WHEN PUBLIC SERVICE BECOMES A LIFETIME CLAIM ON THE TAXPAYER

Former Members of Parliament have apparently discovered that life after Parliament can be a rude awakening.

The phone stops ringing as often. At public functions, nobody is scrambling to find them a front-row seat. They may even have to queue like “mere mortals”, the people whose laws they once passed.

This, according to reports, has become a national emergency.

The Association of Parliamentary Alumni of Uganda is asking for formal identification cards, official recognition and monthly allowances of between sh10m and sh15m. Former MPs argue that they are sometimes disrespected in public and should enjoy benefits comparable to those provided to former presidents, Speakers and judges.

The association says the proposed arrangement would be contributory. It is not asking for houses, vehicles or domestic workers.

How restrained.

To be fair, there may be a legitimate discussion about retirement arrangements for MPs who served before the present parliamentary pension scheme was established. If some legislators served for years under a system that made no provision for their old age, there is room to examine the matter.

"But sh10m to sh15m a month is not a retirement discussion.

It is an entitlement discussion...

Assuming only 500 former MPs qualified, the scheme would cost between sh60b and sh90b every year. If 800 former legislators qualified, the annual bill would rise to between sh96b and sh144b.

That is before administration, medical benefits and the inevitable demand to increase the allowance whenever inflation bites or serving MPs review their own pay.

And we know how these things work. A scheme begins as “contributory,” develops a funding gap and eventually turns up at the Treasury asking for a bailout. What starts as recognition becomes a permanent charge on taxpayers who were never invited to the meeting at which the benefit was designed.

The average Ugandan approaching retirement is told to rely on savings, children, a small garden, a SACCO or whatever remains of the family business. He is reminded that government cannot provide pensions for everybody.

The former MP, however, wants sh15m every month, an identity card and official recognition to protect him from the indignity of being treated like an ordinary citizen.

You cannot make this stuff up.

Ugandans are already carrying a heavy public wage bill, rising debt-service costs, domestic arrears and endless demands from schools, hospitals, roads and local governments. Every department says it is underfunded. Every district has an unfinished health centre. Every ministry has unpaid suppliers.

Into this situation walks the former MP, asking the taxpayer to maintain the lifestyle and status that came with an elective office that has expired.

This column warned in 2019 that Uganda was headed down a slippery slope. The danger begins when leadership stops being understood as temporary public service and starts being treated as membership of a permanent privileged class.

Once elected or appointed to high office, the official begins to believe that the public owes him not only a salary while he serves, but security, medical care, transport, housing and allowances long after he has left.

Public office becomes less of a duty and more of an investment product.

You put in five years and expect a lifetime annuity.

"This is how extractive institutions are built. They do not emerge overnight. They grow allowance by allowance, privilege by privilege and exemption by exemption...

Drawing on the lessons of Why Nations Fail, inclusive institutions distribute opportunity widely and encourage citizens to work, invest and create. Extractive institutions organise the state around transferring resources to those with access to political power.

The elite redesign government around themselves. They receive subsidised vehicles, generous medical insurance, travel allowances, sitting allowances, fuel allowances, retirement packages and special access to public facilities.

The ordinary citizen is given a speech about hard work.

This is why the proposal has attracted so much anger online. Many Ugandans have asked why former MPs cannot live off their savings, investments or businesses. Others suggest that they join the Parish Development Model, Emyooga or the other wealth-creation programmes Parliament has approved for ordinary people.

That sarcasm is not entirely misplaced.

MPs are the best-paid public officials in the country. Their positions provide access to networks, information, influence and business opportunities unavailable to most citizens.

"If, after five or ten years in that privileged position, a former MP cannot secure his financial future, what does that say about the financial advice Parliament has been giving the rest of us?

Perhaps former MPs need an Unco Money seminar.

The case for special recognition is equally shaky.

Respect cannot be legislated. An identity card may get a former MP through a security checkpoint, but it cannot force the public to admire him. Respect is earned by what one did with the opportunity to serve.

Some MPs will be remembered for defending the public interest and speaking when silence would have been safer. Others will be remembered for sleeping through debates, rubber-stamping waste and appearing in their constituencies shortly before elections.

The public is entitled to distinguish between the two.

Former MPs argue that their experience remains valuable. That may be true. They can advise political parties, mentor younger leaders, teach, write, join corporate boards, work in civil society or conduct civic education.

If their knowledge is useful, society will find a place for it. A former title is not proof of continuing usefulness...

There is also a dangerous assumption that retirement must preserve the lifestyle of office. It does not. Retirement requires adjustment. Income falls. Consumption must follow. The suit may remain, but the constituency allowance goes.

A sensible solution would be a properly funded contributory pension scheme for serving MPs. Members should set aside a meaningful portion of their generous earnings while in office. Those who served before the current pension arrangements may receive modest, targeted support, particularly for healthcare and genuine hardship.

But Uganda should resist another open-ended welfare scheme for the political class.

The country does not suffer from a shortage of former leaders. It suffers from poor public services, low household incomes and insufficient investment in the things that would make ordinary citizens more productive.

Public service should be honoured.

But it should not become a lifetime invoice sent to the public.

SOUTH AFRICA’S XENOPHOBIA IS THE BILL FOR A BROKEN PROMISE

South Africa’s latest xenophobia—they call it Afrophobia now, flare-up appears, at first glance, to be about foreigners.

It is not.

Foreigners are simply the easiest target. They run the spaza shop. They sell on the pavement. They compete in the informal economy. They are visible in communities where unemployment, poverty and frustration have become daily realities.

But the anger is not really about them. It is about a promise made in 1994 that remains largely unfulfilled.

Political freedom arrived. Economic freedom did not.

"When apartheid ended, South Africa faced a historic challenge: how to dismantle centuries of economic exclusion that doomed the black majority to serfdom and give them a genuine chance at climbing the social ladder...

Apartheid had not only denied people the vote. It had denied them land, quality education, capital, networks, decent housing and the ability to accumulate wealth across generations.

The new democratic state therefore needed urgency.

It needed to build schools that worked and boost job creation by expanding infrastructure, support entrepreneurs and ensure that millions who had been deliberately excluded could participate meaningfully in the economy.

Because political freedom without economic progress was always going to create disappointment.

Black Economic Empowerment was part of that response. It was necessary. A country that had excluded black people from ownership and leadership could not simply pretend the past did not exist.

But BEE was never going to solve everything.

A few people entering boardrooms could not compensate for millions of children receiving poor education. A handful of black billionaires could not transform communities where unemployment remained high, electricity unreliable and small businesses struggled to survive.

The problem was not that some black South Africans became wealthy. Every functioning economy creates winners. The problem was that too many people saw no realistic path to becoming one of them.

That is where resentment grows. Inequality becomes dangerous when people believe the ladder has been removed...

And South Africa is not merely unequal. It is almost in a category of its own.

The World Bank has ranked it as the most unequal country in the world, while the World Inequality Database shows that the richest 10 percent take roughly two-thirds of national income, leaving the bottom half with only a tiny share. In Sweden, by contrast, the bottom half takes about a quarter of national income.

That comparison matters.

It shows that South Africa’s problem is not just poverty. It is the architecture of opportunity. In a more normal society, inequality can be softened by the belief that the system is open, schools work, capital is accessible and effort can still move a family from the bottom to the middle. In South Africa, too many people do not see that path.

