There is a seductive danger in confusing development with institutional health.
Yes, Uganda has grown sectors.
Yes, milk production rose.
Yes, roads were built.
Yes, factories emerged.
Let us even grant these achievements at their most generous interpretation, though many of the surrounding statistics and political narratives remain fiercely contested. The deeper question lies elsewhere.
Ancient empires also built roads.
The question is whether those roads outlasted the emperor, and in more recent history, whether the institutions managing them answered to citizens or merely to the political survival of one man.”
That is where Elison Karuhanga’s argument becomes deeply troubling.
Not because it defends industrialisation. Industrialisation is necessary.
But because it quietly asks Ugandans to romanticise concentrated power itself.
The article repeatedly frames scepticism toward entrenched political authority as elite cynicism, as though accountability were merely an inconvenience imposed by intellectual spectators standing outside history.
Yet history teaches something far less flattering.
Apartheid South Africa built one of the continent’s most sophisticated industrial economies. Gaddafi’s Libya produced impressive welfare indicators and modern infrastructure. Mobutu’s Zaire cultivated the imagery of national grandeur and developmental ambition.
Yet history eventually exposed the same weakness in each case: institutions had become subordinate to personalities, patronage, or exclusionary systems of power.
Infrastructure is not self-validating.
The real question is never whether factories, highways, dams, or industrial parks exist. The deeper question is whether the institutions beneath those projects remain independent enough to survive the men who built them.
Development without accountability does not eliminate instability.
It postpones it.
And when accountability weakens long enough, entitlement emerges. From entitlement comes impunity. And from impunity comes institutional decay.
That is precisely the warning at the heart of Mahmood Mamdani’s 2025 book, Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State. Mamdani’s argument is not that Uganda failed because it lacked projects or economic ambition. It is that the post-independence dream was gradually dismantled through tribalised politics, institutional corrosion, political violence, and the fragmentation of citizenship itself.
A country may increase exports while weakening citizenship.
That is not transformation.
That is deferred fragility.
And perhaps nowhere is this contradiction more revealing than within the intellectual class now defending presidential mythology in the name of developmental realism.
Many of us were repeatedly lectured about the supposed “neutrality” of the Uganda Law Society whenever lawyers confronted excesses of state power. We were told institutions must remain above politics.
Yet neutrality now appears remarkably flexible when the task is constructing emotional narratives around presidential permanence and historical indispensability.
One begins to suspect that neutrality was never truly about insulating institutions from politics, but about regulating the direction in which criticism could travel.
That selective application is itself part of the institutional decay being ignored.
When institutions of accountability suspend their scepticism in order to celebrate power, they accelerate the very “slow poison” they should be resisting.
And this is why the romantic language of “stubborn men who shape history” should concern us more than inspire us.
History is full of stubborn men.
Some built nations.
Others merely built systems too personalised to survive them.
Uganda’s tragedy has never been a shortage of ambitious rulers.
It has been the absence of institutions strong enough to survive them, and disciplined enough to tell them no.
And if we are to have the rule of law rather than the rule of men with a gun, a Bible, and a pen, then a few stubborn men and women must demand that development be built on accountability, not just the romanticisation of power.
The roots of accountability are bitter, but the fruits are sweet.
This, fellow countrymen and women, is my contribution to that cause.
Enen Ambrose.
Advocate.
For feedback or comments: enen@enenlegalworld.com
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