Uganda is basically plagued by militarism, diseases, poverty and ignorance. Almost everyone is exposed to any of these vices in their diverse forms across all social strata from top to bottom. However, instead of investing money to combat the vices, the governors of Uganda in the 21st century are wasting money on militarisation and primitive accumulation of wealth.

As a result, the vices are proliferating and debilitating the Ugandan people in a century of complex challenges. This is being complicated by democratic recession or decline, whereby solutions are increasingly ethnicised, with one small ethnic group with exogenous roots benefiting more from the government strategies to combat diseases, poverty and ignorance than other indigenous ethnic groups.

What is more, the National Resistance Movement (NRM) governors of Uganda are priotising political education through their Kyankwanzi Ideological School to reorient the minds of young Ugandans towards NRM political and ideological choices. Operation Wealth Creation is advocated at the expense of the environment while environmental education for all is ignored.

Environmental education is of vital importance to promote knowledge, awareness, understanding and concern about the environment. There are important consequences if humanity does not understand how nature and human interactions with it work according to Portillo in his undated article. It is clear that the environmental education is the most effective response to solve the ignorance about environmental problems and issues.

Effective environmental education for all can help generate environmental cadres at all levels of society whom we can collectively use as tools to create a bridge between the population and nature, restoring the link that has been broken due to increasing urban life as well as the disconnection between humans and the environment that surrounds them.

One writer has suggested that this task is possible by incorporating more hours of natural sciences in school curricula, promoting practical experiences and raising awareness among the new generations about the need to understand, preserve and conserve the natural world in which we live, our different ecological-cultural linkages with nature and all the abiotic and biotic elements therein.

Effective environmental education these days must introduce the learners to the four dimensions of the environment to which all environmental challenges, problems and issues can be assigned. We have not so far made much progress in conserving and conserving our environment in its diversity because we have been looking at the environment in physical form only. In my recent not yet published article “The Rise and Rise of Environmental Corruption in Uganda” (Oweyegha-Afunaduula, 2025) I articulated and clarified the ways in which we should perceive and accumulate environmental knowledge, awareness, understanding and concern.

I presented the ways as dimensions of the environment as follows:

Ecological-biological dimension

The ecological-biological dimension of the environment is the physical dimension of the environment. It consists of everything physical including animals, plants and animals, bacteria, viruses, rocks, minerals, soils, lakes, rivers, swamps, etc. Since Man, Homo sapiens, is an animal, he belongs to this dimension. Man, Homo sapiens, has been corrupting through ecological-biological dimension in diverse ways and means, including: urbanisation, construction of dams, introducing foreign trees such as eucalyptus and cypress and genetically modified organisms (GMOs); foreign animals such as grade cattle, grade pigs and grade chicken; plastics in form of plastic cars, plastic buses, plastic cups, plastic plates, plastic mobile phones; and nylon and synthetic clothing; and is currently strategising to introduce a nuclear plant in Buyende, to generate nuclear energy, and by so doing pollute the environment with nuclear particles.

Socio-economic dimension

The socio-economic dimension of the environment consists of all the social and economic aspects of the environment that together operate to transform the lives and circumstances of humanity. It includes social amenities and/or social installations. It also includes economic amenities and/or economic installations and the ways in which thses are interlinked. It includes cooperative unions, cooperative societies, banks and corporates.

Corruption in this dimension can disorient the dimension in favour of certain interests. For example, today, the socioeconomic dimension has been reoriented over the years to favour Indians, Chinese and blacks of exogenous origin, and to a certain extent refugees at the expense of the indigenes. Many hotels and industries in Uganda now belong to such people. If there are benefits accruing from such economic installation, it is a small group of people, frequently ethnically related that can celebrate.

Socio-cultural dimension

The socio-cultural dimension of the environment is the dimension that includes al the social and cultural perspectives of humanity, including its linkages and interactions with the physical and non-physical aspects of the environment. In this dimension is our genetics, culture, our linguistics, our sociality, our diverse social ways of living, our natural indigenous groups, our ethnicity, our linkages to the land, our education system, our health system, our extended family system, our ethicality, our morality, our spirituality, our mentality, our sacredness, our indigeneity et cetera.

When the socio-cultural dimension of the environment is corrupted, all these can be and have been corrupted. The Uganda Constitution 1995 engineered an artificial indigenous group called Banyarwanda and many indigenous groups such as Hehe and Nubi hither to known to be indigenous elsewhere. Cultural pollution has led to the erosion of our languages, thereby compromising conservation, which cannot be meaningfully and effectively done in foreign languages.

