The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
COMMENT | ANDREW PI BESI | In a little over a week, on May 12th, Ugandans will gather at Kololo Ceremonial Grounds and before their television screens to witness the swearing-in of Yoweri Kaguta Museveni for an unprecedented seventh term.
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, 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.
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By Andrew “Pi” Besi | On X: @BesiAndrew
