Between a rock and a hard place: The Perils of Ugandan Citizenship

To be a Ugandan citizen is to experience the world in a uniquely difficult way.

For one thing, it is to constantly be at risk of death in the most unfortunate of ways. In October this year, for example, we lost a very young and promising citizen – Angella Namirembe (a third-year law student at Uganda Christian University and already an active youth leader) to a boda boda accident.

Earlier, in July, Mr David Baagala Mutaaga (69) and his wife Deborah Florence Mutaaga (62), who had retired to Uganda from Switzerland (where they had lived and worked for 30 years) were murdered in their home in Entebbe.

Quite understandably, their children opted to bury their parents in Switzerland where, in their view, the deceased would ‘find peace’ (see The New Vision, ‘Entebbe couple murder: bereaved family settle for burial in Switzerland’, 29th November 2025 available at https:// www.newvision.co.ug/category/news/ entebbe-couple-murder-bereaved-family- settle-NV_223532).

These two instances only exemplify the fate of several other Ugandans, victims of the difficulty of existence at the periphery of global life. While Angella Namirembe and the Mutaagas might have suffered a more abrupt end, we are, the rest of us, similarly ill-fated – suffering a significantly diminished quality of life (from poor air quality, to contaminated food and water and other challenges).

In these circumstances, it is not surprising that many Ugandans try all means within their disposal to escape this rather dystopian existence. It is now routine to see queues of young people at Entebbe airport, leaving the country for odd jobs mainly in the Middle East.

What greater indictment can there be for the governance of a country than the determination of its citizens to flee from it? This trend is so established that the First Lady, who also happens to be the minister of Education and Sports, Mrs. Janet Museveni implored the youth, in September 2024 in the following terms: ‘We must understand that those countries we admire and would give anything to live in were built by their citizens.

They were willing to do everything to build their countries one brick at a time. It took them years of hard work and sacrifice to get them to where they are now. Our homeland deserves no less determination … [W]e must all work together as leaders of this nation and God-fearing people, to encourage the youth to understand that, while we have challenges like any other country, running away to what we perceive as “greener pastures”, is not the best way of handling or addressing these problems’ (See Karim Muyobo ‘Janet to youth: Don’t be tempted to leave Uganda’ The Monitor, 25th September 2024 available at https://www.monitor. co.ug/uganda/news/national/janet- to-youth-don-t-be-tempted-to-leave- uganda-4774416)

I understand the sentiments expressed by the First Lady (and Minister of Education and Sports). Indeed, I am myself a second-generation ‘returnee’ – my father, the late Professor Ijuka Kabumba, returned to Uganda after post-graduate education in the United States and France, to make his contribution to building Uganda.

I followed in this tradition when I returned to Uganda following post-graduate education in the United Kingdom and the United States. There are several other Ugandans (in their thousands over the years) who have made similar choices. Uganda is not short of persons committed to building the nation.

At the same time, I realize the extreme privilege involved in choosing to return. And I can completely understand the choice made by several other Ugandans to do all in their power to escape the Uganda fashioned by President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni (and a whole host of similarly culpable post- independence leaders).

I cannot condemn that young Ugandan who opts to try their luck in the United States, Europe, Middle East and elsewhere after failing to earn a decent living in this republic. Most, if not all, leave Uganda with the knowledge of the indignity and suffering they might be subjected to in those places.

I suppose the grim calculation is the choice between the certainty of a slow death in Uganda, on the one hand, and the possibility of death elsewhere. To quote the British-Somali poet Warsan Shire: ‘No one leaves home unless, home is the mouth of a shark … you only leave home, when home won’t let you stay.’

This is the tragedy of Uganda – where the promise of citizenship is only an abstract one, mechanically sung in the anthem and cynically expressed in a National Identity Card with an expiry date. The duties and burdens thereof are felt in exploitative (and ever growing) taxes, and suffered in teargas, live bullets and other indignities.

And this is why the exhortation by the First Lady (and Minister of Education and Sports) ultimately rings hollow. For many Ugandans, the decision to leave this country is not one of choice – it is forced by circumstances.

