In a recent Daily Monitor op-ed, ‘In South Sudan, Ugandan troops are pursuing a realistic goal’ (April 18, 2025), journalist Raymond Mujuni frames Uganda’s intervention in South Sudan as realistic – and even defends it as critical for regional economic and political integration.
While his argument is water-proof in theory, it ignores a lot of our recent history and, therefore, sidesteps critical questions Ugandans have long raised about the regional role of ‘our’ military.
Mujuni takes the national security mandate of the UPDF for granted and assumes it necessarily acts in national interest. But for decades, concerns about the president’s personalization of the military – and of the wider government – have only grown.
Perhaps most telling is the fact that “our” military is led by the first son, a man whose rapid promotions have been widely seen as an attempt to position him for the top office, and who has made no secret of his view of the army as family property.
Mujuni makes no mention of this apparent fusion of family and state power, or its implications for the professionalism of the army we send to “help” our neighbours. For instance, Uganda’s military deployments have followed a pattern of unilateral decisions by the president, bypassing or compromising parliamentary scrutiny.
While Parliament approved the recent South Sudan deployment, it is clear that its role as a check on executive power has been hollowed out over the years. Legislators are routinely co-opted through financial incentives— most recently, a controversial Shs 100 million payout.
Such transactions have undermined the parliament’s strength, and mean that presidential decisions about army affairs are now beyond any meaningful oversight. There is also the well-known trade-off between our regional peacekeeping and the respect for human rights at home.
Despite branding itself as a regional peacekeeper, the army has faced many credible allegations of systemic abuses, including the ongoing extrajudicial killings, torture, and disappearances of opposition activists.
Just weeks ago, parliament approved the trial of civilians in military courts, effectively legalising repression. Mujuni’s failure to confront these contradictions weakens his argument.
If the very military ostensibly securing peace in South Sudan is also suppressing dissent at home, what does that say about whose interests it truly serves? Mujuni also defends Uganda’s alignment with South Sudan’s “legitimate” government.
But by so doing, he reduces a complex civil war – rooted in intricate ethnic, economic, historical and geopolitical dynamics – to a binary of ‘good’ versus ‘evil.’ This is dangerously simplistic.
In a conflict that is that prolonged and complex, there are undoubtedly some legitimate grievances and egregious abuses on both sides. Attaining lasting peace demands moving beyond picking sides and dropping bombs to creating platforms for inclusive dialogue and reconciliation.
While Mr. Mujuni celebrates Uganda’s military intervention as realistic, he does not articulate how it will resolve the crisis – even as he himself acknowledges there have been many such failed interventions we have undertaken in the past!
The most spectacular of them, perhaps, is the one in DR Congo in the late 1990s, for which Ugandan taxpayers still have to pay $325 million to the DRC for the theft of Congolese minerals by “our” military – and which did little to stabilise DR Congo, as recent events show.
By celebrating the current intervention in South Sudan, Mujuni ignores four decades of evidence to the contrary: Uganda’s military adventures have often prolonged rather than resolved regional conflict, placed huge financial burdens for the taxpayer, weakened democratic institutions at home, enabled the violation of rights, and aided the construction of a family dynasty.
It is the foreign policy of the past, not the future.
The writer is a Ugandan, currently a PhD candidate in International Development at SOAS University of London, UK.
michaelmutyaba@gmail.com
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