Time or temporal dimension

This type of corruption is most exhibited when wrong time scales are attached to project or programme processes, or even if right time scales are attached to them, they are deliberately violated. This is done so that the managers and implementers of the projects and programmes can benefit financially. We have seen this happen with government projects such as construction of roads, hospitals and programmes such as Myooga and Parish development model.

It is not uncommon, also uncommon to see many projects and programmes are denied money so that by the time the start again they are far more expensive than originally budgeted. The beneficiaries are the managers and their supervisors in government

In this article I want to focus on ignorance, specifically public environmental ignorance, in a socio-political, socio-cultural and ecological-biological democratic decline with the passage of time.

Ignorance

Ignorance can be broadly defined as the lack of knowledge, information, education, awareness, understanding, wisdom or insight necessary to confront the challenges, problems and issues of life and living.

Inadequate access to quality education can lead to widespread ignorance, limiting opportunities for individuals and societies to progress. In many developing countries, rural areas often face challenges in providing quality education to their residents. Limited resources, insufficient infrastructure and lack of qualified teachers can result in inadequate educational opportunities for children in these regions, including ignorance of the importance of environmental integrity that they live in harmony with (Dayyeh, 2023).

Ignorance about the environmental consequences of certain actions or practices can lead individuals, businesses and governments to engage in polluting activities without realising their impact. Ignorance can result in poor decision-making when it comes to environmental policies and regulations.

Without a clear understanding of environmental issues, policymakers may not implement effective measures to manage the environment effectively or control pollution. Ignorance can lead to inefficient resource use, such as excessive consumption of fossil fuels or overuse of natural resources, which can contribute to pollution and degradation of the environment. Ignorance of environmentally friendly alternatives may result in continued reliance on polluting technologies or practices and can make it difficult to hold polluters accountable for their actions, as people may not even be aware of the harm being caused.

Ignorance can foster resistance to adopting more sustainable behaviours or technologies, as people may be unaware of the benefits or may fear the unknown. However, ignorance of pollution can also be faked, as some companies or industries might pretend to be ignorant of their contributions to pollution. They might downplay their impact on the environment, manipulate data, or use misleading advertising to create a façade of environmental responsibility while continuing polluting practices behind the scenes. This can be done to maintain a positive public image and avoid regulatory scrutiny. However, it’s essential to emphasise that this type of deception is unethical and can have severe consequences for both the environment and public trust.

Environmental regulations and transparency measures are usually in place to hold polluters accountable, but efforts to fake ignorance still exists and can harm efforts to address pollution and promote sustainability (Dayyeh, 2023)

In conclusion, ignorance can hinder progress in addressing environmental pollution by impeding informed decision-making and perpetuating harmful practices.  

Environmental ignorance

Environmental ignorance refers to a lack of understanding or awareness of environmental issues and their consequences, including how human actions affect the natural world. This can manifest as a lack of knowledge about what environment is, the dimensions of the environment, environmental challenges, environmental problems, environmental issues, their causes, and potential solutions, as well as a lack of awareness and concern of one’s own impact on the environment. However, as Hogan (2023) has put it, ignorance is not a justification for careless environmental inaction or abuse. The impossibility of an imperfect world is not an excuse not to try and make it better (Hogan, 2023).

Environmental consciousness has much more to do with whether someone is prone to understanding that their way of living affects the planet and others on it and that their actions or inactions have real-world consequences, and less to do with whether they know how much carbon their local transit expels (Pomeroy, 2018).

Education may not automatically lead to action; any more than ignorance guarantees inaction. The choices that people make have less to do with what they understand and how much they care about something outside themselves (Pomeroy, 2018). Many times, those who say they are educated and who are socially advantaged are the ones that do the greatest harm to the environment either as actors or decision makers.

Thunström,  van ’t Veld,  Shogren and  Nordström (2014) have talked of strategic environmental harm and social norms. Many educated are the ones who litter the environment with plastic bottles and other containers, which they throw from the windows of their cars.

Those who practice presidentialism (eg. Oweyegha-Afunaduula, 2022) will decide to locate factories in swampy areas or oil palm plantations on islands in lakes, with serious environmental harm.