In Uganda, they found themselves alive but not alive. I think in this regard of a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of India in the case of Olga Tellis v Bombay Municipal Corporation and Others (1986 AIR 180).

Speaking for a unanimous court, Chief Justice Chandrachud observed: ‘[T]he question which we have to consider is whether the right to life includes the right to livelihood. We see only one answer to that question, namely, that it does.

The sweep of the right to life conferred by Article 21 is wide and far reaching. It does not mean merely that life cannot be extinguished or taken away as, for example, by the imposition and execution of the death sentence , except according to procedure established by law.

That is but one aspect of the right to life. An equally important facet of that right is the right to livelihood because, no person can live without the means of living, that is, the means of livelihood … Deprive a person of his right to livelihood and you shall have deprived him of his life’ (at Paragraph 32 of the decision).

Going by this test, it makes perfect sense for those Ugandans who have been more or less ‘sentenced to death’ by a country which is unable or unwilling to provide the conditions for a dignified life to try their lot, even in more perilous settings.

At the same time, to leave Uganda under any circumstances is to be reminded of the consistent underperformance of the State. It starts with the humiliating ritual of the visa application process, in which one is asked to demonstrate that they are significant factors which would make it more likely for them to return to Uganda than otherwise (production of bank statements, land titles, children’s birth certificates and so on).

Even when one has all these, the process seems to be particularly designed to remind one of their undesirable status. On 12th November 2025, for instance, Mathias Ssemanda observed on X (formerly Twitter) that: ‘The French Embassy in Kampala makes Ugandans stand outside for more than one hour to collect their passports – on the roadside … That’s not diplomacy; it’s humiliation.’ He was right.

And if the French are being subtle in their contempt, the United States under President Donald J Trump is more blunt in its rejection of people from countries such as Uganda. In an early morning post on his social media platform ‘Truth’, on 28th November 2025, President Trump declared: ‘The official United States Foreign population stands at 53 million people (Census), most of which are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels.

They and their children are supported through massive payments from Patriotic American Citizens who, because of their beautiful hearts, do not want to openly complain or cause trouble in any way, shape, or form … This refugee burden is the leading cause of social dysfunction in America, something that did not exist after World War II (Failed schools, high crime, urban decay, overcrowded hospitals, housing shortages, and large deficits, etc.)

… Even as we have progressed technologically, immigration policy has eroded those gains and living conditions for many. I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions … end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization…’

The rejection is unmistakable – as is the only very thinly veiled racism which underlies it. The Ugandan citizen is stuck between a country which offers few or no prospects for a dignified existence, on the one hand, and a developed world which is increasingly hostile to migration from the ‘uncivilized’ or ‘Third’ World, on the other.

It is the proverbial space between a rock and hard place. Unfortunately, there is little foreseeable hope for change in this our little rock – one where an 81-year-old President is determined to cling onto office (close to 40 years after he first assumed it militarily), in a context where the median age of the population is about 16 years (one of the youngest in the world).

The Uganda we are asked to commit to building is one where ‘elections’ – such as the ones scheduled for January 2026 are bloody events, in which all the organs of State conspire to returning especially the President as well as several other members of the ruling party.

Already Ugandan citizens have been killed in the lead up to these ‘elections’ – adding to the long list of citizens who have paid with their lives in previous electoral cycles for daring to trust in the constitutional promise of full civic participation and self-determination.

There are also several Ugandan citizens in exile for daring to exercise their natural freedoms of expression, belief and conscience – Dr. Stella Nyanzi, Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, Isaac Ssemakadde (the President of the Uganda Law Society), Justice Esther Kitimbo Kisaakye (of the Supreme Court of Uganda) and many others.

It is little wonder that even as the Electoral Commission approaches the Parliament for a supplementary budgetary allocation of 469.5 billion Uganda Shillings, many Ugandans – myself included – have no intention of taking part in the pantomime planned for January 2026.

In the meantime, we must continue to devise means of surviving, somehow, in this strange place between the rock of Museveni’s Uganda and the dark and hard global place being forged in the Trumpian moment.

The writer is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Human Rights and Peace Centre (HURIPEC) at the School of Law, Makerere University, where he teaches Constitutional Law and International Law.