. The absence of clear recovery plans or performance accountability in these high-profile allocations raises a fundamental question: Is the state acting as a strategic investor or merely as a discretionary benefactor?

Corruption and unchecked patronage are not just parallel problems; they are mutually reinforcing. Together, they weaken institutions, distort markets, and ultimately erode the very gains that the state seeks to protect.

If the promise of this seventh term is truly to “protect the gains,” then the most meaningful protection would lie not in preserving the status quo, but in confronting corruption and reforming state intervention itself—so that it serves the many, rather than the few. Without that, the gains of the past forty years risk becoming the losses of the next.

Its forerunner, the old Mali Empire, was among the greatest political and economic powers of the medieval world. It spanned territories that today include Senegal, Guinea, The Gambia, Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso, and modern Mali itself. It commanded the lucrative trans-Saharan trade in gold, salt, and ivory, linking Africa to the wider world long before the rise of modern Europe.

For many, its most famous ruler remains Mansa (Emperor in the Mandingo language) Musa Keita I, whose 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca astonished the world with extraordinary displays of wealth. Gold was said to flow so freely during his journey that markets trembled in his wake.

Yet for me, and perhaps a precious few, Mansa Musa’s predecessor, his brother Mansa Muhammad ibn Qu, deserves even greater admiration. He is not remembered for what he possessed, but for what he sought.

Muhammad was fascinated by the Atlantic Ocean. To most rulers, it was a boundary. To him, it was an invitation. He gazed westward and wondered what lay beyond the horizon. Where others saw danger, he saw possibility. Where others built walls, he prepared ships.

And so, around 1311, after only a brief period as Mansa, he is said to have assembled a vast fleet of some 2,000 vessels carrying men, women, gold, and provisions, and set sail to discover what lay beyond the sea (the mirror image of the Niger River at the far end of the Atlantic!). Whether every detail of the story is literal history or embellished tradition is less important than the spirit behind it: an African sovereign sponsoring and leading exploration on a grand scale centuries before Europe’s so-called Age of Discovery.

In his influential book, first published in 1976 and titled They Came Before Columbus, Ivan Van Sertima advances the argument that Africans may have reached the Americas before Christopher Columbus. His thesis remains debated, but what cannot be debated is that he challenged the narrow assumption that Africans were merely passive spectators in world history. He insisted that Africa, too, produced navigators, inventors, merchants, and seekers.

And that is where this story matters most today. Africa’s crisis is not a shortage of resources, nor of population, nor of intelligence. It is too often a shortage of imagination among those who govern, and a shortage of confidence among those governed. Too many of our political elites think only in five-year election cycles, patronage networks, and imported talking points. Too few think in centuries, oceans, and civilizations.

This is an age of renewed geopolitical contest. Great powers now compete over minerals, shipping lanes, artificial intelligence, satellites, semiconductors, and energy corridors. China plans decades ahead. The United States seeks to retain primacy. Russia is reasserting itself while India is steadily rising. Meanwhile, many African states still debate basic roads, clean drainage, and whether public schools should function.

What would it mean if Africa rediscovered the curiosity of Mansa Muhammad? It would mean funding science, not slogans. Building ports, railways, and refineries instead of always importing finished goods. Launching satellites, investing in oceanography, mastering shipbuilding, exploring rare earth processing, and making universities engines of discovery rather than warehouses of frustration. It would mean continental ambition under frameworks such as the African Union and stronger regional blocs.

The lesson of Mansa Muhammad is not merely that he may have crossed an ocean. It is that he dared to ask what lay beyond it.

What lies beyond our present limitations? This is the question Africa must ask again.

For nations, as for men, the death of curiosity is the single shock heralding decline.

Toward the close of the nineteenth century, it became evident that Mpororo had entered an age of fragmentation. The source of this decline lay in succession struggles among the sons of Omukama (King) Kahaya Rutindangyezi rwa Murorwa, each prince aligned to a different clan. Kahaya himself had ascended the throne after a violent struggle in 1753 against his brother, Omukama Kamurari II.

Under Kahaya’s rule, from whom the Bashambo clans claim descent, Mpororo expanded impressively. Its reach extended across much of present-day Kigezi (Kamuheesi, Muhanga, and Maziba in Rukiga and Mfumbiro), sections of Ankole including Kajara, Igara, Sheema, and Rwampara, as well as territories stretching northward into Rwanda. His sons were settled across the kingdom: Rukaari in Nshenyi, Kirenzi in Rujumbura, Kihondwa in Kajara, Rugambagye in Rukiga, Kaitezi in Igara, while Obwera remained under the aging monarch himself.

