Since 1986 Uganda has had more NGOs, more laws, more development partners, more ministries and more projects and programmes supported by IFIs and development partners than at any point in its history.

In the same period we have lost more natural forest, more swamps, more clean water, more clean air, more soil fertility, more indigenous knowledge, more institutional independence and more cultural indigeneity than in the previous 80 years combined. That is not a contradiction. It is the method.

The National Resistance Movement did not come to power promising to dismantle Uganda’s complex, self-regulating systems. It came promising security, stability and modernisation.

The method of governing since 1986 has been to simplify what was complex, centralize what was distributed, replace what managed itself with what must be managed and extracted from and pattern people’s choices, movements and thinking to the centre. The result is a state where power, land and meaning increasingly reside with actors and logics of exogenous origin.

Call it what it is: governing by misgoverning.

Method: Three pillars of misgoverning

Pillar One: Legal concentration: Imperial presidency and the orchestrated populace

The Uganda Constitution 1995 gives the executive override power over land, forests and resources. On paper Uganda has strong environmental and land laws. In practice, the presidency can de-gazette forest reserves, allocate protected land to investors and override courts and agencies with a directive.

Legal concentration alone does not explain how this system reproduces itself. The missing piece is people. Choices, movements and thinking are progressively patterned to align with the president’s. Political mobilisation, local councils, religious and cultural institutions are co-opted or side-lined until dissent becomes costly and conformity rational. Alternatives are made invisible, unviable or dangerous.

Elections, rallies and resolutions happen but they reflect a field already levelled by the centre.

The pattern is visible in every land giveaway. Mabira Forest in 2007: 7,100 hectares nearly given to a sugar company despite legal protection and mass protest. Bugoma Central Forest Reserve: a court-protected corridor allocated to sugarcane anyway. Kalangala: Ssese Islands rainforest in Lake Victoria replaced by oil palm under a deal facilitated from the top. In each case, law and local opposition existed, but both were overrun by executive decree and a mobilized base patterned to support it.

PillarTwo: Institutional hollowing – Theatre of the state and the patterned citizen

Uganda has all the institutions a modern state is supposed to have. NEMA for environment. NFA for forests. ULC for land. Parliament for oversight. What we lack is institutional function.

NEMA publishes environmental impact assessments that are ignored. NFA guards forests while State House allocates them. ULC surveys land already taken by political actors. Parliament debates, but the deals are signed elsewhere.

Citizens are patterned into this theatre. Community consultations become rituals with pre-decided outcomes. Local leaders who resist are bypassed or replaced. Over time, people learn that participation is performative, so they disengage or seek patronage instead of rights. The citizen becomes a client.

The carbon trading deals of the last 15 years show it. Foreign firms identify natural forest land, secure allocation through political channels, clear the forest, plant Eucalyptus or Pine, and sell carbon credits to polluters in Europe and North America. Uganda loses the forest. The polluter claims “carbon neutrality.” The institution that should have stopped it issues the certificate.

Pillar three: Substitution of complex systems – Great simplification and the reshaping of thought.

The deepest form of misgoverning is ecological and epistemic. Complex systems that managed themselves for millennia have been replaced with simpler systems requiring constant input, control and extraction. At the same time, the thinking that sustained those systems is displaced.

A natural forest in Mabira Rain Forest or Bugoma is multi-layered, self-sustaining, full of native trees, understory, fungi, insects, birds and relationships. It regulates water, builds soil and holds a seedbank with millions of native seeds per hectare. Replace it with Eucalyptus and you get a biological desert: even-aged, genetically uniform, allelopathic, hydrologically destructive and silent.

Basoga, Bunyoro, Bugisu and other communities developed traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) over centuries. Women selected crops from wild relatives, managed pests through ecotone planting, and maintained soil fertility without external inputs. Clan systems protected totem species and sacred groves. This was empirical, tested and functional knowledge.

Both were replaced. Natural forests became plantations. TEK became “backwardness.” Clan governance became district administration. Schooling, extension and media are reshaped to make the replacement seem modern and inevitable. As material and institutional incentives shift, people’s thinking shifts with it. What you do not control, you cannot extract from. So you replace it and you re-educate people to prefer the replacement.

