Since its inception as a British Protectorate in 1894, the entity known as Uganda has been searching for the formula for lasting peace, security and unity.

From the Commonwealth Realm of 1962 to the republic of today, this quest has been spearheaded by successive leaders who have consistently turned to the same instruments: the gun and the administrative map.

But as we survey the landscape of the Great Lakes region – a region scarred by conflict and defined by its mineral wealth – we must ask a fundamental and urgent question: Can a country that is heavily bantustanised and militarised ever achieve meaningful, long-term unity? Or is it destined to repeat the violent collapse of other ethnically-fractured, militarised empires?

Unity by force

The historical precedent is clear and well-documented. The defunct Soviet Union was a vast conglomerate of multiple nationalities, woven together and held in check by the sheer force of the Red Army and an omnipresent security apparatus.

As historian Ronald Grigor Suny demonstrates in his seminal work The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union, the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union was caused in large part by nationalism – the demands of subject nationalities for independence and autonomy. Unified in their hostility to the Kremlin’s authority, the fifteen constituent Union Republics declared their sovereignty and began to build state institutions of their own.

For decades, Soviet rulers legitimised their power by claiming they had delivered peace, security and unity across Eastern Europe. Yet this was a peace born of the barrel of a gun, not from the collective consciousness of their constituent peoples. Suny argues that nations are “imagined communities,” products of historical processes rather than eternal or primordial identities.

The principle of nationality that buried the Soviet Union and destroyed its empire in Eastern Europe continues to shape conflicts among the new independent countries of that vast region. Such peace, security and unity are unstable by nature. They may endure in the short to medium term, but they cannot stand the test of time because their survival depends on a supersonic and continuous investment in military might and a favourable constellation of global politics.

The moment that investment falters, or the geopolitical winds shift, the entire edifice crumbles. The disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the subsequent armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine – two of its primary components – is a stark, contemporary testament to this truth.

From independence to militarisation

Uganda’s trajectory mirrors this dangerous path. Since independence on October 9, 1962, the nation has experienced nearly eight changes of presidency, the vast majority effected not through the ballot box but through the bullet. This fundamental fact reveals that the “stability” so ritually invoked by our rulers has been, in reality, an unstable stability – a military peace, a military security, and a military unity, all sustained by gunpowder. This is a peace paid for in the highest currency: time, energy, money, human life, and environmental security.

Its history is punctuated by genocides, biocides, ecocides, ethnocide, and what can only be termed an intellectual death, where critical thought is subjugated to the narrow, disciplinary education that serves the state’s interest in domestication and control. The cumulative impact has been a continuous cycle of dependency and the perpetual postponement of genuine development, transformation, and progress.

The colonial architects of the Uganda Protectorate left behind a complex inheritance. While they militarised the urban centres, they largely left the traditional cultural nations intact, merely conglomerating them into a new administrative “nation.”

When power was handed over to Apollo Milton Obote, the central challenge was how to manage the delicate balance of power between a strong periphery and a nascent centre – a balance enshrined in the federal 1962 Constitution. Obote’s solution was to dismantle the political muscle of the kingdoms – Buganda, Bunyoro, Ankole, Toro and the semi-kingdom of Busoga. He abolished them, concentrating all power and authority in the office of the Executive President. This centralisation was the first step.

To further consolidate power, Obote began the process of bantustanisation – the creation of powerless, dependent administrative enclaves. In the 1960s and again in the 1980s, he carved new districts out of the former kingdoms, fragmenting traditional loyalties and replacing them with administrative units entirely dependent on the centre. This administrative fragmentation, coupled with the increasing militarisation of the state, became the twin pillars of disempowerment.

Perfecting the instruments of control

President Yoweri Tibuhaburwa Museveni did not invent these instruments, but he has perfected them. Under the guise of decentralisation and bringing services closer to the people, he has presided over an explosion in the number of districts.

Official data from the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) confirms that as of July 2020, Uganda was divided into 135 districts plus the capital city of Kampala. More recent UBOS data shows the number has now reached 146 districts, organised into four administrative regions.

This represents an extraordinary fragmentation of the administrative map, transforming Uganda into a patchwork of over 100 unsustainable enclaves. These Bantustans are economically unviable, perpetually exploited for political patronage and utterly dependent on Kampala.

