My previous article documented the intimate agony of families – the wives who waited, the children who grew up with an empty chair at the table, the mothers who never received a body to bury. That was the ‘torture of the living.’ This article is about something equally devastating, though harder to see: the torture of the state. It is the story of what happens when a society’s doctors, engineers, teachers, administrators, and honest merchants are systematically removed – not merely as individuals, but as the connective tissue of a civilisation in the making. It is also a call for Uganda to move beyond fragmented, selective recollection and to build a national, institutionalised memory that belongs to every citizen, embedded in our schools, our public spaces, and the official record. Because if the next generation cannot see the whole picture, they cannot learn from it. And if we do not learn, we risk repeating it.
A century of deliberate investment
The story of Uganda’s lost generation does not begin in 1971. It begins more than a century earlier – in the classrooms, the royal courts, and the colonial policy papers that, together, constructed one of the most capable professional classes in Sub-Saharan Africa. The foundation was laid under the 1900 Buganda Agreement and subsequent treaties with Bunyoro, Tooro, and Ankole. The British did not simply replace traditional hierarchies; they re-tooled them. Chiefs were transformed from traditional rulers (holders of land, tribute, and local justice) into salaried administrative civil servants accountable to the colonial state.
Education was not merely encouraged, it became a functional requirement for power. Schools like King’s College Budo (1906) and Busoga College Mwiri (1911) were built precisely to train the sons of chiefs in bookkeeping, land surveying, and the mechanics of the emerging state. By the 1920s, the strategy had shifted from training “chiefs” to training “professionals”, and the engine driving this was not colonial policy alone.
The Agreement Kingdoms moved proactively. Through royal bursary schemes and local scholarship funds, Buganda, Ankole, Bunyoro, and Tooro sent their brightest young people to study law, medicine, and engineering in London, Bombay, and across East Africa. The missionary churches ran parallel pipelines, sponsoring able students through secondary school and, in many cases, onward to universities abroad.
These were not gestures of patronage; they were deliberate acts of nation-building, designed to ensure that when independence came, there would be Ugandans ready to govern, heal, build, and trade. Makerere College, founded in 1922 and steadily upgraded to meet the demand for high-level manpower, became the capstone of this system. It was the institution that brought these streams together and gave them a common professional identity. It would become, by the late 1950s, widely called ‘the Harvard of Africa’ all being prepared for the same mission: self-governance.
It can be argued that, two landmark policy instruments shaped the final stage of this process: The Worthington Plan (1946) and the Lidbury Commission (1954). Historians and Pan-Africanist scholars often view these instruments through a dual lens. The Worthington Plan, while building the ‘hardware’ of the power stations, the cotton ginneries, the hospitals, and the roads that would form the material foundation of an independent state is frequently criticised for its extractive nature. It prioritised British economic recovery after World War II over the holistic social welfare of Ugandans. Similarly, the Lidbury Commission, which provided the ‘software’, a professionalised, exam-qualified African civil service, is seen by some as a reactive measure. It was seen as an attempt to maintain colonial stability in the face of growing nationalist pressure.
The Lidbury reforms established a non-racial salary structure based on merit, created the Public Service Commission, defined the modern role of Permanent Secretaries. It also insisted, explicitly that Africanisation must not lower standards. Only those with high-level academic qualifications could enter senior posts. While the motivations of these and other colonial policy instruments were often self-serving or born out of necessity, historians generally agree that several colonial initiatives, some intended, some accidental provided the structural scaffolding for the independent state that emerged in 1962. The objective result was the creation of a ‘scholar-aristocracy’: a class of deeply credentialed professionals who understood themselves as guardians of the state. By 1962, Uganda had one of the most meritocratic civil services in the region. ‘If a nation is a clock, the 1960s were spent carefully machining the gears – the teachers, the engineers, the honest merchants.
In 1971, the clock was not just stopped; the gears were systematically melted down. We are still feeling the friction of those missing parts today.’ That class included men like Frank Kalimuzo, the first indigenous Vice-Chancellor of Makerere and former Head of the Civil Service; Joseph Mubiru, Governor of the Bank of Uganda; Benedicto Kiwanuka, Chief Justice; Basil Kiiza Bataringaya, the first Leader of the Opposition and a former minister; Francis Xavier Ruhesi, the first chartered engineer from Ankole; Lt Col Serapio Kakuhikire, among the first Ugandans trained at Sandhurst, and hundreds more whose names are recorded, and thousands more whose names are not.