What we have lost from 1986-2026

Ecological loss: Forest cover has collapsed. Swamps have been drained and built on, destroying water regulation and biodiversity. Streams that flowed year-round now dry up. Clean water and clean air are no longer assumed goods. Rain patterns have shifted. Soil structure and biodiversity have been degraded to the point where land needs constant chemical input to produce.

Knowledge loss: Elders who held TEK on herbal medicine, soil and forest regeneration are dying. Their knowledge dies because there is no system to transmit it. Schools and extension services teach imported agronomy, not indigenous practice.

Economic loss: Food sovereignty traded for cash crops and imports. Landlessness rises as land concentrates in political and foreign hands. Farming becomes wage labour on formerly communal or clan land.

Political loss: Citizens reduced to clients and in practice to domestic and international slaves. Accountability runs upward to the presidency and outward to donors, not downward to communities. Local councils and clan structures are hollowed out. Sovereignty over land and resources is compromised through deals that mortgage the country’s future.

Moral loss: Public service replaced by deal-making. The line between state, party and private business dissolves. Public office becomes a platform for private accumulation.

Cultural indigeneity loss: Indigenous names, cosmologies, land tenure systems, rituals and governance logics tied to place are eroded. They are replaced by exogenous cultural forms, legal concepts and economic relations imported through projects, NGOs and investors. Uganda’s public life increasingly speaks, thinks and regulates in borrowed categories.

Genealogies and futures lost: We have lost the continuity of genealogies. Clans can no longer trace land, names and responsibilities because the land base has been alienated and records erased. Future generations are disconnected from the landscapes, stories and obligations that made them Baganda, Basoga, Banyoro, Iteso, Acholi and so on. A people without genealogy and land becomes a population without a future.

Sovereignty and citizenship lost: Political sovereignty has been compromised through deals that mortgage land, water, and carbon to external actors. Citizenship has been hollowed out – rights exist on paper but are not enforceable against power. Identity itself is threatened by President Tibuhaburwa Yoweri Museveni’s politics of interests, where belonging is defined by alignment with the centre rather than by shared history, language, and territory.

Why this method persists

Misgoverning persists because it works for those who practice it. Simplifying complex systems creates rents. Rents fund patronage. Patronage secures loyalty. Loyalty maintains power.

Foreign capital and donors enable it by funding what is measurable and quick, not what is complex and slow. The language of “investment,” “development,” “green growth” and “carbon neutrality” hides extraction and makes dismantling sound like progress.

4. Governing by governing: What it would actually look like

Recognize complexity: Legalise the rights of nature. Recognise clan councils and TEK holders as legitimate governance actors. Stop treating complex systems as obstacles to be cleared.

Push power down: Management authority over forests, swamps, wetlands and seed banks should sit with the people who hold the knowledge. The role of the centre is to support, not to override.

Moratorium on simplification: No new conversion of natural forest and swamp to plantation or agriculture. No new land allocations in protected areas. Audit all land giveaways since 1986.

Reject extractive deals: Withdraw from carbon schemes that reward plantation establishment on natural forest land. Ban the patenting of Ugandan genetic resources by foreign firms.

Rebuild institutions and de-pattern people*: Give NEMA, NFA and ULC real autonomy, budgets, and enforcement power. Protect spaces for dissent and deliberation so public thinking is not permanently patterned to the centre.

Recover cultural indigeneity: Restore indigenous naming, land tenure and governance concepts in law, education, and public discourse. You cannot govern what you cannot name in your own terms.

None of this is radical. It is what governing looked like before 1986 in the areas where it still worked. It is what governing looks like in any place where the state serves the people rather than extracting from them.

The choice

Uganda will not be governed by more projects, more laws, more deals or more aid. Those are the tools of misgoverning.

It will be governed when we stop dismantling what already works and when we recover the right to think, name, own and organise in our own terms. The swamps can still be restored. The water can still run clean. The genealogies can still be reclaimed. The elders who remember are still alive. The knowledge is not gone. But it is going.

The question is not whether Uganda can be governed. It is whether those in power want to govern Ugandans as citizens with a future or whether they prefer to govern a population of clients and slaves patterned to serve the interests that are not ours.

The cost of silence is too high. The time to choose is now.

• A Tell Media report / By Prof Oweyegha-Afunaduula. The writer is a retired Ugandan scholar and elder who has witnessed and analysed Uganda’s political evolution from colonialism through independence to present day. He is a founder of Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis (CCTAA), Uganda.