The legacy of apartheid did not end with apartheid.

It compounded.

It compounded through land ownership. It compounded through education. It compounded through access to capital. It compounded through where people lived, which schools they attended, what networks they could enter and what assets their parents could pass on.

That is why South Africa’s Gini coefficient remains among the highest ever recorded for a major economy. This is not accidental inequality. It is inherited inequality, reinforced over time.

A poor person can accept that someone else has a bigger house or a better car if they believe their own child has a fair chance of achieving the same. But when opportunity appears reserved for those with political connections, wealth begins to look less like success and more like privilege.

This is the uncomfortable reality of post-apartheid South Africa.

The country moved from a system where race determined economic opportunity to one where political access often became a powerful advantage. The rise of a connected black elite was an important correction to apartheid exclusion, but it also created a new frustration among ordinary citizens who feel they were left behind....

Many fought for liberation together. Yet decades later, some live in first-world luxury while others continue to  grovel under sub-human conditions.

That gap is politically explosive.

The statistics explain the anger.

South Africa’s unemployment rate remains among the highest in the world, with young people carrying the heaviest burden. Millions of young South Africans have grown up after apartheid, hearing that freedom had arrived, only to discover that economic opportunity remains painfully limited.

They see politicians and businesspeople with access and influence moving ahead while they struggle to find work.

Then someone tells them the problem is the foreigner.

And the match is lit.

"This is why xenophobia keeps returning. It is not because migrants suddenly become the cause of South Africa’s problems. It is because they become a convenient explanation for problems that are much deeper...

The foreign shopkeeper becomes a symbol of economic frustration.

The reality is more complicated. Migrants are a small share of South Africa’s population, and there is little evidence that they are responsible for unemployment, crime or failing public services. Many migrants are simply doing what South Africa has struggled to encourage enough of its own citizens to do: start small businesses, take risks and compete in difficult conditions.

The tragedy is that their success often becomes a source of anger rather than a lesson.

A society with millions of unemployed young people cannot survive on blame. It needs opportunity.

When leaders fail to provide answers, scapegoats become attractive.

This is where politics enters.

The African National Congress (ANC), once the unquestioned symbol of liberation, has lost much of its dominance. Its loss of a parliamentary majority in the 2024 election reflected growing public frustration with unemployment, corruption and poor service delivery.

A weakened liberation movement faces a difficult temptation: to explain failure or to distract from it.

"foreigner becomes useful because he shifts attention away from the broken municipality, the failed school, the corrupt tender and the political insider who became wealthy without creating broad prosperity...

But South Africa cannot build a future by attacking people who are also trying to survive.

The real challenge remains the same one that existed in 1994: turning political freedom into economic mobility.

And like every unpaid bill, the longer it is ignored, the more painful the final payment becomes.

UGANDA'S HARD RESET: THE POLITICS WE WANTED, BUT MAY NOT LIKE

Recent events in Uganda should give every Ugandan pause for thought.

Veteran opposition leader Dr. Kizza Besigye has now spent more than a year in custody on treason charges. The government has indefinitely suspended more than a dozen NGOs accused of pursuing a regime-change agenda. Senior politicians including Erias Lukwago, Muwanga Kivumbi and Miria Matembe have been arrested and later arraigned on charges ranging from computer misuse to misprision of treason. Meanwhile, opposition leader Robert Kyagulanyi, popularly known as Bobi Wine, remains in self-imposed exile.

Taken individually, each case has its own legal and political context. Taken together, however, they suggest Uganda is entering a different political era.

Many analysts see these developments as part of General Muhoozi Kainerugaba's efforts to consolidate authority ahead of an eventual succession from President Yoweri Museveni. Whether or not that proves correct, the direction of travel is becoming difficult to ignore. Uganda appears to be moving away from the relatively laissez-faire politics that has characterised much of the last three decades towards a far more disciplined—and less permissive—political order.

Museveni's Contradiction

Ironically, that shift may be the inevitable consequence of President Museveni's greatest political achievement.

For nearly four decades, Museveni has successfully managed a chaotic political elite. Rather than eliminate competing centres of power, he balanced them. Patronage, accommodation and political flexibility became instruments of survival.

It worked.

Uganda has enjoyed political continuity unmatched in its post-independence history. The economy has expanded several-fold. Exports have grown from less than US$1 billion in the mid-1990s to over US$13 billion today. Electricity generation, roads, telecommunications and financial inclusion have all improved dramatically.

But flexibility came at a cost.

A system held together by personalities rather than institutions inevitably breeds patronage. Patronage breeds impunity. Impunity breeds corruption.

Many of Uganda's frustrations—from delayed infrastructure and procurement scandals to ballooning domestic arrears—reflect a political order where maintaining coalitions often mattered more than enforcing discipline.

Museveni mastered managing disorder. His successor may conclude that governing Uganda now requires creating order.

The Political Elite's Biggest Mistake

It would be a mistake to see the current moment simply as an assault on the opposition.

The bigger story is that Uganda's entire political elite has reached the limits of its usefulness.

Across both government and opposition, politics has increasingly become personality-driven rather than programme-driven. Politicians have become experts at attracting headlines but remarkably poor at building durable institutions capable of mobilising citizens around coherent agendas.

The opposition, in particular, has fallen victim to a dangerous illusion.

It has mistaken popularity for power.

Large crowds, social media engagement and favourable public sentiment create the impression of overwhelming support. But political power is built much like wealth—it compounds slowly through years of disciplined investment.

Successful political movements recruit village by village. They organise polling agents. They raise money continuously. They train leaders, build local structures and remain active between elections. Above all, they require enormous sacrifice—of time, comfort, careers and resources.

Too much of Uganda's political class has assumed that public frustration would somehow translate into political change without making those long-term investments.

The consequence has been predictable.

Instead of building organisations capable of compelling government to respond to national priorities—or ultimately convincing it to step aside—they have relied on momentum, emotion and hope. Hope is not a political strategy any more than wishing is an investment strategy.

Meanwhile, those within the ruling establishment have devoted increasing energy to succession politics and patronage instead of confronting Uganda's structural challenges.

The conversation should be about improving schools, raising agricultural productivity, eliminating domestic arrears, industrialising exports and preparing Uganda for a post-oil economy. Instead, politics has become consumed by personalities, arrests and intrigue.

A fragmented political elite that cannot marshal disciplined constituencies around ideas is far easier to control than one rooted in strong institutions.

We Want Rwanda's Results Without Rwanda's Discipline

Ugandans frequently admire Rwanda's clean cities, efficient public institutions and ability to implement policy.

What we rarely acknowledge is that discipline did not emerge accidentally.

Whether one agrees with Rwanda's methods or not, its achievements rest upon an uncompromising insistence that rules matter.

Yet many Ugandans want the outcomes without paying the price.

We condemn corruption but resist enforcement. We demand efficient institutions while opposing tighter regulation. We admire Singapore and Rwanda but forget that order always requires discipline.

There are no free lunches in economics.

There are none in governance either.

The Foreign Guardrails Are Fading

There is another reason this moment feels different.

For years Uganda's political freedoms existed partly because foreign donors possessed considerable leverage. Aid dependence gave Western governments influence whenever governance concerns arose.

That leverage is weakening.

Domestic revenues have grown substantially. Oil revenues are approaching. Alternative geopolitical partners have reduced Kampala's dependence on traditional donors.