Yet as often happens, expansion bred fragility. Once the central authority weakened, ambitious neighbours took notice. The small but assertive kingdom of Rwanda repeatedly exploited the divisions of Mpororo, dispatching raiding parties into its fractured domains.

From Rujumbura emerged one of the more dramatic family episodes. A descendant of Kirenzi known as Nyinamanyonyi sought to navigate these dangerous times. In pursuit of favour at the Rwandan court, the Bashambo princes sent emissaries known as Mitoijo. Among them was Ruhengye, son of Nyinamanyonyi, married to Kaharagi of the Bagahe clan. He departed and never returned, held captive at the Mwami’s court. In the strange moral arithmetic of dynastic politics, his pregnant wife was subsequently taken in marriage by her father-in-law.

Months later, she bore a son.

When news reached Ruhengye, he sent word that the child should be named Muhoozi—“the avenger,” the one destined to defend family honour and confront rivals. Whether prophecy or parental longing, the name would prove apt.

Raised in a climate of rivalry and warfare, young Muhoozi gathered around himself a fierce company of brave boys and men known as Entembani, those who fight at close quarters. Like many Bahororo nobles, he prized cattle passionately, and this appetite drove raids, alliances, and adventures aimed at enlarging his herds. Tradition holds that he sometimes disguised himself as a humble shepherd, travelling far to study enemies or potential allies before unleashing his warriors. Unsurprisingly, he also came to be known as Rwitamahanga, the conqueror of nations.

Yet history is never one-dimensional. Though admired for courage and enterprise, Muhoozi also earned the title Mubura (he who deprives) because military glory often came at a cost to his own people.

And so to our own times.

As runners assembled at Kololo Ceremonial Grounds this past Sunday, a day after the traditional wedding ceremony of his niece in Kashaari, my thoughts drifted from the old Muhoozi of Rujumbura to the modern one: Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Chief of Defence Forces, known simply as MK.

Without excessive ceremony, and to the visible irritation of his critics, he has assembled his own contemporary Entembani: an eclectic circle of ministers once thought politically lifeless, restless social-media activists, serving military officers, and professionals drawn from agriculture, finance, industry, and the wider middle class.

Whether one admires him or distrusts him, ignores him or debates him, one cannot deny that he has become a political force around whom many now orbit. Like his namesake of old, he has shown a talent for gathering men and women into motion.

History does not repeat itself exactly, but it often rhymes. In our part of the world, names carry memory, and memory carries ambition.

The theme, “The Geopolitics of Space,” moderated by Dr. Korir Singoei, was a timely choice, not least because space has transformed from the realm of dreamers into the arena of hard power.

On stage, to the mild amusement of students and faculty, I suggested that within 10 to 30 years, the United States, China, India, the European Union, and perhaps Russia and Japan would establish permanent or semi-permanent bases on the Moon. These bases would be designed and built as instruments of strategy: research hubs, logistical nodes, and ultimately, extensions of national power.

For emphasis, I cited the example of agriculture. What would happen to our Agricultural sector if one quarter of the moon were harnessed into a giant agricultural farm? Indeed, beneath the surface of these ambitions lies a question both simple and profound: can humanity sustain life beyond Earth? Can we transplant civilisation itself?

It is at this point that Africa must pause and reflect, because while others design systems for survival in the vastness of space, we have struggled to organise ourselves within the abundance of Earth.

In the more than six decades since independence, too many of our states have drifted into a pattern where politics is less about transformation and more about preservation of power, of privilege, of narrow interests. The result has been a continent rich in promise, yet always constrained by the limits of its own political imagination.

The Democratic Republic of Congo stands as one of the most tragic illustrations. The assassination of Patrice Lumumba, amid Cold War intrigue and the complicity of Mobutu, did not merely remove a leader; it derailed the possibility of a coherent national project. What followed has been decades of instability, leaving the eastern regions mired in cycles of armed conflict that have denied not only Congo, but the wider Great Lakes region, the dividends of peace and economic integration.

Across Central Africa, long-serving regimes in Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, the Central African Republic, etc., have refined the art of political endurance, often at the expense of institutional renewal. In the Sudans, the failure of politics to evolve into stable civic systems has given way to violent contestation.

And yet, Africa is not without its counter-narratives. Rwanda, perhaps because of the April 1994 genocide, has demonstrated what disciplined state-building can achieve. Botswana, thanks to the foresight of its first president, Sir Seretse Khama, offers an even older lesson: that natural resources, when treated as national assets rather than personal spoils, can underpin decades of stability and growth.

