The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
Why “Protecting the Gains” demonstrates how the president and his communication team are talking to themselves
THE LAST WORD | ANDREW M. MWENDA | President Yoweri Museveni’s campaign strapline, “Protecting the Gains,” shows NRM’s lack of a vision for the future of the country. But let me begin with the truths about it. As a factual statement, the strapline states a statistical fact, i.e., that Museveni and NRM have realized many gains over the last 40 years. As a promise for the future, it is also appropriate to protect those gains, especially from an insurgent group like Robert Kyagulanyi’s NUP, which is ignorant of or in disregard of these facts.
While many may loathe Museveni today, I believe history will be much more generous and fairer to him. There are three critical signature achievements of Museveni and the NRM. First is the stabilization of the political dispensation. From October 1962, when Uganda became independent, to January 1986, when the NRM captured power, a period of 23 years, Uganda had nine heads of state. That is an average of 2.55 years per head of state. In each case, change was unconstitutional and most of the time violent. Why? Because post-independence leaders failed to understand how to handle power in a poor country. This made the future uncertain, hence less long-term investment. Museveni’s 40-year rule has demonstrated that it is possible to have a stable and durable government.
Second is partly a consequence of the first: Museveni put the economy on a long-term growth trajectory. This was because of the early decision to liberalize the economy, sell off dysfunctional public enterprises, and deregulate many economic activities. Consequently, over the last 40 years, Uganda’s annual real average GDP growth rate has been 6.7%, one of the highest recorded across geographic space and historic time. According to the IMF, Uganda has had the 12th fastest-growing economy in the world.
So today Ugandans have access to all essential goods right up to the remotest village, goods that were even for the rich. Many more Ugandans now drive cars and motorbikes, live in better housing, own stuff like televisions and sofa sets in their homes, have access to electricity and improved water sources, and have education and health facilities in close proximity, etc. No wonder life expectancy at birth now is 68 years in a country still poor, up from 39 years in 1990. These achievements did not fall from the sky but were a product of deliberate and targeted public investments.
Third, and last, the Museveni administration transformed Uganda from a conflict-ridden country exporting instability and refugees to her neighbors into a stable and secure nation that is not only a stabilizing factor in the region (UPDF stands guard, stabilizing South Sudan, Somalia and the DRC) but also a host to refugees from her neighbors including as far as Eritrea. In 1979-83, Tanzania was the one holding Uganda together. This is not a small gain. Museveni has fought and defeated over 23 rebel groups in all regions of this country to secure the stability we now take for granted. And to a very good extent, he has disciplined the army and subordinated it to civilian authority. These are not small gains.
However, nearly 90% of Ugandans were unborn when Museveni came to power in 1986 or were too young to appreciate the conditions of the time. Therefore, over 80% of them do not appreciate the meaning and depth of the president’s achievements. They are not conversant with this history. Instead, they are concerned with the present and the future. This means that NRM’s focus on its economic achievements, especially sustaining good rates of growth, building roads and dams, etc., neglects to ask what many young Ugandans think of the economy. For most of them, especially the unemployed and underemployed, the economy is for the top people.
Many young people say to me, when I argue economic growth on television, that they do not feel that growth in their pockets and don’t experience it in their lives. People in Kampala who walk, ride, and/or drive through its dirty and dusty roads, potholes, muddy water, garbage, open sewers, and must visit dirty, stinky government hospitals without drugs do not see the gains NRM is promising to protect. Instead, they see skyscrapers emerging on every hill in Kololo, Naguru, Nakasero, etc., piercing the skies owned by the rich who live in luxury housing and drive fancy cars. For most Ugandans struggling to eke a living out of this country, economic growth is not for them but “for those rich and powerful people.”
These are the people NRM should be reaching out to, to communicate to. “Protecting the Gains” is a message for the tiny section of old people in our society, not the vast majority of Ugandans who are young. It is also a strapline that clings to the past when campaigns are about the future. The strapline therefore reflects the president’s and his old inner circle’s internal view of Uganda, not the aspirations and expectations of the young. The strapline shows the comfort zone in which NRM and its allies live, oblivious of the existential challenges the vast majority of Ugandans face.