The uncomfortable truth is that some of the freedoms we assumed were permanently guaranteed rested less on strong domestic institutions than on external pressure. As those pressures diminish, governments inevitably become more willing to define political boundaries on their own terms.

The Hard Reset

Uganda is approaching a hard reset.

Many citizens have long demanded a more effective state—one that implements projects on time, punishes corruption and delivers better services. Achieving those goals will almost certainly require a more disciplined political system than the one Museveni spent four decades managing.

The risk is that discipline imposed from above can easily become coercion if it is not restrained by strong institutions and the rule of law.

The opportunity is that Uganda finally addresses the disorder that has allowed corruption, inefficiency and weak accountability to flourish.

Whether this transition ultimately strengthens or weakens the country will depend not simply on who holds power, but on whether order is used to build institutions instead of merely consolidating authority.

One thing, however, seems increasingly clear.

The Uganda of the next decade is unlikely to resemble the Uganda of the last four.

A hard reset is coming.

Many of us have spent years demanding a more disciplined state. We may soon discover that history has answered that demand.

The only question is whether we will like the answer.

 

THE GREAT REPOSITIONING: MUSEVENI TAKES BACK TOTAL CONTROL OF THE TRANSITION

The most interesting thing about President Yoweri Museveni’s latest cabinet reshuffle is not simply who was promoted or dropped, but what the changes reveal about the political moment Uganda has entered. These are not ordinary administrative adjustments. They increasingly look like positioning moves in a carefully managed transition process where the central question is no longer whether succession politics are underway, but how they are being choreographed — and who controls them.

One striking detail immediately stands out: 28 ministers did not return to cabinet. That is not cosmetic pruning. It is significant political surgery.

"The removal of such a large bloc of ministers signals a deliberate attempt to recentralise authority around Museveni himself after several years in which competing power centres had begun emerging within the ruling establishment. Most notably, the sidelining of Anita Among dramatically changes the internal balance of power.

For a while, Among had evolved from merely a parliamentary leader into a formidable political actor in her own right — building extensive patronage networks across MPs, cultivating financial leverage and increasingly appearing as an autonomous centre of political gravity. The recent corruption scandals surrounding Parliament, culminating in public outrage over elite excess, weakened that project considerably.

With Among politically wounded and many of her allies displaced, Museveni now appears firmly back in control of the transition process. The reshuffle feels partly like a reassertion of presidential authority over a ruling coalition that had started developing too many independent ambitions.

Why Alupo Suddenly Matters More

To understand the deeper logic of the reshuffle, one has to begin with an often-overlooked constitutional fact: under Uganda’s Constitution, the Vice President is the formal successor mechanism should the presidency unexpectedly fall vacant. That suddenly makes Vice President Jessica Alupo’s continued prominence politically interesting.

Alupo is not merely a civilian politician from Teso balancing regional arithmetic. She is also a retired Major in the UPDF and previously served in the Special Forces Command (SFC), the elite military unit over which Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba built his influence and from which much of Uganda’s contemporary military power structure has evolved. Muhoozi is now the Chief of Defence Forces (CDF), effectively sitting atop the country’s formal military hierarchy. 

In ordinary political times that detail might seem incidental. In transition politics it becomes enormously consequential.

It suggests that the formal constitutional succession line and the informal security architecture are increasingly being aligned rather than left to chance. In many African political systems, transitions become unstable when constitutional authority and security power centres diverge. Museveni appears determined to minimise that risk.

The Defence Ministry as Political Insurance

Kiryowa Kiwanuka’s move from Attorney General to Defence reinforces that interpretation.

Defence in Uganda is not merely a military docket. It is political insurance. Whoever controls the security architecture controls the pace and stability of any transition process. Kiryowa is not a bush-war historical figure or battlefield general. He is a corporate lawyer, politically disciplined and deeply embedded within the President’s inner trust networks.

Those trust networks themselves are revealing.

Kiryowa is law partner to Edwin Karugire, Museveni’s son-in-law, in one of Kampala’s influential legal practices. Their relationship stretches back decades. They were in the same class at King’s College Budo and later studied together at Makerere University’s law school — ties that speak to how Uganda’s ruling elite has long functioned through tightly knit educational, social and familial networks.

Kiryowa first came to national prominence as part of the legal team that defended Museveni’s contested 2001 electoral victory. In other words, his rise has long been intertwined with the regime’s political survival architecture itself. 

The Karugire connection goes even deeper historically. Edwin Karugire’s father, the late historian Prof. Samwiri Karugire, was one of western Uganda’s most influential intellectuals. Following his death, his children were in many ways absorbed into the extended Museveni family orbit. The relationship between the Karugires and the First Family is therefore not merely political. It is deeply personal, historical and generational.

Seen through that lens, Kiryowa’s appointment to Defence is less surprising. Museveni appears to be placing strategically sensitive institutions into the hands of people bound not simply by political loyalty, but by decades-long personal relationships forged through family, school, history and shared political battles.

That is classic transition-era behaviour.

Sam Mayanja and the Coming Legal Battles

Sam Mayanja’s appointment as Attorney General is equally revealing, though in a different way. Mayanja is intellectually combative, ideological and deeply invested in constitutional and historical debates. He is not a cautious technocrat. He is a political lawyer.

That may indicate government expects sharper legal and constitutional contests ahead — over elections, political settlements, land and perhaps even succession questions themselves.

Yet Mayanja’s temperament also introduces risk. Attorney General requires institutional restraint and legal steadiness. Mayanja thrives in ideological confrontation. In a politically sensitive period, that can either energise the regime intellectually or unnecessarily inflame tensions.

Ayebare, Kagame and the Rwanda Question

Adonia Ayebare’s appointment as Foreign Affairs minister may be the strongest technocratic choice in the reshuffle. Ayebare is internationally respected, diplomatically sophisticated and deeply networked within multilateral systems. 

Ayebare is also a former journalist, a background that gives him unusual communication instincts for diplomacy. He understands both narrative management and international perception — skills Uganda increasingly needs as succession politics intensify.

Equally important, Ayebare has historically maintained relatively good personal relations with Paul Kagame. That matters enormously given the simmering tensions between Kampala and Kigali over the last two decades.

Relations between the two countries effectively went to pieces in the Democratic Republic of Congo at the beginning of this century, where the former allies found themselves backing rival interests during the Congo wars. Although relations have improved recently, mistrust still lingers beneath the surface.

Ayebare’s appointment therefore appears designed not merely for global diplomacy, but also for regional stabilisation. He is likely to complement Muhoozi’s increasingly visible efforts to engineer détente with Kigali. Muhoozi himself has often projected unusually warm public messaging toward Rwanda and Kagame compared to the harder nationalist rhetoric that occasionally emerges elsewhere within Uganda’s establishment.

In that sense, Foreign Affairs may now become part of transition management too. Stable relations with Rwanda reduce one major external variable during a potentially delicate succession period.

Katumba’s Quietly Strategic Move

Then there is Gen. Katumba Wamala’s move from Works and Transport to Public Service. At first glance it looks like a demotion. Works is politically visible; Public Service is bureaucratic and low glamour.

But in transition periods, bureaucratic control becomes critical.

Public Service determines appointments, promotions and administrative discipline across the state. Katumba’s reputation as a calm, loyal stabiliser trusted across military and civilian divides may make him particularly useful in keeping the state machinery cohesive during an uncertain political period.