In stark contrast, Somalia’s early promise dissolved into fragmentation, as the erosion of national institutions gave way to clan-based political logic. The lesson is as clear as it is uncomfortable: nations are not sustained by identity alone, but by the institutions that give that identity meaning.

It is in this context that one recalls the recent, characteristically blunt observation by President Museveni, who, at an NRM retreat to Kyankwanzi, contrasted America’s pursuit of the Artemis II mission with our own political preoccupations. While others invest in science, technology, and the conquest of new frontiers, we gather in Kyankwanzi, not to design the future, but to rehearse consensus, affirm loyalty, and perfect the choreography of applause. It was a remark delivered with humour, but carrying the weight of an inconvenient truth.

However, if there is a glimmer of strategic coherence on the continent, it lies in the slow, imperfect, but undeniable progress of regional integration; most notably within the East African Community. What began as a modest effort at cooperation has evolved into one of Africa’s most promising experiments in shared destiny. The expansion of its membership, the steady harmonisation of trade policies, the push toward a common market, and ongoing conversations around monetary union all point to a recognition that scale matters. Infrastructure corridors now link ports to hinterlands; people, goods, and ideas move with increasing fluidity; and a regional consciousness, however nascent, is beginning to take root. The East African Community is not yet the finished article, but it is, perhaps, the clearest cynosure of what Africa can become when it chooses integration over fragmentation.

For it is only at scale that ambition becomes feasible. No single African state, acting alone, can marshal the resources, technology, or institutional depth required to compete in an era defined by lunar missions and space-based economies. But a continent that integrates economically, politically, and intellectually can begin to imagine, and then to pursue projects of similar magnitude.

And so we return to the contrast that frames this reflection.

On one hand, a retreat in Kyankwanzi - familiar, performative, grounded in the rituals of political continuity. On the other hand, a mission to the Moon - precise, forward-looking, grounded in science and long-term vision.

The question is not whether Africa can build rockets or establish lunar bases. The question is whether we can first build the political, economic, and institutional architecture that makes such ambitions conceivable.

Because in the end, the distance between Kyankwanzi and the Moon is not measured in kilometres. It is measured in vision.

#LamentAndSatire

On X: @BesiAndrew

Until the recent escalations pitting Israel and America against Iran, the Strait of Hormuz was, to many East Africans, little more than an obscure name on a distant map. But obscurity does not diminish importance. For students of geopolitics, the world’s narrow waterways, among them Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, Malacca, Gibraltar, Mozambique channel, etc., are more than mere geographic features; they are the arteries through which the lifeblood of the global economy flows. To control them is to influence the fate of nations.

The value of these chokepoints lies not just in their geography but in the dependencies they create. Oil from the Gulf, goods from Asia, and energy all converge through these narrow passages. Consequently, a disruption in any one of them sends ripples across continents, raising prices in Kampala as surely as it rattles markets in London or Shanghai. Geography, in this sense, is destiny.

And here lies the deeper concern for, especially East Africa. We are too often spectators to contests whose consequences we feel but whose rules we do not shape. The Strait of Hormuz becomes relevant only when fuel prices spike; the Red Sea matters only when supply chains falter. These are not distant problems, but structural vulnerabilities. Our economies remain tethered to routes and resources we neither control nor sufficiently study.

This is no accident. It is the residue of a world order that positioned Africa as a consumer at the end of the pipeline: whether of energy, goods, or ideas. Colonial cartography did more than divide land; it disconnected us from strategic awareness. The Cold War deepened this condition, turning states into clients rather than thinkers, and reactors rather than actors. This lack of strategic agency is most visible in our economic dependency; we have mastered the art of being used, but not the art of using what we have.

It is this legacy that makes our current rhetoric a hollow rebellion. In Uganda, President Museveni has frequently spoken about the necessity of value addition—the transition from a “supermarket” for foreign goods to a factory for our own. He is right: the real revolution is to build our own refineries, process our agricultural produce for both domestic, regional, and global consumption, and manufacture our own medicines.

Yet, in a cruel twist of irony, the President’s vision is increasingly undone by the very system he presides over. His ambitions for an industrial leap are hindered by an inefficient civil service and a government that seems unable or unwilling to excise grand corruption. You cannot build a modern industrial state on the back of a bloated, lethargic bureaucracy where “who you know” matters more than “what you produce.”

