Uganda is a widening gyre of economic crimes, but this gyre has for more than three decades been propelled by an executive that is inimical common good. The vice is entrenched in ethnicity and thrives through political and economic cronyism that is openly choreographed, cheered and rewarded by President Tibuhaburwa Museveni and the genocidaires of Luwero Triangle.

Back in 2011, I wrote an article titled Uganda is Greater than Museveni, Besigye. It was published in The Daily Monitor and reviewed in the Independent. In those days President Tibuhaburwa Museveni and Dr Kizza-Besigye Kifefe were at the height of their bloody political rivalry. The incessant fighting took the tone and character of either being greater than Uganda.

The country was split between the two and thought increasingly less about Uganda. This was the case across all social, political and economic strata of the nation. Even the intellectual spectrum was split and confused and intellectual debates were weakened and almost ineffective. The military and the police too were divided in their loyalties: they answered to the appeals of the two protagonists rather than the professional calling to serving Ugandans.

Today I set out to discuss: Uganda is greater than Museveni, National Resistance Movement (NRM) in relation to development.

Development in Uganda tends to begin with President Tibuhaburwa Museveni and end with President Tibuhaburwa Museveni. Indeed, as I have stated several times before, everything in Uganda tends to begin with President Tibuhaburwa Museveni and end with President Tibuhaburwa Museveni.

The president is a dispenser of happiness and agony in equal measure. Everything, which includes justice, criminalisation and freedom of the criminalised is determined by him. It includes appointments to juicy jobs and priotisation in the national budget. It definitely includes success and failure of development programmes and projects.

As the president has become everything, professional and technical people have become less productive and less effective, and more consumptive, tending to concentrate on creating one leeway after another to make money at the expense of development, transformation and progress. This is one reason why corruption has proliferated alongside ethical and moral decay in the public service.

Of course, the other reason is that the president believes corruption is an economic tool in the development of a country. One time, when his Inspector General of Government (IGG) Beti Kamya was convinced that the use of a method used successfully in Singapore to fight corruption – the Lifestyle Audit – would go a long way to deal the vice a decisive blow to the corrupt. However, the president discouraged her saying it would scare the corrupt away from the country to invest their loot in other countries.

This excited the corrupt, most of whom are high-ranking government official and close to power or in power, thanks to ethnic, kinship and political-historical considerations.

The Lifestyle Audit would, no doubt, net many military, police and prisons officers, in addition to judiciary personnel, Members of Parliament, public servants and all categories of politicians and administrators at all levels of society since the majority cannot explain the sources of their wealth. For the majority of them their wealth stories are the same: from rugs to an astronomical riches and ownership of properties that include land (often grabbed or bought using ill-gotten money.

Corruption has become a political weapon since there is growing evidence that many people are using it to acquire financial might for elective politics. The political motive has indeed complicated the fight against the corrupt who easily dismiss the IGG’s onslaught on them as witch-hunt.

During the burial of philanthropist Paul Gwaira Wekiya on June 7, 2023 at Bugonza Nawaka, I privately asked IGG Bet Kamya, who was the ‘chief mourner’ why she had become lukewarm on fighting corruption using the Lifestyle Audit tool. I wondered whether the president’s defence of the corrupt by suggesting that the Lifestyle Audit would scare those who had looted the country to invest elsewhere.  Responding, the IGG told me that she was still committed to applying the Lifestyle Audit to fight corruption because there is no better way to fight the vice.

The IGG said it had succeeded in liberating the corrupt from the centrality of the vice in Singapore and could do the same in Uganda. She explained that Lifestyle Audit is not based on witch-hunting the looters, but is an information-based tool that involves everyone everywhere to use information on the life trajectories of those suspected of robbing the country to provide her with necessary data to track the sinister loopholes the public loses resources. I was happy when the IGG publicly revealed to the mourners my private discussion with her on the scourge of corruption and the effectiveness of the Lifestyle Audit tool in fighting the scourge.