Museveni the Guerrilla Still Keeps Us Guessing

Still, one must be careful not to overstate the certainty of these interpretations.

Museveni is, at his core, a guerrilla strategist. One of the defining characteristics of guerrilla warfare is deception — keeping opponents guessing, masking intentions, creating multiple centres of gravity and never fully revealing one’s endgame. Throughout his political career Museveni has shown an extraordinary ability to play his cards close to his chest, often allowing observers to confidently misread his intentions.

That means all these interpretations may ultimately prove to be sophisticated misdirection. The apparent alignment of constitutional succession, security structures and trusted family networks may be deliberate signalling — or deliberate distraction.

Museveni has survived politically precisely because he rarely moves in straight lines.

Yet even with that caveat, the reshuffle unmistakably suggests a leader thinking carefully about continuity, stability and regime preservation in an uncertain future. Whether by design or instinct, he appears to have covered most of the critical bases if something untoward were to happen tomorrow.

The constitutional line is secure. The military hierarchy is tightly aligned. Trusted loyalists sit atop strategic ministries. International diplomacy is in experienced hands. Bureaucratic management is under dependable figures.

The Opening Moves of Uganda’s Next Era

The broader signal from the reshuffle is therefore that Uganda’s political system is quietly reorganising itself around a future beyond Museveni while publicly insisting that no transition conversation exists. That contradiction is becoming harder to conceal.

This cabinet increasingly resembles a structure designed less for routine governance and more for continuity management — aligning constitutional succession mechanisms, security structures, diplomatic messaging and elite trust networks into a coherent political insurance framework.

The irony, however, is that transition management itself can accelerate transition pressures. Once elites begin positioning for a post-Museveni order, politics subtly changes. Loyalties become conditional. Bureaucracies become cautious. Security calculations become layered. International actors begin hedging their bets.

That may explain why this reshuffle feels less like the beginning of a new government term and more like the opening moves of Uganda’s next political era.

THE FALL OF AMONG WAS NOT ABOUT CORRUPTION

After perhaps the most intense weekend of her life, Uganda’s Speaker of Parliament Anita Among announced that she would not put herself up for re-election as leader of the country’s legislature in the next Parliament.

The decision came after days of extraordinary political drama: armed security personnel surrounding her home, reports of billions of shillings discovered in dollars, euros and pounds, and mounting public outrage over her newly acquired Rolls Royce.

"In the end, it was the Rolls Royce that finally shifted Anita Among from controversial politician into symbol of elite excess...

The luxury vehicle, reportedly flown into Uganda brand new in January rather than imported second-hand like most luxury vehicles in the country, instantly became politically toxic. Depending on specification, a new Rolls-Royce Cullinan or comparable Rolls Royce model can retail between £350,000 and £450,000 before shipping, taxes and customisation — roughly Shs1.7 billion to Shs2.2 billion at current exchange rates, and potentially much higher once fully imported into Uganda.

In a country where many civil servants struggle to survive on monthly salaries below Shs1 million, the symbolism was devastating.

The subsequent raid merely completed the picture in the public mind.

And in politics, once the public mind settles, recovery becomes almost impossible.

Ironically, she seemed politically untouchable only weeks ago

What makes Among’s apparent fall even more startling is that she emerged from the recent election cycle looking politically stronger than almost anyone in the system except President Yoweri Museveni himself.

Unlike many senior politicians who spent months fighting for survival in their constituencies, Among appeared liberated from ordinary political anxieties. She was elected virtually unopposed and therefore free to crisscross the country shepherding Museveni’s campaign effort and consolidating influence inside the ruling establishment.

At the height of the campaign season, she projected the aura of a politician whose future looked secure, expansive and perhaps even ascendant.

Which is why the speed of her apparent political collapse has caught nearly everyone by surprise.

From indebted MPs to dangerously wealthy politicians

Back on September 9, 2012, in a Shillings & Cents commentary titled “Uganda: MP indebtedness compromising Parliament?” Shillings & Cents — Uganda: MP indebtedness compromising Parliament? (September 9, 2012), I argued that financial vulnerability weakens independent political judgement because politicians trapped by debt become captives of survival rather than servants of principle.

But there is an opposite side to that same coin: excessive accumulation can be just as politically dangerous as indebtedness.

Because wealth changes political incentives.

Ironically, the two realities may now have collided in spectacular fashion inside Parliament itself. For years, quiet whispers around Kampala’s political corridors have suggested that many MPs are indebted up to their eyeballs, not just to banks, but directly to powerful parliamentary figures including Anita Among and Deputy Speaker Thomas Tayebwa, who allegedly evolved into major lenders to legislators.

That matters politically.

Because debt creates dependency. A financially desperate MP is easier to influence, easier to mobilise and easier to discipline. In such an environment, political authority stops being purely institutional and increasingly becomes financial. Patronage then evolves from campaign support into a parallel credit system operating within the legislature itself.

Seen this way, the wealth allegations against Among are not just about personal excess. They potentially point to the emergence of an alternative internal power structure rooted not merely in constitutional office but in financial leverage over fellow politicians...

The coalition that may now be unravelling

But power built through financial patronage rarely operates alone. It inevitably creates a coalition — beneficiaries, loyalists, fixers and opportunists tied together not necessarily by ideology but by access, favours and mutual vulnerability.

Among appears to have cobbled together precisely such a coalition.

Many within it may never have fully understood what her ultimate political endgame was. Some may simply have been responding to immediate incentives: campaign financing, loans, committee influence, parliamentary protection or proximity to power. But once a system begins to suspect that such a coalition is evolving beyond patronage into an independent political centre of gravity, alarm bells inevitably begin ringing.

Which is why this process may still be in its early stages.

It would not be surprising if more politicians, brokers and parliamentary actors are quietly summoned by security agencies in the coming weeks — at best to explain their role within the broader network, at worst to help stitch Among up politically and legally...

Because elite political takedowns are rarely clean or isolated affairs. They often involve carefully dismantling the ecosystem around the principal target.

Yet therein also lies the regime’s dilemma.

The system must manage the process carefully because a genuinely unconstrained anti-corruption campaign could end up bringing down far more than a single political figure. Too many interests are interconnected. Too many careers, alliances and financial relationships overlap.

A serious, uncontrolled excavation of corruption at the highest levels could destabilise the very political edifice the state is trying to preserve.

And that carries potentially damning political consequences.

“Rich men get into politics to protect their wealth”

My father once told me something that sounded cynical at the time but has proved remarkably accurate over the years: “Rich men get into politics to protect their wealth.”

Not necessarily to create wealth. To protect it.

The moment wealth reaches a certain scale, politics stops being an arena of service and becomes a form of insurance. A shield. A guarantee against investigation, prosecution, confiscation or political extinction. That is why across the world, from oligarchies to fragile democracies, wealth and political power eventually begin circling each other like magnets.

In Uganda’s case, this intersection has become increasingly delicate because of the country’s unresolved succession question.

That is why the Anita Among story cannot simply be understood as an anti-corruption story. Corruption is merely the surface layer. The deeper issue is political consequence...

When an individual accumulates wealth at the scale now being alleged, especially while occupying the third most powerful office in the land, it inevitably creates political possibilities. Wealth brings networks. Networks bring influence. Influence breeds ambition, whether stated openly or quietly nurtured behind closed doors.

