Before I delve into the gist of this article, let me introduce you to four international days critical to the sustenance and advancement of the human specie, Homo sapiens, in modern times:

International Women’s Day. This was created by the UN and is celebrated every March 8 since 1977 commemorating women’s struggle for equality and liberation along with the women’s rights movement. The International Women’s Day focuses on issues such as gender equity, reproductive rights and violence and abuse against women.

International Men’s Day. It was first celebrated in 1999 in Trinidad and Tobago. Dr. Jerome Teelucksingh, a history professor at the University of the West Indies, re-established the day to honor his father’s birthday. Historical records say it was first conceived on 8th February 1991 and inaugurated on 7 February 1992. It has since become a global awareness day for many issues that men face, including abuse, homelessness, suicide, and violence, celebrated annually on November 19.  Gender equity and liberation of men are not in the equation of the International Men’s Day. 

International Day of Families created by the UN in 1993 is observed on May 15 since then. It provides an opportunity to promote awareness of issues relating to families and to increase knowledge of the social, economic and demographic processes affecting families

World Marriage Day (WMD) also exists and is celebrated annually on the second Sunday of February. It’s a day to honour marriage, the commitment between partners and the love that binds them together. However, it is not the creation of the UN. It is an observance sponsored by American organisation Worldwide Marriage Encounter, associated with the Catholic Marriage Encounter movement.

On the whole, International Days are occasions to educate the public on issues of concern, to mobilise political will and resources to address global problems, and to celebrate and reinforce achievements of humanity. However, in Uganda, such days have been reduced to National Resistance Movement Organisation (NRMO) politicking and marketing of its ideologies and what it considers to be its achievements in the last 40 years of its hegemony in the country. Thus, the days are an opportunity for NRMO to enhance and entrench NRM hegemony in Uganda and ostracise other Ugandans from global processes.

I am using NRMO because it is what theUganda Electoral Commission registered as a party: not NRM, whose owners during and immediately after the bush war preferred to perpetuate illegally in Uganda so that Ugandans would be continuously tuned to the politicomilitarism of NRM well in the future.

It has become a ritual that Ugandans that do not belong to NRMO or appreciate its governance, leadership and ideologies, are not involved in the celebration of the international days. Many are scared away by the fact that on such days virtually all those involved don either the NRMO party uniform or uniforms of the armed forces of Uganda (army, police and prisons).

It is rare to hear of the global intentions behind the Days. We instead hear of NRMO achievements, which obliterates the purposes for which they were created.

The most recent celebration of an International Day was the International Women’s Day on March 8, 2025 in Kyankwanzi, the home of NRMO’s Ideological School. It was unlikely that alternative political leaders who wanted to celebrate the day would make it to the place. Indeed, none was introduced.

Although in his speech President Tibuhaburwa Museveni reiterated that empowering women has been a deliberate focus of his administration since the National Resistance Movement (NRM) came into power, in most cases the women empowered are those who profess to be NRMO at all levels of society. For example, it is extremely rare for a woman to be appointed an ambassador unless she has shown love for or converted to NRMO. It is also next to impossible for a woman who does not profess NRMO to be appointed a District Resident Commissioner (RDC) or a Resident City Commissioner (RCC). This practice is replicated in every aspect of the Uganda economy, indicating discrimination against the rest of the country’s womenfolk who are not NRMO. This is dangerous. However much we preach patriotism to such women, it is just empty noise that will be ignored or perceived as just a political slogan.

There is also widespread suspicion that most women being empowered in NRMO administration, civil service and the armed forces have exogenous roots. If true, this contradicts the president’s reiteration that his regime is empowering [all] women of Uganda. It is an area that begs serious sociological research to unveil the truth.

What has become worrying, however, is that most women of whatever political faith or human endeavour believe that President Tibuhaburwa Museveni has empowered them against and liberated them from men. Everywhere women praise the President for freeing them from their men. It does not matter whether they are married or not. This makes the President perceive that that his political base is the women of Uganda.

The false assumption by most women is that “men have been owning women as their property” (e.g.  Linda Scott, 2024). This has translated into broken families and broken marriages. Many children now have no parental care. Some have either become vagabonds, married early (e.g. Desmond Tutu, 2016) or been introduced to unnatural sexual practices of lesbianism. Many young women either resist getting married or walk away from their marriages. They now prefer to go to the Middle East to work as modern slaves. They value money more than family or marriage.

What they do not know is that the firms ferrying them into slavery belong to people who are integral to President Tibuhaburwa Museveni’s System. Besides, some of the money they make as slaves is heavily taxed to enable government to implement its projects and programmes, although some enters the corruption chain. Moreover, many women who have been in the marriage institution for as long as 20 or more years, now feel empowered enough to abandon their husbands and children, ostensibly to enjoy freedom as women.

At the smallest instigation they seek divorces, that will avail some of the men’s wealth to themselves. Some of these older women join the young women in modern slavery. A good number of them are increasingly becoming vulnerable to the unnatural sexual practices of lesbianism.

The ultimate negative consequence of all this is that the indigenous groups of Ugandans, from whom these women are being resourced for modern slavery, are unable to contribute to the reproduction of the indigenous groups. Instead, members of the migrant groups from other countries of the Great Lakes Region who seek refugee status in Uganda are the ones profusely reproducing their kind. Very soon the population of refugees might overshoot the population of some indigenous groups as long as the NRMO is in power.

