In Uganda, there is no longer any question that everything begins and ends with the President Yoweri Tibuhaburwa Museveni. At present the president is restructuring and re-organising Ugandan society the way he wants, de-emphasising the supremacy of indigenous groups.

Using the Constitution of Uganda 1995, whose making he presided over, he introduced a new indigenous group, which he called Banyarwanda, and to which he and his ethnicity belongs, and which is effectively the one in power in Uganda – politically and militarily.

So, when the President talked of “This is not a mere change of guard but a fundamental change”, on January 26, 1986 when he was sworn in as the immediate post-Tito Okello military junta president of Uganda, he meant he would address the business of reconstructing every fabric of Ugandan society and redesigning its functionality in all sectors of the economy, spheres of life and spheres of human activity.

Already, every sphere of human life and activity is now effectively dominated by people who belong to the ethnic group dominating power in Uganda. This is not surprising. During his long reign in Uganda, the president has made sure that power does not get out of his hands, or out of his family and ethnic group. This is exactly what racist South African supremacists did to exclude the majority Blacks from governing their country.

In furtherance of this goal, it is apparent that the president has allowed his son, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, and his son-in-law, Odrek Rwabogo, to exclusively access the population of Uganda alongside himself (the president) in what appears to be a three-pronged strategy to keep power in his family and ethnic group.

Playing politics is in the family, at the exclusion of alternative political forces. Apparently, some political formations such as Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) and the Democratic Party (DP) – both of which are the oldest in the country – have been compromised and their top leaders coopted to serve the interests of the ruling party.

All the three (President Museveni, Odrek Rwabogo and Muhoozi Kainerugaba) are using different justifications to sell why they are the right ones for Ugandans to choose from as suitable to be Uganda president when presidential election is held in 2026.

President Yoweri Tibuhaburwa Museveni is using the ‘conquer poverty and make everyone rich’ dictum. Odrek Rwabogo is using revitalising businesses, which were badly hit by Covid-19, and for this he got Ush39 billion that he is using for his visibility. Muhoozi Kainerugaba has distanced himself from the failures and mistakes of his father’s party, and is promising heaven on Earth to revamp the economy, employ youth and eliminate poverty.

Meanwhile the president maintains he is building democracy in and out of Uganda. However, it has become clear that it is a type of democracy that is dynastical and both politico-military and ‘militia-political’, completely excluding alternative political leadership. The three ethnically related individuals are well protected by the public security agencies. All this is happening two years after the 2021 General Election and the focus is on the 2026 General Election.

It seems it has already been decided by the ruling family that the next President of Uganda must come from the ruling family. This is of course political segregation. Without being explicitly told, alternative political leaders must wait for 2026 to rubberstamp the 2026 Presidential and General Elections and make them appear credible and legitimate. When they participate the Electoral Commission is already conditioned to pronounce the elections free and fair even when it is aware that political activity in the country has been and continues to be lopsided in favour of the ruling party and ruling family.

There appears to be evidence that the tight hold onto the political space and the preference that power does not get out of the palace, or at least from the ethnic group in charge, was well planned, perhaps when the “Liberators” were in the bushes of the Luwero Triangle, which those days consisted of 22 Districts.

Keeping power in the palace was precisely what the racist Supremacists of South Africa did from 1949 to 1992. Ethnic nepotism was the strategy. All power belonged to whites. Al security organs were constructed, developed and maintained to protect the racists, their power, their economy, their injustices, their institutions and to ensure that all resources of the big country belonged only to them, although the true owners of the resources were the Black Africans.

There are many ways that the South African supremacists built their apartheid system. They maintained close relations with the West, especially UK, USA and the Netherlands, where the Boers who built the system came from. They Bantustanised the country, creating several Bantustans and giving them sham independence, power and authority without being in charge of the resources underground.

