Before President Tibuhaburwa Museveni captured the instruments of power in Uganda in 1986 through the barrel of the gun, with the assistance of Rwandan Tutsi refugees who wanted to use Uganda’s resources also to capture power in Rwanda. The country had developed an enviable industrial base since the colonial times.

It had an industrial town Jinja, in Busoga, which had a diversity of interlinked factories. Unfortunately, in the wake of his bush war, leading to the capture of power, Jinja lost most of its factories through vandalism by Museveni’s combatants. There are claims that some of the vandalised factories had their infrastructure dismantled and parts carried off to Rwanda.

Hopefully, at an opportune time, thorough research will be conducted to establish what exactly happened when the combatants of Luwero entered Jinja. The remaining functional factories, and the vandalised ones were sold off by the combatants in government mostly to themselves, but also to some select Indians posing as foreign investors, although they were given public money as start-up capital, almost free labour (since the regime removed minimum wage), 10-year tax holidays and allowed to repatriate all their profits back to their country -India.

Once the industrial sector suffered destruction by combatants, it was clear the new regime would set on a new path of rebuilding and reconstruction of the sector. However, the NRM leaders are doing this in light of the lasseiz faire paradigm (Obwona, et al, 2014) that does not allow direct government intervention in the industrial process.

Many thinkers have written about Uganda’s industrial sector since President Tibuhaburwa Museveni captured the instruments of power and presided over the destruction of the industrial sector. Obwona, et al (2014) and Shinyekwa, et al (2016) discussed in writing the evolution of industry in Uganda. They believed the non-interventionist policy has not been adequate to propel Uganda’s industrialisation. They called for the direct interventionist approach to industrialisation in Uganda. Such an approach shows that the government is interested in industrialisation and may reduce corruption of manipulators of the sector by locals who quickly strike venture deals with do called foreigners that may even serve as fronts for them.

Ortega (2025),  in the article in the Observer, What Museveni got wrong about industrialisation, seems to suggest that the president perceived industrialisation as just a scattering of factories on the biocultural landscape of Uganda without interconnections between them. In this case, the more factories, the more industrialisation! However, Ortega teaches us that a factory is not an industrialisation. Even many factories are not necessarily industries. Those are Katwe-like installations that may disappear because they are equivalent to what we ecologists call “ecological islands”.

An industry is a self-sustaining ecosystem of factories, which feed into and originate from each other, mutually reinforcing each other and continually achieving high levels of integration with each other.

One thing is true. Many Ugandans are convinced that new industrialisation is taking place in Uganda. Industrial parks have been established, unfortunately without an environmental vision. This means that Uganda’s industrial rebuilding and reconstruction is potentially replete with ecological-biological, socio-economic and sociocultural disruptions that Ugandans never imagined.

Many disconnected factories are located in areas formally occupied by swamps, which were acting as sinks for wastes, including carbon dioxide. However, without a clear environmental vision, many industrial parks are likely to be ecologically perturbed by floods. Floods can greatly reduce the value of industrialisation and the incomes of industrial actors as we recently saw recently in the areas close to the assaulted Nakivibo Channel.

My present article is not about industrialisation per se. It is about linking industrialisation and intellectual activity. The article title Uganda: Industrial Revolution Without Intellectual Debates suggests that industrialisation without intellectual debates is a stale economic-political undertaking.

Indeed, Stearns (3015), stressed the value of debating the industrial revolution. As he noted, the industrial revolution was and is a huge development as one of the fundamental changes in human experiences in the modern world. It adds a lot of value when intellectuals – public and institutional – are busy debating the changes engendered by industrialisation.

The British industrial revolution was the transition to manufacturing processes that occurred from about 1760 to sometime between 1830 and 1843. Machines took over from manual production. New chemical manufacturing and iron production, improved efficiency of water power, increased used of steam power and development of machine tools characterised the industrial revolution. Thinking and rethinking of most aspects of British society became inescapable.

Intellectuals based in the social sciences and the humanities became active putting forward new theories of change and discarding the old ones. Indeed the old intellectual and academic elite gave way to new academic and intellectual.