This is exacerbated by the fact that many young men in the indigenous groups are now averse to marriage and family making because they do not want permanent association with the so-called empowered young women. Others prefer to consort with old women whose reproductive life is over. Or else, an increasing number of men, who detect that their empowered wives are behaving abnormally, are reigning violence on them, although the converse is also true. There is need for serious sociological and sociocultural research to record what is going on.

Besides, unfortunately, many women, unprotected by family and marriage institution, are falling prey to human trafficking and trafficking of their body organs to make the life of the rich liveable in the more developed world where diseases mostly common to the wealthy are mushrooming and destroying organs such as kidneys.

It is clear that as the NRMO regime empowers some women it is consciously or unconsciously paying little or no attention to the negative consequences of women empowerment. If the NRMO rulers were adequately concerned about the consequences of women empowerment, perhaps the Ministry of Gender and Social Services would be at the forefront of alleviating the rising vices associated with it. I must, however, stress that it is not true that women empowerment is a foreign conspiracy to destroy the family system (Farah Adeed, 2017).

On the whole women empowerment is good for marital and family stability (Muniini Mulera, 2022). However, it is important that both women and men are empowered simultaneously in order to preserve the roles of family and marriage in the perpetuation of the human species, Homo sapiens well in the future. Experience in Uganda with women empowerment suggests that empowering women at the expense of men is instead disrupting marriage and family institution, and is instead scaring young women and men from marriage and family formation.

For God and my country.

• A Tell report / By Oweyegha-Afunaduula / Environmental Historian and Conservationist Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis (CCTAA), Seeta, Mukono, Uganda.

About the Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis (CCTAA)

The CCTAA was innovated by Hyuha Mukwanason, Oweyegha-Afunaduula and Mahir Balunywa in 2019 to the rising decline in the capacity of graduates in Uganda and beyond to engage in critical thinking and reason coherently besides excellence in academics and academic production. The three scholars were convinced that after academic achievement the world outside the ivory tower needed graduates that can think critically and reason coherently towards making society and the environment better for human gratification. They reasoned between themselves and reached the conclusion that disciplinary education did not only narrow the thinking and reasoning of those exposed to it but restricted the opportunity to excel in critical thinking and reasoning, which are the ultimate aim of education. They were dismayed by the truism that the products of disciplinary education find it difficult to tick outside the boundaries of their disciplines; that when they provide solutions to problems that do not recognise the artificial boundaries between knowledges, their solutions become the new problems. They decided that the answer was a new and different medium of learning.

Further reading

American Organisation Worldwide Marriage Encounter, associated with the Catholic Marriage Encounter Movement World Marriage Day (WMD)

Carol Watson, Grace Bantebya Kyomuhendo and Anita Ghimire (2020). Stories of change and persistence: Shifting gender norms in Uganda and Nepal. Research Report, March 2020 https://www.alignplatform.org/sites/default/files/2020-03/lessons_learned_uganda_and_nepal.pdf Visited on 11 March 2025 at 19:30 pm EAT.

Farah Adeed (2017). Women Empowerment is not a foreign conspiracy to destroy our family system. The Nation, May 11 2017 https://www.nation.com.pk/11-May-2017/women-empowerment-is-not-a-foreign-conspiracy-to-destroy-our-family-system Visited on 11 March 2025 at 18:55 pm EAT.

Girls Not Brides (2016). Desmond Tutu: Child Marriage Harms Our Human Family.

Kate Ambler, Kelly Jones and Michael O’Sullivan (2021). Increasing Women Empowerment: Implications for Family Welfare. I Z A Institute of Labour Economics, November 2021 https://docs.iza.org/dp14861.pdf Visited on 11 March 2025 at 18:50 pm EAT.

Linda Scott (2020). Did Men Own Women? DoubleXEconomy, August 10 2020 https://www.doublexeconomy.com/post/did-men-own-women Visited on 11 March 2025 at 19:54 pm EAT.

Muniini, K. Mulera (2022). Women Empowerment Good for Marital and Family Stability. Mulera K Blog March 8 2022 https://blog.mulerasfireplace.com/engage/women-empowerment-good-for-marital-and-family-stability-22219 Visited on 11 March 2025 at 19:12 pm EAT

Oweyegha-Afunaduula (2024). Can the Family Institution Survive? Inter-Religious Council of Uganda, 25 May 2024, https://www.ircu.or.ug/can-the-family-institution-survive-by-oweyegha-afunaduula-25th-may-2024/ Visited on 11 March 2025 at 12:22 pm EAT

The State House (2025). “We are Deliberate at Empowering Women”, President Museveni ensures Ugandans. The State House, 8 March 2025. https://statehouse.go.ug/we-are-deliberate-at-empowering-women-president-museveni-assures-ugandans/ Visited on 11 March 2025 at 11:30am EAT.

UN International Day of Families 15 May

UN International Men’s Day.19 November.

UN International Women’s Day 8 March.

UN Women (2019). Families in a Changing World. https://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/Headquarters/Attachments/Sections/Library/Publications/2019/Progress-of-the-worlds-women-2019-2020-en.pdf Visited on 11 March 2025 at 19:06 pm EAT.

UN Women (2024). Facts and figures: Ending violence against women. UN Women, 25 November 2024 https://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/facts-and-figures/facts-and-figures-ending-violence-against-women Visited on 11 March 2025 at 19:45 pm EAT

World Marriage Day (WMD) Second Sunday of February.