Such ambitions demand a foundation that, sadly, is currently being eroded - a deliberate investment in quality education for all. In Uganda today, the cost of education is spiraling out of the reach of many, while public schools, once the great equalizers, deteriorate. It is a bitter irony that the generation currently in power, themselves products of these very institutions, no longer trusts them with their own children. A society that abandons its public schools, preferring instead to tolerate a civil service and political elite that loots the funds intended to fix them, abandons its future industrial capacity before it is even born.

Today, as the great powers of America, China, Russia, Europe, and India once again circle each other, the global chessboard is being redrawn. East Africa risks approaching this new contest with the same outdated playbook: fragmented, reactive, and perilously inhabiting an information desert.

The lesson of the world’s chokepoints is ultimately about leverage. Those who understand the map shape the game; those who do not are shaped by it. Now that the Strait of Hormuz is part of our vocabulary, it should not be a passing curiosity, but a warning.

In a world defined by narrow passages, it is not only ships that get trapped. Nation-states do too.

Later that evening, convinced that our Headmaster, Mr. Stephen Kamuhanda, and his staff were asleep, we gathered quietly around Mugarura Spencer’s old Panasonic radio. We tuned into the Kenya Broadcasting Service. What came through the crackling airwaves was chilling: President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane had been shot down as it attempted to land in Kigali. It crashed and burned. He was dead. So too was Burundi’s President, Cyprien Ntaryamira.

That single moment marked the beginning of the execution of one of the darkest chapters in modern history.

What followed was not a spontaneous breakdown of order, but a calculated and systematic genocide. Over the next 100 days, nearly one million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were slaughtered—many dumped into rivers, lakes, or hastily dug graves. It was a tragedy engineered through years of ideological conditioning, bureaucratic precision, and the deliberate manipulation of identity.

Today, Kigali stands transformed. Its greenery, order, and architectural ambition reflect a country that has chosen discipline and renewal over despair. Rwanda has become, for many Africans, a symbol of what is possible when a nation confronts its past with clarity and rebuilds with purpose. For others, particularly those invested in disorder disguised as liberty, it is an uncomfortable example.

As Rwanda and its diaspora observe Kwibuka, the act of remembrance is not merely ceremonial. It is a conscious refusal to forget, and a warning against repetition. Etched on a stone wall at the Genocide Memorial in Kigali is a haunting reminder: “If you knew me, and you really knew yourself, you would not have killed me.” It is a simple sentence, yet it captures the entire tragedy: the collapse of empathy, the corruption of identity, and the terrifying ease with which the human being can be turned against the human.

Yet even as candles are lit and names are recalled, the region remains unsettled.

East Africa today faces a quiet but dangerous instability, one too often spoken of in hushed tones or ignored altogether. The continued dalliance of the Democratic Republic of Congo with the remnants of the genocidal forces, the FDLR, surely must be a matter of grave concern. That these elements, rooted in the same ideology that fueled the 1994 genocide, continue to find space within the region is troubling enough. More troubling still is the reluctance of the East African Community to speak with clarity and conviction on the matter. Silence, in such circumstances, is not neutrality; it is complicity. A regional bloc that aspires to integration and stability cannot afford ambiguity when confronted with forces that represent the very antithesis of both.

The deeper historical roots of the genocide also demand reflection. As historian Martin Meredith notes, Belgian colonial policy played a decisive role in distorting relations between Hutu and Tutsi. What had once been fluid social distinctions were hardened into rigid ethnic identities, codified through administrative systems such as identity cards. Even when colonial officials later recognized the danger and proposed abolishing these labels, the political logic of division had already taken hold. The idea that majority rule must necessarily mean Hutu rule entrenched a dangerous arithmetic—one in which identity became a tool of exclusion, and eventually, extermination.

There is a lesson here that extends far beyond Rwanda.

Africa’s post-colonial challenge has never been simply about political independence; it has been about moral and institutional clarity. And it is here that we, the contemporary elite, must confront an uncomfortable truth: corruption is not merely an economic crime; it is a civilizational threat. When corruption becomes normalised, it erodes the ethical foundations upon which societies are built. It fosters moral decadence where public office is reduced to private gain and national purpose is subordinated to personal accumulation.

In such an environment, our greatest assets, that is to say, our diversity of tribe, language, and culture, are no longer harnessed as sources of strength and economic opportunity. Instead, they are manipulated, trivialised, or allowed to decay. Corruption strips these identities of their productive potential and recasts them as tools of division, echoing, in quieter ways, the same distortions that once proved so catastrophic.

