Fellow Ugandans Uganda is already in election fever. Norbert Mao recently declared that the country is undergoing a ‘political transformation.’ He is right – but the transformation taking shape may not be the one voters expect at rallies. It is unfolding in classrooms, salary slips, and commuter choices.
At the IPOD Summit 2025, President Museveni used one of his favourite analogies. Politicians, he argued, are like doctors diagnosing a patient. Unless they are as brilliant as scientists, they cannot read the symptoms of society or prescribe the right cure. It was a neat metaphor – but troubling. If every politician must be a scientist to govern, where does that leave philosophers, historians, and sociologists who explain causes, not just symptoms?
The irony deepens when applied to his own salary policy. Science teachers, like engineers or pilots, are paid handsomely, while arts teachers – like cleaners or secretaries – lag far behind. Yet doctors cannot function without cleaners; pilots cannot fly without ground staff. Remove one group, and the system collapses.
The results are visible. The science teacher, buoyed by a bigger pay cheque, drives to school in a modest car. The arts teacher, equally qualified but undervalued, clings to a boda boda. This is no harmless contrast. Uganda loses an average of 10 people a day in road accidents, with boda bodas accounting for nearly half. In 2022 alone, boda bodas killed 1,422 riders and passengers.
The salary policy is scripting a new inequality: one group travels safely; the other risks their life daily. Transformation, here, is measured not in slogans but in blood on the tarmac. The question is whether this transformation will strengthen Uganda or divide it further. Science is vital – no one disputes that. But societies are not sustained by laboratories alone.
The humanities teach citizens to think critically, remember their history, and question authority. When governments sideline these disciplines, they silence the very voices that explain why societies rise or collapse. The West provides cautionary lessons. Climate change was not caused by a lack of scientific knowledge but by lack of restraint.
Nuclear bombs were not accidents of poor calculation but brilliance without ethics. Artificial Intelligence now promises efficiency yet is already deployed as surveillance, monitoring citizens, and flagging dissent. These are not technical failures; they are civic ones. As 2026 approaches, Uganda’s voters must ask what kind of transformation they are being offered.
One where science teachers drive cars past accident scenes while humanities teachers cling to boda bodas? Or one where science and the humanities work together – building not just machines, but also justice and civic trust? Science can build rockets, but only the humanities remind us to ask where they should go and why. If Uganda forgets that, its political transformation may deliver cars for a few – but leave many others permanently stranded. Ciao