They placed all institutions, projects, programmes, authorities, commissions only in their hands. They created a white supremacist dynasty between 1948 and 1992 when it collapsed. They sabotaged the education of blacks by segregating them socially. They hunted down educated Africans and forced many of them in exile.

Every other time they increased the number of Bantustans. They trained their children in the best universities in and outside South Africa. They controlled all resources in the country such as diamonds. Their educational curriculum was different from that of the Blacks to ensure the gap between them and the Blacks continued to widen.

They trained their people to manage all the resources and ensured the Blacks were slaves to the Apartheid State. They made laws and policies to tighten their grip onto all resources and the entire economy

They made obnoxious laws to manage law and order, with the view to exclude Blacks from participation in the politics and governance of the country. They grabbed all resourceful land and assigned the Blacks to ecologically poor lands where they would grow nothing. They discouraged intermarriages between Blacks and Whites. They ensured that all public property belonged to whites and none to Blacks. They designed their racist system in such a way that Blacks were no more than slaves to them and to the State.

They assisted any of their kind to live meaningfully in the Apartheid economy with public money at their disposal to establish small and big businesses. They controlled the economies of the satellite countries and independent enclaves such as Swaziland.

The national budget was committed to individual racists by a percentage regardless of age-group. The government ensured that white government workers got lucrative salaries and big retirement benefits to live on the rest of their lives.

They created huge salary disparities between them the Indians and Coloureds, while assigning Africans to exploitative jobs earning them peanuts.

A huge portion of the national budget, which was a racist budget, went into contracts, projects, salaries, supplies, training, works and health bills of the racists. They decreed that the mandate of the Apartheid State was to protect every white person – man, woman, child from crime of any kind, big or small, national or international.

All political and military power was under the control of the racists. The racist Constitution of South Africa invested all power and authority in the president.

Death by torture and shooting was reserved for any Black nationalist forces. Even children would be shot if they demonstrated against the Apartheid regime as did happen in Soweto when several students were shot dead and many maimed.

Treason cases were reserved for Blacks and their collaborators who were always Blacks. Democratisation whereby power would be passed into the hands of the Black majority was constitutionally and practically prevented. No political party, especially the African National Congress (ANC) was allowed to operate legally until 1994, when the racists surrendered power to Nelson Mandela and his ANC after he successfully negotiated the transfer of power from the White minority to the Black majority.

A country governed on the basis of ethnicity and nepotism cannot survive for long as a unit, let alone embark on a meaningful and effective democratisation path. Injustice, inequity and discrimination are institutionalised. Where there is injustice, inequity and discrimination politically, economically, socially, culturally, ecologically and environmentally there cannot be democracy. Democracy is a myth and deception becomes integral to governance and leadership.

Development, transformation and progress become a tripod of lies. The whole scheme of governance is a gigantic lie uncommitted to liberating Uganda and Ugandans and committed to enslaving Uganda and Ugandans well in the future.

Uganda of the 21st century needs to rethink its political trajectory into the future. The Indigenous groups of Uganda need to re-evaluate their status in the present state of affairs collectively and chart out a new path to secure their future themselves. Their future and the future of all their members seem to be in jeopardy. A new Uganda must emerge.

Such a Uganda must be the Federal State of Uganda with the original traditional nations as the federal entities. Better late than never. Otherwise, their future generations have no future in Uganda. The future belongs to immigrants such as Indians, Chinese, Rwandese, Eritreans, Somali, Ethiopians and Rwandese.

The country will belong to previously nomadic pastoralists. They will take all good land and scatter the indigenous groups as internal refugees in their own country. Indigenous people will be slaves to the immigrants and to the State. They will own nothing except their past! Their undoing will be the current ethnic nepotism and practice if extended well in the future with the participation of some greedy and selfish indigenous people in or close to power. I am prophesying.

For God and My Country.

• A Tell report / By Prof Oweyeghe Afunaduula, a former lecturer in the department of environmental science, Makerere University, Uganda