Reading Uganda’s media and Ugandans on social media can break one’s heart. It is a country where corruption has become both an industry and an ideology. The 2024 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index ranked Uganda 141 out of 180 countries, far below Kenya, Rwanda, or Tanzania. Estimates suggest that Uganda loses nearly Sh10 trillion a year to graft, about 10 percent of its GDP.
The larger cost lies in how it distorts merit and corrodes institutions, creating a quiet acceptance that “eating” is part of governance. President Museveni has long argued that corruption is not necessarily bad if the thieves invest their loot in the country. His logic is simple and even persuasive: if a corrupt official steals and, instead of hiding the money in a secret account in the Cayman Islands, invests it in rental houses, buys land, or starts a poultry farm, the money stays in Uganda and generates jobs.
To some, this argument exposes the moral exhaustion of a regime that has run out of ideas. However, for the sake of argument, let us accept Museveni’s thesis for now. If corruption can fuel growth, then it must also be inclusive. A system where every region gets a seat at the corruption table would at least spread the loot. Services would reach different corners of the country not because the government works, but because everyone is stealing with equal enthusiasm. That is what could be called “smart corruption,” where plunder at least produces something that appears to be development. Uganda, however, practises “dumb corruption.” It is a closed circuit of theft and kinship.
By conservative counts, at least 15 members of the Museveni family hold key government or military positions. Cousins and in-laws fill advisory roles and diplomatic posts. Uganda’s top leadership is dominated by officials from a few areas within the President’s home region. Reports by the Great Lakes Institute for Strategic Studies confirm this persistent ethnic imbalance in senior appointments. Meanwhile, many of the poorest districts, especially in Karamoja, West Nile, the north, and the east, remain largely excluded from the high table. Not surprisingly, data from the Uganda Bureau of Statistics show that poverty in parts of the north and east remains above 60 percent, compared to less than 10 percent in the south-west. Dumb corruption, therefore, reinforces Uganda’s regional economic inequality.
The farther you are from the seat of power, the less you benefit from the theft. This imbalance may explain why the National Unity Platform’s presidential candidate, Robert Kyagulanyi (better known as Bobi Wine), continues to attract large crowds, despite some analysts expecting the novelty of his 2021 presidential bid to have faded. His campaign speaks to communities and groups that are left out of the sharing. Museveni’s “productive corruption” argument recalls the early industrialisation of South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s. There, cronyism between politicians and family-run conglomerates, the chaebols, was rampant. Yet the government demanded results: exports, jobs, and technological progress. Corruption bought performance. Over time, as accountability grew, South Korea evolved from a poor autocracy into a prosperous democracy.
Uganda’s corruption, by contrast, supports political survival rather than economic transformation. Its effects on public services are devastating. In her book Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror, author Helen Epstein argues that Uganda’s health outcomes are now worse than during Idi Amin’s rule. Despite billions in donor and government funding, maternal mortality and child deaths remain high. Health workers steal drugs because their supervisors steal budgets. Corruption in healthcare no longer fuels productivity; it accelerates collapse. The Inspectorate of Government reported in 2023 that fewer than five percent of corruption cases involving senior officials resulted in conviction.
All this as the President continues to defend loyal culprits as “our people who made mistakes.” And so we arrive at a strange place. In a functional democracy, representation matters less because services work for everyone. Citizens do not need “their person” in government to get a school or a health centre. In a patronage State, the opposite is true. People demand representation not for policy, but for access to loot. Every tribe and religion wants a place in the Cabinet so that their region can “eat”. When corruption becomes the primary tool of distribution, exclusion becomes a political bomb. Uganda’s problem is, therefore, not corruption itself but its narrow ownership.
A truly smartly corrupt State, if such a thing can exist, would at least steal inclusively and build accidentally. Because Uganda does not, decades of looting have not created prosperity but resentment. If the idea of “good corruption” had any merit, Uganda would already be a South Korea of the Nile. It is not. Instead, it is a country where theft has ceased to be a means of enrichment and has become a way of governing, and eventually, of undoing itself.