Uganda’s political class has a love affair with titles. ‘Honourable’, ‘Right Honourable’, the prefixes roll off tongues as though dignity itself were being manufactured in bulk.
Yet the bearers of these lofty labels are often the very names listed in corruption reports, procurement scandals, and betrayals of public trust. At what point do we stop clapping for this colonial theatre and admit that the show is more farce than honour?
Britain’s medieval relics
The titles we so freely distribute are not Ugandan inventions. ‘Honourable’ and ‘Right Honourable’ trace back to an aristocratic and parliamentary order rooted in medieval hierarchy. They once carried weight because they were embedded in rigid class systems. But even in Britain today, they feel increasingly outdated. What exactly does ‘Right Honourable’ mean in a modern democracy?
Why should a 21st-Century MP in Westminster sound like a courtier from the 1600s? Britain, clinging to monarchy and pageantry, keeps these relics partly out of nostalgia. But Uganda did something stranger: we adopted them wholesale without ever asking if they were still relevant, even to their mother country. We embraced the vocabulary of medieval hierarchy while promising ourselves that we were building a modern republic.
From ‘honourable’ to ‘dishonourable’
In Uganda, ‘honourable’ has become the slipperiest word in the dictionary. It sticks automatically to Members of Parliament, regardless of their record. Even those caught red-handed in corruption scandals continue to be addressed with reverence in chambers, on airwaves, and at public functions.
The Luganda equivalent, ow’ekitiibwa, once evoked respect. Today, it has been twisted by sarcasm into a synonym for ‘thief.’ The satire has become so entrenched that when a non-Luganda-speaking MP recently discovered the translation, Parliament itself burst into laughter.
That moment of collective humour revealed something deeper: the people no longer see honour in those who wear the title. From inflated allowances to vanishing billions, the so-called honourables have transformed what was meant to dignify into a running national joke. It is no accident that young Ugandans, scrolling through memes, no longer treat ‘honourable’ as a mark of respect. It is shorthand for privilege, arrogance, and scandal.
The titles we abandoned
What makes the satire sharper is that Uganda once had titles that truly carried both honour and responsibility. In Buganda, katikkiro (prime minister), omuwanika (treasurer), and Ssabalangira (chief prince) were not empty badges. They were functions tied to duty, reputation, and accountability to the community. To be called by one of these names was to be measured daily against the values it represented. In discarding our indigenous titles for borrowed prefixes, we swapped responsibility for costume jewellery. The imported terms sound grand but carry no teeth. The indigenous terms sounded ordinary but carried weight.
Time for a Ugandan reset
Uganda must stop pretending. If we want leaders who command respect, let the honour be earned, not conferred by colonial grammar. Call our MPs Representatives. Call them Legislators. Let them introduce themselves by the work they do, not by the dust of an imported hierarchy. Until then, every corruption scandal involving an ‘honourable’ will remind us of this national irony: we imported the titles, we exported the scandals, and we left the honour behind.