Is the Civil Service the gravest failure of Uganda?

COMMENT | ANDREW PI BESI | Reader, on May 12th at the Kololo Ceremonial Grounds, President Yoweri Museveni will take his seventh oath of office. As I have previously noted, under his reign, Uganda’s economy has expanded, and, indeed, today Uganda is wealthier than at any time in its 64 years as a republic. This, I think, is the reason he has chosen the slogan “Protecting The Gains” as the theme for his seventh term.

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 stand 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?

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By Andrew “Pi” Besi | On X: @BesiAndrew