This brings us to NUP and its cult leader, Robert Kyagulanyi, aka Bobi Wine. In NUP and Bobi Wine, NRM has failed to understand what it is up against. In all its campaigns, NRM seeks to deploy facts regarding its record of achievements to promote its cause. “Protecting the Gains” is one such example. Yet NUP’s strategy is to ensure that facts do not get in the way of its narrative. The aim of NUP is to cultivate narratives that provoke anger and indignation in its supporters. This reduces the need for rational explanations of events and things based on facts. NUP’s strategy puts people into an indiscriminately punitive mindset.
Once people have a punitive mindset – those ruling us are evil people destroying the country and therefore should be destroyed – they are immunized against thinking about the consequences of their actions. They would not mind burning down Kampala if only to bring about the change they seek. This strategy becomes quite effective against NRM’s claims to have brought about stability and economic prosperity, which it argues NUP threatens. It is harder to make angry people fearful of the negative consequences of their actions. People who are angry tend to underestimate (or not estimate at all) bad outcomes arising out of their actions – that is why angry people tend to engage in extremely risky behavior. Uganda is caught between NRM’s lack of a vision of the future and NUP’s dark vision of hate and destruction.
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amwenda@ugindependent.co.ug
Andrew, what kind of “economy for Ugandans” are you defending? Even President Museveni recently exposed its hollowness. During Diwali celebrations at State House Entebbe on October 26, he acknowledged that Indians who are less than 1% of Uganda’s population contribute over 65% of the country’s tax revenue. When foreign banks, MTN, BAT, oil companies, and Chinese investors are included, the foreign share rises to nearly 90%. Ordinary Ugandans contribute barely 10%. After accounting for the holdings of Museveni, his family, his brother Salim Saleh, and their close associates, Ugandans likely own less than 6% of their own economy. This is not economic transformation; it is dependency and economic mafialism disguised as development. So whose gains are being protected? Uganda’s economy is overwhelmingly foreign-owned and elite-controlled. You praise Museveni for bringing stability, yet he was one of the key architects of the instability that preceded his rule. His rebellions of the 1970s and 1980s helped create the very chaos he later exploited to seize power. The current “stability” rests on coercion, patronage, and military dominance—a calm that benefits rulers, not citizens.
For most Ugandans, especially the youth who constitute more than 70% of the population, these supposed gains are invisible. They live with unemployment, corruption, collapsing health services, and rising living costs while watching foreign investors and a small political elite amass wealth. The problem is not ignorance of history but the lived experience of exclusion. Uganda’s task, therefore, is not to “protect the gains” but to reclaim ownership and dignity, to build an economy that serves its people rather than one family and their business partners. Until that happens, talk of protecting the gains remains an illusion.
Let’s be honest. Poverty and unemployment are huge issues of priority demanding urgent attention and sustained action, but Ugandans have money. As in, Ugandans are having money. Money for building, money for cars, money for petrol… markets are always full, supermarkets are always full, malls are always full, bars are always full, pork joints are always full… it’s not that only a handful of elite Ugandans are having money. A lot more must be done for more Ugandans to have more money, and to reduce the growing gap between the rich and the poor… but to have money, Ugandans are having money.
Well said comrade! However, let me expound a little on the so-called political stability.
Mr M9 suppression of any political dissent militarily in addition to economic muzzling of your perceived opponents (recall the case of late Garuga Musinguzi when Tibuhaburwa referred to him as “politically squinted eyes”!?).
Secondly, M9’s argument that the NRM fails to explain it’s achievements adequately to the young population is redundant if not ridiculous. It means that ugandans are idiots with squinted eyes who must be explained and showed the hospitals with drugs, who must be showed good roads, who must endure long days without electricity among others. M9 I think is now political assistant to Tibuhaburwa’s political assistant Moses Byaruhanga who’s been peddling such a ridiculous argument that achievements have to be explained to the would be beneficiaries!
Last but certainly not least.
“The aim of NUP to cultivate narratives that provoke anger and indignation in it’s supporters. This reduces the need for rational explanation of events and things based on facts…..” Such a generic accusation coming from a supposedly an elite intellectual.
Just expose the “shallowness” of all opposition manifestos rather than reduce yourself to a bootlicker of your idol Tibuhaburwa!