It would not be far-fetched to conclude that at some point, if she felt politically threatened or isolated, Among’s resources could eventually become the foundation for a play for higher office or, at the very least, a destabilising political faction.

The system gave her enough rope

Power in politics is rarely surrendered voluntarily. It is managed pre-emptively.

That is why the current developments feel less like spontaneous accountability and more like controlled political surgery.

The system appears to have given her enough rope to hang herself. The Rolls Royce became symbolic excess at a time when ordinary Ugandans are struggling with school fees, rent and taxes. The foreign currency allegations then transformed public irritation into moral outrage. She is now politically indefensible in the court of public opinion, which is perhaps the most important battlefield of all.

Was the Sovereignty Bill really about foreign influence?

But there is another intriguing layer to this story that may explain the hurried and controversial introduction of the Protection of Sovereignty Bill earlier this month, and the insistence that the 11th Parliament pass it as virtually its last order of business.

It seems inconceivable that such vast quantities of dollars, euros and pounds could have been accumulated purely through domestic circulation. Hard currency at that scale immediately raises uncomfortable questions about external linkages, foreign financial networks and possible international political interests. Whether those suspicions are true or not almost becomes secondary because in statecraft perception often matters as much as fact.

If the security establishment had reason to believe that foreign actors were cultivating relationships with ambitious political elites during a sensitive succession moment, then the Sovereignty Bill begins to look less random and more strategic.

Suddenly the urgency makes sense.

Suddenly the procedural flaws, the haste and the political pressure to pass it before the end of the parliamentary term begin to appear less like legislative incompetence and more like elite panic...

The state may have concluded that Uganda is entering the dangerous phase many countries face during leadership transitions: the point where internal elite competition starts attracting foreign interest and external influence operations.

History is full of such moments.

Foreign governments and interests rarely wait for transitions to happen before positioning themselves. They cultivate networks early, identify emerging centres of power and quietly build leverage. In fragile political environments, money often becomes the first instrument of influence.

Seen through that lens, the move against Among may not simply have been about corruption or even succession management. It may also have been about shutting down what the system perceived as an emerging node of political and possibly foreign-backed power before it fully matured.

Norbert Mao’s curious role

There is also the curious role played by Norbert Mao in recent weeks. His increasingly public positioning around the Speakership now looks less accidental and more tactical. In hindsight, Mao may have been deployed as a political red herring — a deliberate irritant designed to ruffle Among’s feathers, unsettle her camp and pressure her into strategic mistakes.

Politics often works this way. Direct confrontation is avoided until the target has been psychologically isolated, politically cornered and emotionally destabilised.

One suspects there may initially have been efforts to engineer a quiet exit — a negotiated stepping aside in exchange for dignity, protection and preservation of some political relevance. But if Among resisted such overtures, believing perhaps that her networks, resources and institutional position still gave her leverage, then the escalation we are now witnessing becomes easier to understand...

The result has been a political sideshow that increasingly feels choreographed but is far from over.

Because once elite conflicts spill into public view, they develop their own momentum. Rival factions emerge. Old grudges resurface. Opportunists circle. The public becomes emotionally invested. And institutions themselves can become theatres of political signalling.

The transition question lurking beneath everything

And timing matters.

These developments are unfolding immediately after Museveni’s swearing-in on May 12 and just before new cabinet and political appointments are expected. That cannot be accidental. Political transitions, especially long-managed ones, are rarely dramatic events announced in a single speech. They are often quiet processes involving the careful elimination of obstacles, rivals, uncertainties and centres of independent power.

In many ways, Among may have become the last major obstacle to what appears to be an attempt at constructing an orderly transition architecture behind closed doors...

Uganda’s political history teaches us that transitions are feared precisely because they can easily descend into elite fragmentation. The governing system therefore has every incentive to tightly control the process, neutralise unpredictable actors and ensure that succession happens within a carefully supervised framework.

Seen through that lens, the move against Among begins to make strategic sense.

Why nations fail

The irony, however, is that this entire saga also validates another warning I wrote about recently on August 18, 2024, in a Shillings & Cents commentary titled “Uganda, beware of Why Nations Fail” Shillings & Cents — Uganda, beware of Why Nations Fail (August 18, 2024), discussing Why Nations Fail.

Nations fail not simply because leaders steal. Many countries survive corruption for decades. Nations fail when institutions become too weak to regulate the ambitions of powerful individuals and when political systems become overly personalised.

When wealth accumulation becomes inseparable from state power, politics itself becomes a high-stakes survival game. Public office stops being about governance and becomes access to protection. Losing office then becomes existential.

That is where danger begins.

Because once political competition is no longer about ideas, competence or ideology but about protection of accumulated wealth, transitions become harder, more suspicious and potentially more unstable.

The real lesson

Ironically, the Among saga may therefore reveal both the strength and weakness of the current system simultaneously.

Its strength lies in demonstrating that no political figure, however powerful, is untouchable if the system decides otherwise.

Its weakness lies in the uncomfortable public realisation that wealth accumulation at the highest levels may have proceeded unchecked until political calculations shifted.

Ugandans should therefore resist the temptation to see this merely as entertainment or palace intrigue. It is actually a revealing window into how power is organised, managed and contested in modern Uganda.

And perhaps the biggest lesson is this: in political systems where wealth and power become too intertwined, the fall of powerful individuals is rarely about morality alone.

It is usually about timing.

FORTY YEARS ON: ARE WE FORGETTING HOW WE GOT HERE?

Tomorrow, President Yoweri Museveni takes his seventh oath of office.

Politics aside, the last forty years represent the longest period of sustained economic growth in our country's recorded history. And if you ask observers to name the two biggest achievements of the NRM era, the answers converge quickly: the restoration of security, and the revitalisation of the economy. What is less often appreciated is how deeply the two fed off each other.

In 1986, Uganda was not merely poor. It was dangerous. Investors do not build factories in war zones. Farmers do not plant crops they cannot be sure of harvesting. Security was not just a political achievement — it was the precondition for everything that followed. And as stability returned, the economy began to breathe. And as the economy grew, it gave the state resources to consolidate security further. Growth and stability became mutually reinforcing — a virtuous cycle now so established that we have forgotten it was ever built.

In 1986, the economy was worth roughly $3.5–4 billion. Today it stands at over $50 billion. Exports have grown from under $500 million to nearly $14 billion. VAT alone now contributes Shs8–10 trillion annually — more than the entire tax take of 2006. That is not a footnote. That is a transformation.

But transformations have authors. When VAT was introduced, Kampala City Traders Association (KACITA) shut down shops in protest across Kampala for a week. The reform held anyway.

When Nile Breweries was privatised — after fierce, protracted debates the President presided over personally it was producing 2,000 crates a month. Today that output disappears over a long weekend on Bandali Rise.

When agricultural liberalisation came, farmers began earning 70–80 percent of world prices instead of the fraction they had received under state monopolies.

Behind all of it the government forced discipline at a time when indiscipline would have been far easier, and far more popular. And we have begun, rather dangerously, to take what was built for granted.

But here is the part the numbers do not tell you.

The gains have not been shared equally. Uganda remains one of the more unequal economies in East Africa, and the gap between those who have benefited from four decades of growth and those still waiting is wide and, in some places, widening.

The answer starts in agriculture, where the majority of Ugandans still earn their living. Better incentives for farmers, investment in rural infrastructure, access to inputs and markets — these are not new ideas. They are ideas that have not been implemented with the seriousness they deserve. An economy growing at 6 percent while most farmers operate at subsistence level is an economy running on one engine.

