Increasingly, media like the Daily Monitor and others must exercise caution and a measure of self-censorship in how they report on the President and First Family. And yet, there is no way around this. Everybody who is anybody in media, politics, and civil society knows that the National Resistance Movement (NRM)’s Uganda is increasingly resembling the West African States of Gabon and Togo 20 years ago, in which the president’s family was the de facto government.
It’s becoming so glaring, public, and obvious, it’s hard to imagine which media house would get into trouble by pointing it out. That’s why it was important last month for leading politicians, security officers, and businessmen to be seen to take part in the MK Charity Run, and the reason the same people dutifully travel to Gulu from time to time to meet Gen Salim Saleh. In the latest Cabinet, no less than six relatives and in-laws are included. This is important, not so much that Museveni’s relatives are necessarily unqualified for these government jobs, but for what it does to the country.
Civil servants and other technocrats start to calculate their prospects of appointment or promotion in terms of their perceived proximity or loyalty to the First Family and not in their technical performance on the job. We used to see this spectacle every May from 1981 to 1985, when senior civil servants made a point of travelling to Bushenyi in western Uganda to attend the Heroes’ Day celebrations for President Milton Obote.
As Google’s AI chatbot put it on June 2, 2026: ‘Rather than strengthening institutions, Museveni prefers a chaotic, overlapping governance structure where everything routes back to him. Ugandans complain bitterly about the decay of public health facilities (like Mulago hospital) and the state of Kampala’s potholed roads, while billions are spent on a bloated Parliament and a network of presidential advisors who rarely see him…The very traits that enabled him to save Uganda from systemic collapse-unyielding discipline, tactical flexibility, and a fierce consolidation of authority-are the exact traits that now constrain the country’s democratic evolution. His legacy remains a deeply polarising study in how a revolutionary liberator can gradually morph into the vanguard of the status quo.’
This line, ‘Rather than strengthening institutions, Museveni prefers a chaotic, overlapping governance structure where everything routes back to him,’ was in full public view last week when the new Cabinet was announced. First, Justine Kasule Lumumba was named the Government Chief Whip in Parliament even though she is not an MP, as the position requires the office holder. And then there was the endless confusion about several appointees who, it was discovered, hold citizenship of other countries as well as Uganda’s. Even after 40 years in power and several election victories (or ‘victories’) later, State House still can’t seem to get basic details of procedure and law right.
A CIA report on Uganda in July 1984 described the then national army, the UNLA, in terms that sound much like the NRM government today – bloated, overstaffed, indisciplined, split into bickering factions. The dramatic fall from power of the Speaker of the 11th Parliament, Anita Among, was the biggest story of the first half of 2026, bigger, even, than the general election in January. Among’s excesses and lack of modesty in displaying her wealth attracted resentment in the country, her fall being welcomed, although many were quick to note that her purge seemed more driven by a political need to clip her wings than a genuine clampdown on corruption.
Turning to Ugandan society itself, the bloated, inefficient, and corrupt NRM State is complemented by the weak and lacklustre mentality of the population. If we use searches on Google as an indicator of interests and aspirations – which certainly I do – in most measurements of elite taste, Uganda ranks near the bottom, not just in Africa but in the world. From golf to philosophy, milk to tennis, books to tourism, libraries, credit cards, poetry, insurance, restaurants, microwave ovens, and Artificial Intelligence, and dozens others, the more elite or ‘sophisticated’ the topic or product, the more likely Uganda ranks among the bottom 10 or 15 countries in the world.
I first used Google data in my State of the Nation report in 2024, and nothing has changed about Uganda’s relative global ranking. The state of the nation, thus, is one of a low-calibre people led by a wasteful and corrupt government. As I argued last week in my examination of Jinja, the only hope for a revival and streamlining of Uganda will have to come from external sources, probably a combination of a Chinese infrastructure and European funding undertaking.