Simultaneously, Museveni has constructed Uganda as a military garrison. The military, a heavily militarised police, and a sprawling network of spy agencies (ESO, ISO, DISO, GISO, VISO and Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence, recently rebranded Defence Intelligence and Security). Saturate the nation. The financial commitment to this security apparatus is staggering. According to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), compiled by the World Bank, military expenditure in Uganda was reported at approximately 1.98 per cent of GDP in 2023. SIPRI’s 2024 Yearbook further reveals that Uganda’s military expenditure rose by 5.6 per cent between 2022 and 2023, from $925 million to $977 million.

The SIPRI data places this spending in regional context. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) registered the highest year-on-year increase in military spending globally in 2023 (105 per cent), while South Sudan had the second highest increase (78 per cent). Uganda’s increasing militarisation must be viewed within this volatile regional dynamic.

As Nan Tian, Senior Researcher at SIPRI, warns, “Governments that allocate substantial resources to the military can inadvertently increase the political power of the military. This will in turn lower both civilian control and oversight and increase the risk of an unconstitutional change of government (coups)”.

Under Uganda’s amended public finance management laws, military expenditure is now grouped under the Governance and Security Programme (GSP) for budgeting purposes. For FY 2024-25, this sector was allocated Ush7.4 trillion, the second largest sector allocation after non-wage recurrent expenditure. The bulk of this budget – Ush5 trillion (68 per cent) – was for security, with the Ministry of Defence receiving Ush3.9 trillion.

The 1995 Constitution, far from liberating the people, has been crafted to make the office of the president more sovereign and more liberated from the people than ever before in our history. Article 98(1) establishes the president as “the Head of State, Head of Government and Commander-in-Chief of the Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces and the Fountain of Honour.”

Article 98(4) grants the President immunity from legal proceedings while in office: “While holding office, the President shall not be liable to proceedings in any court.” Article 99 vests the entire executive authority of Uganda in the president. This constitutional architecture concentrates power in a manner unprecedented in our history.

Spectre of regional conflict

The result is a nation that is both over-bantustanised and over-militarised, existing as a police state under heavy surveillance. The question that hangs over us is the same one that doomed the Soviet Union: Can such a construction last?

The Soviet Union’s collapse was triggered by internal weakness and external pressure. What will be Uganda’s trigger? We need look no further than the ongoing externalisation of our conflicts in the Great Lakes region. For decades, Uganda has projected its military power across its borders, particularly into the mineral-rich eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Uganda currently runs “Operation Shujaa,” a joint military mission with the DRC launched in 2021 to fight the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebel group.

A growing consensus in the region holds that Uganda and Rwanda bear significant responsibility for the mayhem wreaked by the M23 rebel group.

Yet, in a startling twist, President Paul Kagame of Rwanda has declared that M23 is a “Ugandan affair.” More ominously, a prominent leader of the Banyarwanda community in Uganda, Frank Gashumba, has warned that if his community were ever expelled from Uganda, the “M23 phenomenon” would follow them here.

If this “prophecy” were to materialise, it would reveal the ultimate folly of the military-garrison state. It would mean we have been pouring billions of shillings into a militarisation project, diverting funds from healthcare, education and infrastructure, only to pour them into a sinkhole.

As Nan Tian observes, “An extra dollar spent on the military potentially crowds out spending for human development. Higher military expenditures can divert resources away from essential socio-economic areas such as education, healthcare and infrastructure. This may hinder efforts to improve living standards, reduce poverty and promote human development. That, in turn, can feed a cycle of instability and insecurity in a country or region.

The contrast with Uganda’s budget priorities is stark. The FY 2024/25 Budget Speech by Minister of Finance Matia Kasaija emphasises, “Full monetisation of Uganda’s economy through commercial agriculture, industrialisation, expanding and broadening services, digital transformation and market access.”

Yet the massive allocation to security spending sits uneasily alongside these development goals.

Conclusion

The peace, security, and unity of a nation cannot be manufactured in the barracks or imposed by the spy. They are products of a collective national mind, nurtured by justice, equity, and a sense of belonging for all its peoples. A country fractured into 146 meaningless, powerless enclaves and held together by a military apparatus consuming nearly 2 per cent of GDP is not a nation; it is a prison.

And as history shows—from the Soviet Union to the contemporary conflicts in our own region – no prison is built to last forever. For Uganda, the path to a meaningful and enduring future lies not in further militarization and bantustanisation, but in their opposite: genuine democratisation, restorative justice and the painful but necessary work of forging a true national community from the wreckage of the garrison state.

For God and my country

• A Tell Media report / By Oweyegha-Afunaduula. Prof Oweyegha-Afunaduula is a natural scientist, academic, public intellectual and a former Secretary General of Makerere University Academic Staff Association and former chair of the Nile Basin Discourse.