The business environment matters too. Corruption — at the counter, in the procurement office, at the border remains a tax on ambition. Every shilling lost to a bribe is a shilling that does not become a job or an export. Fighting corruption is not a moral exercise. It is an economic one.

And then there is oil.

Uganda is edging toward first oil, and the temptation will be to treat the revenues as a solution — a cushion against fiscal pressures, a substitute for the harder work of broadening the tax base and improving the investment climate. That would be a mistake.

Oil revenues, without extraordinary discipline, concentrate wealth rather than distribute it. The resource curse is not a myth. Rents flow upward. Politics become more transactional. And there is a deeper risk — that oil money disrupts the very virtuous cycle that sustained Uganda for forty years, funding patronage rather than institutions, rewarding loyalty rather than productivity, and quietly hollowing out the foundations that made growth possible.

Uganda cannot afford to let oil scuttle four decades of hard-won progress. The revenues must serve the economy, not replace it.

Forty years is long enough for an entire generation to grow up knowing only stability. The battles that produced it — over VAT, privatisation, liberalisation — are ancient history to a 25-year-old in Kikoni. The architecture of the economy is taken for granted, like electricity that only becomes remarkable when it goes off.

The restoration of security and the revitalisation of the economy is a genuine achievement. It should be acknowledged clearly and without embarrassment.

But the next forty years will be defined by whether those gains reach the farmer in Kapchorwa, the trader in Arua, the graduate in Lira who is talented, ambitious, and running out of patience.

That is the real measure of the milestone. And it remains unfinished business.

THE SOVEREIGNTY BILL:SHOOTING OURSELVES IN THE FOOT?

 Patrick runs a small pharmaceutical distribution business in Ntinda. He imports medicines through a supply chain financed partly by a Dutch development bank loan. His company has a Kenyan minority shareholder. He pays his taxes. He employs eleven people.

Under the Protection of Sovereignty Bill 2026, Patrick could be classified as an agent of a foreigner.

Is it me, or are we trying to dismantle the very engine that rebuilt this country?

There is a story Uganda tells about itself. After the devastation of the Amin years, after the chaos of the early 1980s, Uganda rebuilt. GDP grew. Infrastructure returned. A middle class emerged.

But the version the government seems to have forgotten is what powered that reconstruction.

It was not domestic capital alone. It was World Bank loans, bilateral grants, and FDI from multinationals willing to bet on a fragile frontier market. It was investors who planted money in Uganda when the risk was real. And it was the river of money that never makes the headlines — remittances from Ugandans in London, Minneapolis, and Dubai sending money home for school fees, medical bills, and small businesses that no local bank would touch. According to Bank of Uganda data, remittance inflows have grown to rival coffee exports in some years.

Under this bill, a Ugandan in Toronto who sends money home to support a local advocacy campaign could be committing a prosecutable offence.

Is it me, or are we at war with our own diaspora?

Now, what the government is right about.

"Foreign money that arrives without disclosure and departs without accountability is a legitimate concern. The idea that Uganda's governance should be shaped in Kampala, not choreographed from Brussels or Washington, is sound constitutional instinct. Article 1(1) — all power belongs to the people — is a founding principle, not a slogan.

The government deserves credit for naming the problem.

But then it wrote the wrong solution.

The bill introduces sweeping restrictions on anyone who receives foreign money or engages in activity construed as promoting foreign agendas. The definitions are extraordinary in their reach. A company with a foreign minority shareholder. A hospital on donor funding. A researcher on a European grant. All of them, potentially, agents of foreigners.

And once you are classified as an agent of a foreigner in this bill, the state does not send you a letter. It can send you to prison for twenty years.

That number is worth sitting with. The US Foreign Agents Registration Act — the FARA statute Ugandan officials love to cite as justification — carries a maximum of five years. Uganda's bill is four times harsher. Russia's foreign agent law, deployed to silence journalists and opposition figures and widely condemned for it, does not go as far as this bill in its definitions, its funding caps, or its banking surveillance requirements.

When your legislation makes Moscow's model look moderate, something has gone very wrong in the drafting room.

The funding cap compounds the damage. The bill restricts foreign receipts to sh400 million per year,  roughly USD 106,000 — before ministerial approval is required. Banks must submit monthly reports on all transactions involving foreign entities. Non-compliance attracts fines of up to sh4 billion.

"For a country that has spent forty years carefully rebuilding its reputation as a stable, investment-friendly destination, this is a remarkable amount of goodwill to incinerate in a single piece of legislation.

And here is the contradiction that should embarrass the bill's promoters. For 2025/2026, the government budgeted sh13.41 trillion in external financing. Borrowing. From foreigners. To run the state.

You cannot spend forty years inviting the world to build Uganda — with its loans, its grants, its equity, its remittances  and then pass a law that treats that same involvement as a threat to be criminalised.

The final problem is the most damning. Existing law already covers every legitimate concern this bill claims to address. The Anti-Money Laundering Act 2013 already mandates due diligence on foreign-sourced funds and empowers the Financial Intelligence Authority to track suspicious flows. The Anti-Terrorism Act 2002 already criminalises financing designed to destabilise the state. The NGO Act already requires registration and disclosure of funding.

Every genuine target — covert political financing, undisclosed foreign interference is already an offence.

Consider the timing. 

Uganda's tax-to-GDP ratio sits at around 13 percent — well below the Sub-Saharan Africa average of 18 percent. That gap is not a footnote. It is the difference between a state that can fund its own ambitions and one that cannot. 

And here is the truth that no budget speech ever says plainly enough: government does not generate wealth. It redistributes it. The wealth that government taxes, borrows against, and spends originates entirely in the private sector — in the Patrick Ntindas of this country, in the traders, the manufacturers, the service providers, the farmers, the engineers. The strength of any economy is ultimately determined by the viability of its private sector. A weak, frightened, over-regulated private sector produces a weak state. There is no other arithmetic.

Closing the tax gap requires exactly the kind of economic activity this bill threatens to chill — cross-border investment, foreign-linked enterprise, the entrepreneurial energy of Ugandans who have one foot in the global economy and one foot at home.

Some in government may be quietly emboldened by the prospect of oil revenues arriving later this year, reasoning that petroleum will eventually reduce dependence on foreign financing. That logic is understandable. But it is also dangerous. Oil revenue, when it comes, will be a cushion — not a replacement for the broad-based private sector activity that sustains a modern economy. And the personal initiative that drives that activity is not a tap you can turn off and on at will.

Dampen that initiative now, through fear, compliance costs, and the creeping suspicion that cross-border connections are criminal, and you will not easily recover it. Not even with oil.

The NRM caucus resolved to support the bill before it was officially published. The new parliament will almost certainly pass something. The question is what form.

Because the sovereignty law Uganda actually needs could be written in twenty clauses. Transparent registration of foreign-funded political activity. Proportionate penalties. Ministerial discretion confined to what the Constitution can sustain. That law would protect genuine sovereignty and survive constitutional challenge.

This bill will not.

Patrick in Ntinda built his business on cross-border capital. His employees built their lives on his payroll. He is not a threat to Uganda's sovereignty.

He is Uganda's sovereignty — in the only form that ultimately matters. A people prosperous enough, and free enough, to make their own choices.

The bill, as written, threatens both.