The old elite received their status from landed wealth. The new story that unfolded was different. A new elite was to receive its status from industrial wealth. The new elite debated the roles of natural resources, foreign investors, government, intellectuals, the new industrialised society and the emerging social relations and social dynamics and other industry-related issues in Britain.

In Uganda, however, the situation is different. The 40 years of President Tibuhaburwa Museveni has seen the president become everything in everything. He initiates industry and stops industry. He invites foreign investors and tells them what he wants, but goes on to give them start-up capital, cheap labour (by removing minimum wage), tax holidays and a leeway to take all their profits out of the country, leaving the country to gain nothing.

Since he is the president and the substantive Minister of Finance, he decides how much money is given to the different investors as start-up capital. He even decides how much money is forgiven.

The Ugandan parliament, which is more or less lucky when and who comes in as an investor. There are or were times when the president sent Ugandan soldiers to foreign countries and the deceptively sought the permission of parliament retrospectively. The best example of an investor who was single-handedly picked by the president is the Lubowa Specialised Hospital (or the International Specialised Hospital of Uganda) investor, an Italian-Arab woman said to be related to fallen Libyan ruler, Muammar Gaddafi called Enrica Pinetti. According to a Daily Monitor article of March 6, 2025, by Damali Makhaye Ush774.4 billion of taxpayer’s money had been released by parliament to the investor since 2021, but there was no hospital and no completion date committed to by the investor. Like other projects in the country project has not benefited from public or university based intellectual debates because there is intellectual death in the country.

Young people, who should have got humanizing employment are retained at home as domestic slaves or exported to the Middle East as international slaves, but the evil slave network is cast by the government a lucrative source of employment of young people, which also praises it as major conduit for foreign exchange being earned through the slave labourers.

As if all this is not enough, the NRM government policies emphasising politics and political survival have disintegrated the science (humanities, social science, humanities and natural sciences, preferring natural sciences in the universities because it is the social scientists and humanists who have, since the colonial time, that have actively sustained intellectual debates, often challenging the policies and choices of power. To silence them the President of Uganda has overhyped natural scientists by paying them far more even if they hold the same experience and qualifications with their counterparts in the humanities and the social sciences.

Fear and silence on the university campuses are now integral to the academia. There is virtually no intellectual production and intellectual challenges to government choices or policies. Even the Departments of Political Science there is a deep sea of silence and fear. What now matter are academicism, scholasticism and careerism. The government is happy that there is so much fear and silence on the university campuses that it cannot be challenged intellectually on anything. It does whatever it wants without expecting contradictory messages from the campuses. It values its Kyankwazi- bred intellectual fat mores because they are committed to power retention by him and his NRM party.

The weaponized schemes of Myooga, Operation Wealth Creation and Parish Development Model are passing the test of time, succeeding in the impoverishment of whole communities.

Meanwhile the government continues to pump billions of shillings into the schemes, unchallenged by present-day inactivated intellectuals in the universities. This is also true of the model of factorisation being cast as industrialisation. It is equally terrible in the society. The space for public intellectuals has been captured by nincompoops and ignoramuses, who now posit themselves as public intellectuals, mainly to immunize the regime in power and its choices in various sectors of the economy from intellectual inquiry and questioning and from public scrutiny.

In one sentence industrialisation in Uganda is more of less a one-man show and is devoid of intellectual debates, unlike what obtained during the British industrial revolution.

There is intellectual death both on the university campuses and in the greater society of Uganda. Therefore, meaningful and effective intellectual debates are absent in the academia and in the public space.

This does not augur well for Uganda of the 21st Century. The president of Uganda has been able to achieve the intellectual death of Ugandans in and outside the universities. If there are any gains for the NRM regime to talk about, this must rank high on the list of gains.

It is now a choice between survival and extinction of the nation of Uganda before the 21st century ends and the 22^nd century begins. The NRM regime is lucky because most of the people it governs are so intellectually poor and politically underdeveloped that they are unaware of what is going on. They have largely been stupefied by money.

Question is: Who gains, who loses?

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).