When Yudaya Twase Musisi walked into her first corporate dinner as a young banker in 1998, she was wearing the right dress and holding the right invitation. What she did not have was the right confidence. She stood at the door perspiring, unsure when to drink the water already served at her place setting, wondering whether everyone in the room had received a manual she had somehow missed.
Nearly three decades later, the retired client relationship manager has decided that enough is finally enough. The bad manners she once endured in silence have, in her view, spilled out of private boardrooms and into public life with such force that she has come out of retirement to teach etiquette to a nation she believes has forgotten how to behave. But is Uganda actually getting ruder, or are we simply running out of places to hide our social anxiety?
The bad manners takeover
Twase Musisi, who left banking in 2016 after 18 years of interfacing with brilliant minds and grand dinners, insists the decline is real and measurable. She sees it at traditional weddings where brides and their entourages do not understand what they are wearing. She sees it in corporate spaces where leadership etiquette is ‘lacking at every level’. She sees it among Parliamentarians, among young business executives, and among the customer-facing representatives who are left to handle clients their bosses would rather not face.
‘People of such good manners and character are becoming fewer every other day,’ she says, ‘And those with bad manners are taking over the public space.’
The observation is as old as civilisation itself. Every generation believes the next one has forgotten how to be respectful. What makes Musisi’s intervention worth noting is that she does not come to the subject from a position of inherited privilege or finishing-school polish. She learnt etiquette the hard way, by teaching herself after one too many evenings of feeling small in rooms where she was supposed to feel accomplished.
It is about how you treat people
Her definition of the word is broader than most.
‘Whenever we hear the word etiquette, people think it is about holding the fork,’ she says. ‘And yet it is much more than that, in fact, it is more about how to treat people.’
It is, she explains, the confidence to enter a room, the grace to make others comfortable, and the humility to value people even when you disagree with them. In other words, it is the soft skill that keeps you in the room when your technical skills have already been noticed and filed away.
The digital age has complicated the picture. Twase notes that people now voluntarily reveal private information that damages their social standing, because the information age arrived without an accompanying manual for digital etiquette. Social intelligence, she argues, is not keeping pace with social media. You do not have to be loud to make a point, but loudness has become the default language of online discourse, and that volume is leaking into offline spaces.
Ubuntu in a global village
She is careful, however, to distinguish between global etiquette and what she calls the African perspective. In the global tradition, confidence means looking someone in the eye and smiling. In the African tradition, looking an elder in the eye can be read as aggression. Ubuntu, she reminds us, is our heritage. The guest is ushered in and escorted out. The poorest neighbour asking for salt or fire is treated with dignity because communal living demands inclusion.
This raises an uncomfortable question that Musisi’s crusade must eventually confront. Are Ugandans losing their manners, or are they losing a specific set of cultural codes that once governed how we treated one another? The corporate dinner that intimidates a brilliant banker may not be evidence of national rudeness at all. It may simply be evidence that the rules of one world have not been taught to people raised in another.
Musisi is aware of the tension. She insists that her teaching adds an African perspective to continental etiquette rather than replacing one with the other. But she is also unapologetic about the standards she wants to enforce. Arrive on time, not too early. Respect the dress code. Thank the host. These are little snippets, she says, that make a whole lot of difference.
The room where it is worst
The most vulnerable space she identifies is not the boardroom or the wedding reception. It is Parliament, where decorum should be institutional but is, in her assessment, appalling. She also worries about women who have been ‘left behind for a very long time’ and need what she calls leadership etiquette for women, because true elegance is not about wealth or status but about the ability to make others feel comfortable.
If there is a silver lining in her diagnosis, it is that she believes etiquette can be taught, and that children and teenagers are the ones who will change communities. But the clock is ticking. The longer a generation goes without being taught how to hold people, the more likely they are to treat the world as a room they have already been locked out of.
Perhaps Uganda is not getting ruder. Perhaps the spaces where manners matter have simply expanded beyond the narrow corridors that once contained them, and a nation is fumbling its way toward new codes of respect without anyone to guide the transition.