Kwibuka, therefore, is not only about remembering the victims of 1994. It is about interrogating the present. It is about recognizing that the seeds of instability ( whether in the form of unresolved militant networks, regional indecision, or internal decay through corruption) are, unfortunately, still with us.

Memory, if it is to have meaning, must sharpen our vigilance.

#LamentAndSatire

#Kwibuka32

On X: @BesiAndrew

Africa’s story has too often been written in the language of extraction. Diamonds, gold, oil, and other natural resources have not merely been sources of wealth; they have been the currency of conflict, manipulation, and foreign intervention.

The civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia during the 1990s made this brutally clear. Charles Taylor’s backing of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) was not driven by ideology or national interest, but by control of diamond fields. These so-called “blood diamonds” financed war, fueled atrocities, and devastated entire societies. In that context, Sting’s lyrics became a diagnosis.

But this pattern did not begin in West Africa in the 1990s. It is embedded in the very architecture of Africa’s modern history. In January 1961, Patrice Lumumba was abducted and murdered in a plot involving Belgium and elements of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency. His transgression: insisting that Congo’s vast mineral wealth should serve its own people rather than foreign powers.

Lumumba’s fate was part of a much older pattern. From the 16th century, European expansion was driven less by any civilising impulse and more by calculated extraction. Spain, then the world’s dominant power, colonised much of South and Central America, imposing the Catholic religion while ruthlessly extracting staggering quantities of gold and silver. The scale of their loot, in an ironic twist, was probably the beginning of their decline because it destroyed the value of their own gold coinage by causing impressive inflation which left their economy permanently weakened.

By the time European powers convened at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, the logic of plunder was already well established. What the conference did was formalise it. Africa was partitioned with little regard for its peoples, cultures, or political systems. Spain, no longer a major power, was handed Equatorial Guinea, Western Sahara, and parts of Morocco. The principal beneficiaries were Britain, France, Portugal, Germany, and Belgium’s King Leopold II whose rule in the Congo would become synonymous with some of the worst atrocities of the colonial era. Britain, then the world’s superpower, consolidated its strategic ambitions, particularly its “Cape-to-Cairo” vision, reducing the continent to a corridor of imperial control rather than a mosaic of sovereign societies.

Yet if the 19th century marked the formal “Scramble for Africa,” the 21st century is witnessing its quieter, more complex successor. Today, Africa stands at the center of an intensifying geopolitical contest involving the United States, Europe, China, Russia, India, and, to a lesser extent, Japan. The language has changed, from conquest to partnership, from empire to investment, but the underlying interests remain strikingly familiar: access to resources, markets, and strategic influence.

China builds infrastructure and extends credit. Russia offers security partnerships. The United States and Europe advance investment frameworks and governance models. India seeks energy security and markets. Each presents itself as a partner, yet beneath this lies competition. Africa risks, once again, becoming an arena where external powers pursue their rivalries.

What makes this moment particularly precarious is not only the intensity of external interest, but Africa’s internal unpreparedness. The modern African state is not an organic evolution of its societies; it is a colonial construct, designed primarily for extraction. Communities were fragmented, governance systems distorted, and economies oriented outward to serve distant capitals rather than domestic needs. Independence did not dismantle this structure, it merely transferred its management.

The Cold War deepened these distortions. African institutions, especially the civil service, were shaped more by ideological alignment and patronage than by developmental purpose. Bureaucracies became rigid, externally dependent, and often insulated from the realities of the societies they were meant to serve.

Today, that legacy persists. In a world defined by technological change, complex global value chains, and strategic competition, many African states remain anchored in administrative systems designed for a different era. The result is a civil service frequently out of step with contemporary demands, ill-equipped to negotiate effectively, to anticipate geopolitical shifts, or to transform resource wealth into long-term prosperity.

This is the crux of Africa’s dilemma. Its challenges are often framed in terms of governance failures or ethnic divisions, but these are symptoms rather than causes. At the heart of the matter lies the question of control: who owns Africa’s resources, who decides their use, and who ultimately benefits?

Until that question is resolved in favor of African peoples, the continent risks remaining trapped in complicated cycles of exploitation disguised as progress.

Sting sang that the symbols in his song were not “the shape of his heart.” For Africa, however, those symbols, diamonds, gold, oil, rare-earths, have too often defined its fate. The challenge now is not merely to reclaim these resources, but to fundamentally rethink the institutions that govern them and the strategies that deploy them in a competitive world.

Only then can Africa cease to be a prize in other nations’ contests and become, fully and finally, the author of its own destiny.