Shrinking forests, increasing landslides, floods, rising pollution of our freshwaters, rising extinctions diminishing breading sites for fish, rising numbers of internally displaced people and proliferating land grabbing all relate to poor policy prescriptions or inaction of the rulers. Corruption of the environment in its diverse dimensions will compound the problems. Besides, Santhosh (2020) has written that ignorance of government in the implementation of environmental laws is a matter of huge concern since it may cause government officials either to ignore the environmental laws or apply them wrongly, if at all.

In Uganda, exacerbated presidentialism and corruption have rendered environmental laws dysfunctional. Asasha (2022), writing about Tanzania, records that ignorance and insolence are responsible for the current environmental crisis in Tanzania. This is also true of Uganda. The ignorance and insolence of government officials and the educated have really harmed the environment and humanity.

Vitek and Jackson (2008) have written on what they termed the virtues of ignorance and highlighted complexity, sustainability and the limits of knowledge. However, Cattle Australia (2024) stressed the that wilful ignorance of the environmental groups is of no help to climate and the communities.

To put it another way the wilful ignorance of environmental groups complicates the environmental ignorance situation. The communities may take what the environmental groups tell them even when borne out of ignorance. Faber, et.al (2024) have submitted that knowledge about our ignorance helps with environmental problems. Environmental education that integrates the different dimensions of the environment and assumes a holistic stance can help us conquer environmental ignorance in ways never known to us before towards reducing the great ignorance of nature that still obtains.

It will be useful if we all understand what  Franco de Lima (2025) means by “The Balance of Environmental Ignorance). Whatever the case, Gough (2002) alerted us that there is a lot of ignorance in environmental research. There is also a lot of ignorance in environmental legislation, environmental policy-making and environmental policy implementation and management.

Indeed Angelito (2025) has stressed that ignorance is the cause of all human and societal problems. ReliefWeb (2015) agrees that ignorance is largely to blame for continued assault on the environment. However, Hogan (2023) writes that ignorance is not a justification for careless environmental inaction. Moyal Adiel and Amos Schurr (2022) have discussed the effect of deliberate ignorance and choice procedure on pro-environmental decisions. In Uganda deliberate ignorance of especially the president has made environmental experts almost useless and rendered the environment just for exploitation and abuse, with preservation and conservation being things of the past.

Apparently, the social construction of ignorance in science and environmental policy discourses (eg., Rayner, 2012) continues in Uganda, with environmental education being confined to the ecological-biological dimension of the environment. Besides, in his unilateral philosophy of development, which emphasises infrastructure development and separation of local communities from the environment, President Tibuhaburwa Museveni is singularly destroying the environment of Uganda, with his emphasis on private enterprise at the expense of public engagement in enterprise development and management.

The cost of ignorance (e.g. Saderup Zacarías, 2024) of the president about the unity of people/communities and the environment has proved to be extremely high. This is being compounded by land grabbing by people of exogenous roots, who are destroying forests and out indigenous agroecological farming systems as well as sacred places of conservation value.

It is further compounded by the combination of environmentally empty industrialisation in swampy areas and agricultural policies favouring sugarcane and oil palm in areas formally for natural forests. unregulated, clandestine mining as well as environmentally empty development of a uranium-based nuclear plant in Buyende, Busoga driven by greed and selfishness are likely to compound the problems of environmental ignorance in Uganda (see also Sönnergren Gripe and Sandahl, Johan, 2024). Criminal companies are unwittingly funding environmental crime (Saderup Zacarías, 2024) in Uganda.

We can talk of criminal ignorance, environmental harm and processes of denial (Thiel and Nigel South, 2022). Wanatabe (2015) sees ignorance as a limitation for the application of scientific methods to environmental protection activities. This is serious in Uganda because the government of Uganda has chosen to promote natural sciences ant the expense of the arts and social sciences. This is a consequence of democratic recession or decline in Uganda. Where there is environmental recession or decline there cannot be environmental democracy. Where there is no environmental democracy, environmental decision-making will be corrupt and corporate or business corruption will predominate just as environmental illiteracy and environmental ignorance also predominate.

All this will be exacerbated by presidentialism, with all environmental decisions being made by the President in spite of an adequate pool of environmental expertise. Uganda is in this state of environmental reality, unfortunately.

Last but not least we cannot fight and conquer environmental ignorance when the natural sciences, the arts (humanities) and social sciences are segregated. They must interact and work together for any success against environmental ignorance. Environmental ignorance does not recognise boundaries between natural science, arts and social science, nor the boundaries between the disciplines of knowledge. In other words, it is nondisciplinary.

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 and innovating, which they characterised as “The Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis” (CCTAA).