 

THE POVERTY OF UGANDA'S POLITICS

When Yusuf Nsibambi crossed from the opposition to the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) earlier this week, the outrage was swift. Betrayal. Opportunism. Moral collapse. Yet perhaps the more honest question is this: why are we still surprised?

We cling to a consoling fiction, that politicians are primarily in public life for the public good. In Uganda’s political economy, politics is often closer to capital investment. Campaigns require money, logistics, networks. Office delivers income, access, influence. Remove the office, and the investment sours.

Nsibambi’s earlier episode laid this bare. After losing his re-election bid, he reportedly disconnected his constituency from the electric power grid—a connection he had personally bankrolled in the hope it would convert into votes. The signal was unmistakable: if loyalty ends, so does the benefit.

And this is not an isolated case. We have seen MPs retrieve ambulances they donated once the electorate turned against them. Scholarships once paraded before cameras quietly evaporate when the benefactor is voted out. Public goods become private campaign assets—withdrawable upon defeat.

Outrage is justified. Astonishment is not.

Viewed through Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the behaviour becomes less mysterious. Political office here is not self-actualisation; it is security. It provides economic stability and social standing in a scarcity environment. When security disappears, sunk costs loom large. Why are we shocked when politicians behave like investors defending capital?

The uncomfortable truth is that our leaders reflect us. A society negotiating material poverty often produces moral compromises. Patronage becomes rational. Defection becomes strategic. Scarcity breeds scarcity instincts.

Nsibambi’s defection is less scandal than mirror.

But the mirror reflects beyond personal ambition—it reveals structural weaknesses in Uganda’s opposition politics.

For years, the opposition’s reflex has been to appeal outward—Washington, Brussels, London hoping international pressure will reshape domestic power. Yet regime change engineered or heavily influenced abroad has rarely delivered stability. Libya’s fragmentation after Gaddafi. Iraq’s prolonged instability post-Saddam. Syria’s catastrophic entanglement. External actors pursue interests. The social cost is borne locally.

Legitimacy cannot be airlifted in. 

History offers another lesson. Ruhollah Khomeini

did not unseat the Shah by lobbying Western governments. From exile, he built domestic networks, distributing cassette tapes until his message saturated Iran’s political bloodstream. Whatever one’s view of the outcome, the strategy is instructive: build local infrastructure before claiming national authority.

In Uganda, distribution networks remain uneven.

Urban centres consistently reject the NRM. Taxpayers in Kampala and other towns feel the state monthly—PAYE, VAT, fuel taxes. When infrastructure fails or services falter, the arithmetic between contribution and return feels immediate. Dissatisfaction sharpens where taxation is visible.

Rural Uganda experiences the state differently. Direct income taxation is less palpable. Government often appears as provider—roads, agricultural inputs, cash programmes. Cultural restraint tempers demands. The political thresholds differ.

This divergence shapes election results.

Robert Kyagulanyi aka Bobi Wine and the National Unity Platform (NUP) transformed parliamentary opposition politics, emerging as the largest opposition bloc by number of MPs. Yet geographically, NUP’s strength is heavily concentrated in Buganda and urban centres. Beyond those zones, its representation thins dramatically.

In fact, NUP reportedly failed to nominate candidates in roughly 190 constituencies. That absence is structural. It is difficult to claim national majority while absent across large stretches of the map.

This creates another uncomfortable perception: the party that accuses the NRM of concentrating power in western Uganda risks appearing more geographically confined itself. While critics portray the NRM as regionally anchored, it has registered electoral victories across vast parts of the country—north, east, west—losing decisively mainly in NUP’s Buganda stronghold. In raw geographic spread, the ruling party appears more nationally distributed than its chief challenger.

NRM planners would be clever to keep it that way—to preserve a broad coalition that transcends regional perception. A geographically diversified mandate provides resilience.

None of this dismisses valid grievances. The electoral process has been marred by rights abuses and uneven enforcement. The terrain is imperfect. But here lies the strategic pivot: a level playing field will not materialise through shaming power. Power rarely concedes because it is embarrassed. It concedes when compelled—through sustained organisation, leverage, and negotiation—to adjust.

Compelling power demands numbers. It demands presence in every constituency, not only in sympathetic strongholds. It demands coalition-building that transcends regional identity. It demands transforming indignation into structure.

Nsibambi’s crossing underscores incentive logic. Politicians migrate toward perceived durability. They hedge against uncertainty. Floor-crossing is an assessment of longevity as much as loyalty.

Meanwhile, the ruling party should not interpret rural arithmetic as permanent immunity. Urban rejection remains consistent. Cities are engines of growth, taxation, and narrative. Persistent service delivery gaps accumulate political cost over time.

Uganda’s politics therefore balances on dual illusions. The opposition’s illusion is that international endorsement equates to domestic power. The ruling party’s illusion is that rural breadth guarantees eternal stability.

Beneath both lies a deeper reality: our politics mirrors our society. If ambulances can be retrieved and power lines disconnected when votes disappoint, institutions are weak and incentives skewed. If parties struggle to build national footprint beyond regional bases, identity remains potent.

A level field will not descend from moral outrage. It will be constructed patiently, arithmetically, constituency by constituency.

Until then, defections will continue. Outrage will spike and fade. And the mirror will remain, reflecting not just Nsibambi or the NRM or NUP—but Uganda itself.

SEVENTY-ONE PERCENT IN A HALF EMPTY ROOM

Uganda woke up after the 2026 presidential election to a familiar headline delivered with an unfamiliar undertone. Yoweri Museveni had won again, this time with roughly seventy-one percent of the vote. 

On paper, it looked like a commanding endorsement, a suggestion that the political clock had been turned back to the era of overwhelming victories. But elections, like markets, only reveal their truth when you read the fine print. The other number that mattered—quietly but profoundly was turnout, hovering around the low fifties. The victory was wide, but the room was half-empty.

What made this result unusual was not just the arithmetic. It was the tone struck at the very top. In his acceptance speech, Museveni himself called for an investigation into low voter turnout. That single line, almost an aside, was more revealing than the percentage printed on the results sheet. 

Incumbents who believe they are riding a wave of popular enthusiasm rarely ask why fewer people showed up. This one did. In doing so, Museveni inadvertently acknowledged what the numbers already suggest: that the story of 2026 is not simply about a dominant winner, but about a thinning electorate.

To understand how Uganda arrived at a seventy-one percent victory attended by barely half the voters, one needs to step back three decades and trace the long arc of participation and power. 

In 1996, the country’s first direct presidential election under the current constitutional order, Museveni secured about seventy-four percent with turnout close to three quarters of registered voters. Uganda was emerging from years of turmoil; politics felt new, consequential, and personal. The high margins of that era were anchored in mass participation. People showed up in large numbers because they believed the future was being actively shaped.

By 2001, Museveni was still dominant, just under seventy percent, but competition had arrived and with it a subtle shift in political psychology. Politics became contested rather than consensual. That tension sharpened in 2006 when Museveni dipped below sixty percent for the first time. The significance of that election was not that he nearly lost—he did not—but that he entered a phase where margins could no longer be taken for granted. From then on, victories would need to be managed.

The years that followed confirmed this new equilibrium. In 2011 Museveni rebounded into the high sixties, but turnout fell sharply. In 2016 and 2021 his share hovered around sixty percent, while participation remained stubbornly depressed. For roughly fifteen years, Uganda’s elections settled into a pattern of compressed dominance: the ruling party winning comfortably, but no longer expansively; the opposition energetic, but structurally constrained. 