The mechanics of decapitation
When Idi Amin seized power on 25 January 1971, he encountered a bureaucracy that was arguably the most professionalised in Sub-Saharan Africa. What followed was not merely political upheaval. It was the deliberate dismantling of the human infrastructure of a modern state. The clash was structural as much as personal. Amin was a product of the King’s African Rifles, a colonial track that prioritised physical toughness and loyalty over the ‘literary’ formation of the civil servant. The Lidbury professionals operated on written memos, strict budgetary controls, and deliberate, rational decision-making. To Amin’s command-and-obey military culture, this was not administration, it was obstruction. The most credentialed were also, in his view, the most dangerous: they knew the law, the accounts, the supply chains, and the procedures.
They were the referees of the state. Remove them, and power becomes unchallenged. Chief Justice Benedicto Kiwanuka was murdered. Frank Kalimuzo disappeared. Basil Kiiza Bataringaya was killed, as was his wife, Edith. Nekemia Bananuka, former Secretary General of Ankole, vanished alongside his three sons. Francis Xavier Tibayungwa, former Administrative Secretary of the Ankole Kingdom, was killed. Joshua Wakholi, John Kakonge, Alex Ojera, James Ochola – ministers all, gone. Abdalla Anyuru, Chairman of the Public Service Commission, was publicly executed at the Kampala Clock Tower in September 1977, alongside Y Y Okot, Chief Inspector of Schools, and Elias Okidi Menya, General Manager of the Lake Victoria Bottling Company. These were not isolated incidents.
They were a pattern of erasure – vertical, deliberate, and aimed at the most senior, most experienced nodes of the system. The administrative machinery was eviscerated in parallel. Many permanent secretaries and regional administrators were replaced not by qualified successors, but by military loyalists who lacked the training, ethics, or institutional memory to run complex public institutions. The meritocracy that the Lidbury Commission had spent decades constructing was replaced, almost overnight, by a patronage system held together by fear. In the army, the targeted purging of educated officers from the Acholi and Lango communities destroyed the professional military that Sandhurst had begun to build. Lt Col Kakuhikire, Valerius Ochima, Aboma Ayumu, John Ebitu, Emmanuel Ogwa – gone.
The economic war and the death of the honest merchant
The 1972 ‘Economic War’ is most often remembered for the expulsion of nearly 70,000 Ugandan Asians. That expulsion was catastrophic in its own right. The Asian community had been the commercial backbone of the Worthington-era economy, holding much of the engineering, accounting, and commercial expertise that kept businesses, factories, and supply chains functioning. But embedded within that larger story is a smaller, darker one. Before 1972, a cohort of astute African businessmen had begun a sophisticated economic transition, often partnering with or buying out Asian interests through formal, legal channels. Paul Bitature was a highly respected businessman from Western Uganda; Michael Kaggwa bridged law and commerce as President of the Industrial Court; James Senabulya had built an indigenous foothold in coffee processing and export, Uganda’s most valuable sector.
These men were blueprints, demonstrating what an indigenous, professional private sector could look like. They were removed. Into the vacuum poured the Mafutamingi: an overnight ‘business class’ of military sycophants, largely illiterate in matters of supply chains, depreciation, or reinvestment. The result was economic vandalism on a measurable scale. In 1971, Uganda produced 1.4 million hoes essential to its agricultural economy; by 1978, only 333,000. Sugar production collapsed from 110,000 tons in 1973 to just 3,000 tons in 1978. A functioning soap factory became a stockpile to be liquidated. A textile mill in Jinja became a shell. The culture this birthed was- extraction over production, connection over competence, survival over integrity – would take decades to begin to undo.
The brain drain: A net export of intelligence
For every professional murdered, many more fled. Doctors to Kenya and the United Kingdom. Professors to North America. Engineers to Tanzania and Southern Africa. Uganda became, in the language of development economists, a ‘net exporter of human capital’, haemorrhaging the very people it had spent a century training. Makerere, once the Harvard of Africa, was gutted. Dr Vincent Pim Emiru, Professor of Ophthalmology, disappeared. Dr Edward Kizito, Head of the Dental School, was gone.
Engineer Kagulire Kasadha vanished. The institutions they had staffed lost not merely individuals, but the institutional memory, research traditions, professional standards, and mentorship relationships that make a university a university. Research by economists Arne Bigsten and Steve Kayizzi-Mugerwa – in their landmark study of Uganda’s post-Amin reconstruction – identified what they called the ‘mentor gap’ as the most devastating long-term consequence. In the Lidbury and Worthington system, a senior professional was expected to mentor three juniors. When that senior was killed or fled, the chain of knowledge transfer broke.
By 1979, the ‘middle management’ cohort – the 35 to 50-year-olds who should have been ready to take over – was almost entirely missing. Uganda had to wait for the teenagers of the 1980s to finish university and accumulate experience before ministries could function at a pre-Amin level of professionalism. That recovery was pushed well into the late 1990s. The public executions of February 10, 1973 included not only political figures but James Karuhanga, a mathematics teacher, and Sebastino Namirundu, a secondary school student. Knowledge itself was being executed.
