What Mamdani described as a slow poison has fully entered the bloodstream of our nation. Nearly five decades into octogenarian senile Museveni’s rule, corruption is no longer hidden, it is performed. Power is no longer justified, it is auctioned. Violence is no longer exceptional, it is administrative.
Mamdani wrote that under power-hungry Museveni, corruption would stop being discreet to shameless, public and transactional. Today, that description fits our nation with chilling precision.
State offices function like collapsing private stalls. Loyalty is bought, not earned. Institutions exist, but they do not lead; they obey. Elections are held, but intimidation and guide the counting.
The regime has no social base, only clients. No believers, only beneficiaries. This is why every election cycle is accompanied by violence, arrests, abductions, internet shutdowns, militarized polling stations, and the criminalization of dissent. A government with followers does not fear its people. A regime with clients does.
Despot Museveni’s Uganda is trapped in the exact political culture Mamdani warned cannot be fixed by cosmetic reforms of New laws, New constitutions, New commissions with same habits. Same violence, Same corruption, Old reflexes dressed in legal language. Paper promises used as anesthetics, not cures.
And the cost is generational.
An entire generation has grown up learning that survival requires silence, cynicism, or submission. That truth is dangerous. That justice is optional. That the state is something to fear or exploit—but never trust. This is the deepest damage of dictatorship: not the stolen elections, but the poisoned moral imagination of a nation.
Uganda is not suffering from a leadership problem alone. It is suffering from a regime that has outlived its legitimacy, exhausted its moral capital, and mortgaged the future to maintain the present.
This is decay with a flag.