This was the context into which Robert Kyagulanyi -- Bobi Wine burst onto the scene.

Bobi Wine did not just add another name to the ballot. He injected emotion, generational language, and cultural symbolism into opposition politics. For the first time in years, dissent felt youthful and immediate. 

Shillings & Cents noted early that this mattered deeply, but also cautioned that enthusiasm is not the same as organisation. Wine’s appeal resonated powerfully in urban centres and among young voters who felt excluded from economic progress. Yet Uganda remains predominantly rural, and rural politics is shaped less by symbolism than by networks, relationships, and pragmatic calculations. That terrain still favoured the ruling party.

The 2021 election illustrated both Wine’s breakthrough and its limits. The opposition achieved its strongest showing in years, and the ruling party suffered unexpected losses, particularly in Central Uganda, where the National Unity Platform made dramatic parliamentary inroads. The result fed a narrative that Museveni’s grip was loosening. 

But even then,

the column warned that votes are delivered not by momentum alone, but by sustained grassroots presence. The danger, left unaddressed, was that frustration could mutate into abstention rather than mobilisation.

By 2026, that danger had crystallised. Many voters simply did not turn up. Some were disillusioned by the aftermath of 2021, others intimidated or fatigued, others resigned to the belief that participation would not meaningfully alter outcomes. Abstention, in such a system, is not neutral. It redistributes power in favour of those with reliable bases. And reliability, in Uganda, sits squarely with the incumbent.

This is where the ruling party’s own reading of the results becomes important. The National Resistance Movement has claimed a statistical victory in Central Uganda in 2026, pointing to the recapture of constituencies lost in 2021 and a notable reduction in the number of MPs from the National Unity Platform. From the NRM’s perspective, this is evidence that the political tide has turned back in its favour, that the shock of 2021 has been absorbed and reversed.

Yet those gains need to be read alongside turnout figures. Winning back seats in a context of lower participation is not the same as reclaiming broad consent. It suggests that the ruling party’s machinery—its local networks, resources, and institutional presence proved more resilient than the opposition’s in a demobilised environment. The base held; the opposition’s softened.

This, ultimately, is Museveni’s most enduring political advantage: adaptability. In the 1990s, legitimacy flowed from mass participation and post-war recovery. In the 2000s, as challenges mounted, control tightened. In the 2010s, the system learned to manage margins rather than chase overwhelming approval. By the 2020s, the objective was endurance. Elections no longer needed to inspire; they needed to conclude predictably.

Museveni’s call for an investigation into low turnout sits squarely within this logic. It can be read as concern, but also as confidence. A system that wins comfortably even when half the electorate stays home is not under immediate threat. But it is also a system aware that thinning participation carries long-term risks. Markets formed on low volumes are stable until they are not. Politics built on shrinking turnout carries a similar fragility.

For the opposition, and particularly for the Bobi Wine tendency, the lesson is hard but clear. Charisma, outrage, and symbolism can open doors, but they do not keep them open. Politics remains an organisational exercise. Without patient investment in rural presence, voter protection, and turnout discipline, moments of anger will continue to flare brightly and then fade at the polling station.

Thirty years of Ugandan election data tell a story that is neither triumphalist nor apocalyptic. Museveni’s victories have grown less participatory even as they remain decisive. The opposition has grown louder even as its turnout machinery has struggled. The 2026 result—seventy-one percent in a half-empty room, captures that tension perfectly.

The warning embedded in the numbers is subtle but unmistakable. Dominance sustained by low participation is durable, but brittle. It holds until something compels the absent to return. When that happens, margins built in quiet rooms can change very quickly indeed.

VENEZUELA AFTER MADURO: WHEN EXTRACTION EMPTIES LEGITIMACY

The US' weekend arrest and extradition (Abduction?) of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro landed  with the force of history breaking through the door. 

Legal outcomes will be contested, delayed, and politicised, but the symbolism is already set: a regime that ruled as an extraction cartel rather than a national steward has finally run out of road. For many Venezuelans, this moment is not about court filings; it is about a long-denied reckoning.

Venezuela did not unravel because of one doctrine or one foreign adversary. It collapsed because power mutated into entitlement. Oil rents stopped financing institutions and started feeding patronage, secrecy, and personal accumulation. The state ceased to arbitrate fairly and began to loot efficiently. Once that happened, trust evaporated, incentives died, and the social contract dissolved.

The testimonies pouring out of Venezuela—some gathered and archived on Shillings & Cents 

are not ideological pamphlets. They are grief accounts. Endless food lines. Businesses nationalised into extinction. Imports choked. Production shattered by price controls. Savings erased by inflation. Families fragmented by migration. This was not a slow decline but a violent one. A functioning, if imperfect, economy imploded with shocking speed once extraction became the organising principle of governance.

When ruling cliques turn countries into resource pits, sovereignty hollows out from within. Consent drains away. Power becomes brittle. And brittle power invites outside pressure. Venezuela’s exposure to what critics deride as an American “cowboy adventure” is not an accident of geography or conspiracy; it is a domestic product of years spent alienating the very population that grants legitimacy.

This is not a Venezuelan anomaly. In North Africa, similar dynamics played out. 

In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak learned that decades of patronage and security-state dominance could not survive the withdrawal of street consent. In the Maghreb, extraction politics and gerontocratic entitlement hollowed regimes until public patience snapped, an arc associated regionally with figures like Tunisia's Abdelaziz Bouteflika, whose fall underscored how quickly legitimacy can evaporate once rulers appear to exist only for themselves.

Libya's Muammar Gaddafi mistook oil rents and bravado for immunity. Mobutu Sese Seko ran a country like a personal vault. Robert Mugabe hollowed out production while elevating loyalty over competence. Each believed wealth, coercion, and rhetoric would outlast consent. Each was wrong. When extraction severs the bond between ruler and ruled, the end is rarely dignified.

Venezuela also punctures the romance of “alternative” patrons. China, Russia, and shadowy intermediaries did not rebuild; they extracted. Anti-Western language proved no substitute for maintenance, investment, and competence. Extraction without reinvestment is looting with better branding, and Venezuelans felt the outcome in empty shelves and darkened hospitals.

This brings us to the uncomfortable present. 

Any renewed involvement by the United States will not be a silver bullet. Washington’s record elsewhere gives no credible reason to expect tidy outcomes or benevolent miracles. Interventions carry costs, contradictions, and unintended consequences. Yet there is a deeper, sadder indictment here: when a local population would rather gamble on foreign intrusion than endure domestic rule, the failure lies squarely with the ruling elite. It is an extraordinary moral collapse when citizens welcome outside pressure because it feels like the least bad option left.

For people who have lived through institutional collapse, pragmatism displaces purity. If refineries are rebuilt, infrastructure repaired, imports reopened, and people allowed to work and earn with dignity, hope returns—not because the arrangement is perfect, but because something finally functions. Functionality, after years of trauma, is not a slogan; it is survival.

The lesson reverberates far beyond Caracas. States are not mines. Nations are not ATMs. When leaders gorge themselves at the trough of public resources, they alienate the people and hollow out sovereignty. And when the brown stuff hits the fan, no offshore billions, foreign friends, or security cordons can compensate for lost consent. Power without legitimacy holds—until it doesn’t.