In no particular order, and this is by no means exhaustive… We have had the safety and security term. We had the economic stability term. We had the managing HIV AIDS term. We had the managing rebels term. We had the multiparty politics term. We had the anti sectarianism term. We had the radio and TV term. We had the attract investors term. We had the telecommunications term (even though that one was a global trend in technology, not really government’s hard work). We had the constitution term. We had the modernization of agriculture term. We had the multiplying of districts and bloating of parliament term. We had the no change term. We had the removing term limits term. We had the magendo term. We had the national IDs term. We had the removing age limits term. We had the professionalizing the army term. We had the public order management term. We had the managing of homosexuals and human rights term. We had the managing kiface term. We had the managing kasasiro term. We had the UPE term. We had the operation wembley term. We had the Karamoja iron sheets term. We had the managing load shedding term. We have had very many terms for better roads. We had the managing covid term. We had the securing your future term.
After all this, why wouldn’t the gains already be automatically protected? Protected from what exactly? These are genuine questions, no malice. To be there, the gains are there, and we are very grateful for the very many gains. We even look forward to more gains, not just protecting gains as if there are no more gains coming.
But for many Ugandans, “protecting the gains” really sounds like some weird kind of endless “protection” scam where extortionists press and squeeze vulnerable people to give them whatever they want so as to guarantee their safety and protection from the very same extortionists who are pressing and squeezing them for things. “Vote for us, or else…” There’s really no need for threatening language… we have come a long way as a country for us to be using threatening or coercive language to cause people to vote out of fear.
Maybe the only term remaining is the one of smooth transition, which is related to protecting gains, but protecting gains is not explicit enough about the smooth transition concerns that most Ugandans have been having for a very long time. It’s a thing that is raising more and more anxiety the longer it goes unaddressed. It’s even the reason why people can decide to vote for a donkey, to preempt change and manage the feeling of impending doom when one imagines an inevitable, naturally occurring, yet poorly planned and therefore disastrous transition phase and long lasting problems thereafter for generations to come.
Maybe Muzeeyi will surprise us this time and use this term to set the stage for a smooth, exemplary transition of power, protecting his legacy as a proper son of Africa. Maybe.
In 2025, 40 years later the only problem we have is about protecting the gains, and if it’s only by M7 who is able to do so! Then we are doomed as a country.
Mr. M9 arguments leave me speechless and confused at the same time. The choice to support a failed system is questionable and misleading.
I mean if truely you want to protect any gains and talk about peace as one of them? You want to tell us that peace is not a right to all citizens of Uganda but a given. By the way rightly said by one of the contributors… In the 70s the same person was I voloved in distabilising the country and continued acting from within, then come 1980s the same person was the one who decided to go to the bush.
Instead of steady development those government were busy fighting his comrades then him self – M7 in-order for them to survive in power. Now he is in power out of the bush and no more fighting government using proxies hence the peace you talked about. Uganda would be far much better, if it was not these folks to terrorise the young but stable governments then.
By the way, M9 if you think the kyagulanyi’s have no substance offer your self for election if not kindly advise your self to let the folks be. What kyagulanyi has done offering him self as a choice to replace M7 is a creation of M7, a man whose word should. Never be trusted. Orderly handing over power to others with in his party he failed from the start, hence the creation of the so-called name calling you painting of these folks of NUP.
I am persuaded leadership is not about eloquence but vision for the people and ability to manage the resources of the country can NUP do so? Absolutely why not. You guys have failed so it is time up. Jinja the beacon of cities in now a village city after 40 years with bogus new buildings that should not have be built in the city in this day and age. So you guys ahhhh mutulekemu.
Andrew Mwenda is right on the historical facts However, “Protecting the Gains” is not wrong factually, it is wrong politically. It is a defensive slogan against “protest vote” deployed in a political environment dominated by emotion rather than reason, and it assumes a rational voter weighing facts and fearing loss an assumption that does not hold in today’s Uganda.
NRM’s deeper failure is strategic, not historical. By framing its campaign as a response to NUP and Robert Kyagulanyi’s politics of Hate, the ruling party surrendered narrative control. NUP does not compete on facts but on emotion, cultivating indignation that neutralizes risk calculation and makes people indifferent to consequences. By constantly trying to counter this anger, NRM has allowed NUP to set the terms of debate, shifting politics away from achievements and future plans into a moral struggle between “evil rulers” and “righteous protest.”
The result is that NRM now campaigns against Kyagulanyi instead of for Uganda’s next phase of transformation. Young Ugandans are not rejecting past gains, they are disconnected from them and concerned with how those gains translate into opportunity, and visible improvements in daily life. Until NRM reclaims narrative sovereignty and articulates a forward looking vision that uses past gains as a foundation rather than a defense, it will continue to fight on terrain chosen by its opponent and lose the initiative.