Last Tuesday, Uganda marked its 37th Heroes’ Day, with fewer than 25 guests in attendance because of Ebola restrictions. President Museveni used the occasion to return to his wealth creation message.
”I don’t want to neighbour poor people everywhere I be,” he told the gathering, ”because I’m a Christian and I want to go to Heaven. I don’t want the angels to lock me out, like the rich man who had wealth on earth and on ascending was sent to hell.”
It is a fine sermon. In fact, it is the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31, one of the most famous stories Jesus told, and its lesson is the sin of omission. But the President has remembered only half of it. The rich man was not condemned for his wealth. He was condemned for Lazarus, the sick man at his gate, whom he passed every day and chose not to see and or help out.
Uganda’s Lazarus is on shift right now, in the place Ugandans simply call ‘Casualty’. If you have never been inside Mulago hospital’s emergency ward, count it among your blessings. It is where this city’s worst hours arrive, the victims of the Kampala-Jinja Highway and the Northern Bypass are offloaded in droves from police pickups, families press against corridors, beds fill faster than they empty and supplies run short in ways that demand improvisation. Pray for the people in there. Then pray harder that you, or anyone you love, never joins them.
The President prays the angels do not lock him out of Heaven. Most Ugandans pray something humbler, that they never pass through the doors of the Casualty Ward.
And when they do pass through, the first hands on them belong, more often than not, to a medical intern. Those interns stabilise, and make the calls in the first critical hour, frequently as the only clinician present, because their seniors in the staffing structure exist mostly on paper.
The health sector is staffed at 31 percent, regional referral hospitals at a critical 23 percent, according to the Ministry of Public Service’s own 2024 report. After the recruitment freeze, new health hires collapsed from 3,136 in 2022 to 930 in 2024. The medical interns have been quietly covering the gap the government created.
In May 2026, Cabinet reportedly resolved to thank them by stopping their allowances from August, reclassifying internship as an extension of university training rather than the professional service it plainly is. A student spends five years earning the Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery before reaching that ward. What they do there is not homework. It is the health system functioning.
Shortly after taking oath for his new term, the President openly declared there would be no more sleep. No Ugandan worker took that instruction earlier or more literally than the medical intern on a 36-hour call. That intern is the slogan, walking. From August, that intern will be doing it for free.
In Mr Museveni’s new term of office, the interns will not sleep. They will simply not be paid to stay awake.
Even last Tuesday’s small crowd tells the story. The Heroes’ Day gathering was kept under 25 by Ebola restrictions, measures enforced at the door of every ward by the same interns taking the 3am risk on the thinnest layer of protection. Last week, we honoured heroes in their absence while preparing to stop paying the ones still on duty.
The money argument does not survive contact with the budget. The government wage bill grew from Shs5.5 trillion in Financial Year (FY) 2021/2022 to Shs7.9 trillion in FY2024/2025, more than 43 percent in four years.
Whether Uganda can afford one year of intern allowances is a question of priorities, not capacity.
Research published in BMC Medical Education in 2026 confirms what common sense suggests, that withdrawing financial support from clinical trainees drives attrition and undermines quality of care. This decision walks in the opposite direction.
The President says he does not want the angels to lock him out of heaven. Neither do the rest of us. But the parable is clear about what the rich man was judged on. Not his wealth. The gate. And ours has young doctors standing at it, unpaid, waiting to be seen.
President Museveni, reconsider the medical interns, the heroes at the gate.