The price we are still paying
The cost of this destruction was not confined to the 1970s. Research suggests Uganda lost more than 50 percent of its professional and technical workforce during Amin’s reign. The real value of civil servants’ salaries collapsed by 90 percent within a decade, while the cost of living for the professional class rose by 234 percent between 1971 and 1977. Those who were not killed or exiled were driven into the black market or subsistence farming to survive. Professionalism had been made economically impossible. The loss of mentorship is perhaps the most invisible and profound consequence. A generation of young Ugandans grew up without the professional archetypes they were meant to emulate. The engineers, jurists, and honest merchants who should have been their models were gone.
In their place rose the culture of the Magendo: short-termism, the quick transaction over the long investment, survival over craft. The damage to the civil service ran deeper still. When meritocracy is replaced by patronage, and when honesty becomes a liability, the state does not merely become less efficient. It becomes predatory. The ‘petty authoritarianism’ and survivalist corruption that calcified in the 1970s did not simply evaporate with Amin’s fall. Habits of governance, like habits of mind, outlast the regimes that instil them. As historian Derek Peterson’s research in district archives showed, by 1975 basic bureaucratic functions like collecting taxes, conducting land surveys, maintaining medical records had essentially ceased.
Historians broadly estimate that the destruction set Uganda’s economic and social development back by two to three decades. While countries like Malaysia and South Korea, with whom Uganda was being favourably compared in the early 1960s were compounding institutional gains, Uganda was attempting to rebuild from the ruins. We are still building. You can rebuild a bridge in a year, but you cannot rebuild a professional culture until a new generation grows up.
The case for institutionalised memory
There is a temptation, in documenting this history, to tell it selectively, to foreground the stories of those who now have a voice, those whose families survived and can speak, those whose names appear in the memoirs and the court records. That temptation must be resisted. The disappeared came from every corner of this country. Simayo Peter Oryem, Administrative Secretary of the Acholi District Council. Benedict Otim, leader of local administration in Lango. Francis Walugembe, Mayor of Masaka. Stephen Epunau, manager of the Kabale branch of Barclays Bank. Haji Suleiman Balunwa, Administrative Secretary of Busoga District. Rwamashonge, President of the Uganda Mineworkers Union at Kilembe copper mines.
Their deaths diminished every region, every ethnicity, every faith community in Uganda. Uganda needs to institutionalise the culture of memory. This means embedding this history in the national educational curriculum – not as a footnote, but as a substantive and honest account of what was done, who was lost, and what it cost. It means creating and maintaining public spaces of recognition – memorials, named streets, dedicated archives – that give physical form to the acknowledgment that these people existed and that their absence shaped the country we live in. It means building a national truth and memory archive, supported by law, that is not subject to the editorial choices of successive governments.
Memory that depends on political goodwill is not memory; it is mythology. And it means ensuring that the recording is comprehensive and non-selective: not only the politically prominent, but the town engineers and bank managers and textile workers, the mathematics teachers, the Acholi and Langi soldiers. Not only those with surviving families who can advocate for them, but those who left no one behind to remember their names. ‘We are currently living in a house that was partially demolished while the cement was still wet. To rebuild it, we must first acknowledge who the architects were, what was done to them, and how deep the foundation damage goes.’
Remembering whole
The greatest tragedy of the 1970s was not only what was destroyed. It was what was never built: the Uganda that the Golden Generation would have made. A century of deliberate investment – from the 1900 Buganda Agreement to the Lidbury Commission, from the royal bursary schemes to the lecture halls of Makerere – had produced something rare: a professional class capable of running a modern state. It was dismantled in less than a decade. The Bigsten-Kayizzi-Mugerwa analysis is precise on this point: you can rebuild physical infrastructure in a year, but the ‘stock’ of institutional knowledge – the tacit expertise, the mentorship chains, the unwritten culture of how to run a ministry or a hospital or a court – cannot be reconstructed until a new generation grows up, learns, and earns its own experience.
That took until the late 1990s. We will never know the hospitals that Dr Emiru might have built, the contracts that Senabulya or Bitature might have negotiated, the students that Karuhanga might have taught, the legal architecture that Kiwanuka might have shaped. That unrealised potential is, in the most precise sense, the full cost of what happened. But we can honour it. We can insist that the stories of the disappeared, the killed, and the tortured are told fully, formally, and forever – not selectively, not only by those who happen to have a platform, not subject to revision whenever the political winds shift. Recognition is not nostalgia. It is not political grievance.
It is the precondition for an honest reckoning with who we are and what we must not become again. The new generation deserves to inherit this story whole. They cannot learn from a history they are not permitted to see.