I concluded that the IGG is serious about making the fight against corruption a people’s and community struggle. The Lifestyle Audit tool re-empowers the people and communities to track stolen public funds. Yes the people and communities of Ugandans can identify the corrupt within them, and the IGG can use the information they generate using the Lifestyle Audit tool. The country is waiting for President Tibuaburwa Museveni to get genuinely committed to eradicating corruption by disengaging from the corrupt and allowing the Lifestyle Audit tool to work. The Singapore example shows that it can work in favour of Uganda.

Some of the programmes or projects the President has initiated single-handedly include Bona Bagaggawale, Myooga, Operation Wealth Creation and Parish Development Model. These have become chimneys of fleecing the country of scarce money to benefit only a few people, often those closely related ethnically, kin-wise and politically.

Virtually all the beneficiaries tend to be those who reigned mayhem in the Luwero Triangle or their relatives. We have not had our present crop of researchers at our universities formulating suitable topics to investigate the effectiveness of the programmes and projects, perhaps because the programmes and projects, however poorly designed, have been accompanied by threats from interest-based politicians. Future researchers will definitely confirm or reject linkage between the projects and programmes and corruption.

It is a fertile ground for accumulation essential information and knowledge for fighting corruption on a continuing basis. I can nevertheless state without hesitation that the pursuit of these programmes and/or projects is one reason why governmental performance and effectiveness in the development arena have meteorically declined. The craze for dams for hydropower stations is primarily presidential and secondarily a practical concern of convinced professionals and technical people because it is destroying the Pearl of Africa environmentally and ecologically.

At some point I wrote an article about “The Perils of Presidentialism”. One peril here is sowing seeds of environmental illiteracy and environmental decay and collapse through damming. It is a falsehood that dams are a tourist attraction. It is better to preserve our falls in perpetuity.

It is a truism today that it is no longer important for one to be professional and technical because being so is superseded by presidential wisdom and choices in leadership, governance and development. The presidential wisdom and choices are frequently reflected in the annual budgets of the country and the work of different public officials. For example, since the substantive minister of finance of Uganda is the president himself, we have over the years seen the national budget rise astronomically especially in the line budgets of the ministry of defence, State House, Office of the President and Classified Expenditure.

Simultaneously administrative costs have shot up. This reflects presidential commitment to making politics the most lucrative employer in the country, and to bantustanization of Uganda into numerous districts, sub-counties and parishes. All this is dedicated to enhancing the spread and influence of the president and his ruling party and effectively excluding alternative political spread and influence from the population.

Meanwhile the line budgets for agriculture, education and health have continually attracted diminishing allocations, in real terms, as if social development in Uganda no longer matters. This reflects President Tibuhaburwa Museveni’s choices and wisdom in development, guided by exaggerated belief in infrastructure development and resources exploitation. Nature, environment, conservation and social development coming in only when it makes political sense to him.

To confirm this status quo, one needs to have a critical scrutiny of the National Budget 2023-2024. I will not bother myself with the elaborate statics in the budget, suffice to say that although the volume money of the national budgets has continually astronomically shooting up until this year it the national budget is Ush52.7 trillion, the services to the diverse communities of Ugandans, especially at the bottom of society, have meteorically and consistently declined.

This means that the effectiveness and relevancy of government to the people of Uganda have also declined in real terms, as all political and governance effort is focused on power retention and conquest, control and domination of the indigenous communities of Uganda.

This is not surprising. Any kind of development at the bottom of society in Uganda is almost always generally pegged on NRM politics but most particularly on President Museveni, who as I keep emphasising, has successfully made sure he is the Alpha and Omega of everything in the country. How close a given community is to the ruling party assures it of public services at the expense of those communities that are deserving but do not embrace NRM. Such communities have become absolutely impoverished during nearly 38 years of NRM rule in the true spirit that President Museveni used to repeatedly stress: Those who don’t vote or support us will have no share of the national cake”.

Or else, individuals, ethnically related to those that dominate power in Kampala, have over the years tended to penetrate the peripheral communities, assumed leadership positions, grabbed land and started businesses, including large-scale farming. In the true spirit of individualisation of development, the programmes and projects initiated at the centre have persistently, consistently and selectively benefited such people.

For God and my country – Uganda!

• A Tell report / By Prof Oweyegha-Afunaduula, a former professor in the Department of Environmental Science of the Makerere University, Uganda