President Museveni’s new slogan, ‘Protecting the gains,’ comes at a time when Uganda is being promised the long-awaited transition from poverty to prosperity.
The gains in question are clear enough: a more secure country, expanding infrastructure, industrial parks, the promise of oil revenue, and the pledge to lift households into the ‘money economy.’ It is a familiar language of growth, framed as a step toward building a modern middle class.
A lesson from Britain Yet the question that demands asking is this: What do we stand to lose if ‘gains’ are defined only in terms of GDP, factories, and electricity grids?
A recent British documentary provides a cautionary parallel. It traces the country’s social journey from churches, which once anchored communities, to pubs, which became the ‘secular churches’ of working people, and finally to ‘nothing.’
Today, Britain’s wealth sits alongside record levels of loneliness, declining neighbourliness, and a shrinking sense of belonging. Affluence, unguarded, created a hollowing of society.
Uganda’s living heirlooms
Uganda is in a different season. Churches and mosques still brim with worshippers, though their prayers are mostly for relief from poverty: school fees, hospital bills, jobs, visas. But religious attendance alone is not the strongest glue that binds Ugandans together.
That role belongs to deeper, older social structures that are not yet broken, our true heirlooms.
? The extended family system still quietly pays tuition, arranges elderly care, and steps in during medical emergencies. It remains the invisible welfare state of Uganda.
? The clan system continues to provide identity, mentorship, conflict resolution, and moral instruction across generations.
? The village is the ultimate equaliser. At burials, weddings, and harvests, both haves and have-nots sit side by side, their differences blurred by solidarity.
Protecting social anchors
These heirlooms are not relics. They are living treasures that hold Uganda together in ways industrial policy can not replicate. They ensure that even when the formal state fails, society does not collapse. To ‘protect the gains’ in any meaningful sense must, therefore, include protecting these heirlooms.
Affluence without community creates fragmentation. If families weaken under individualism, if clans lose relevance, if villages hollow out under migration, Uganda will be left rich in concrete but poor in cohesion. The UK shows us that progress without social anchors ends in isolation.