Why moral appeals alone cannot resolve Uganda’s succession question

I write as both colleague and critic of Dr. Yusuf Serunkuma, a friend with whom I have shared studios, public platforms, and private conversations on Uganda’s governance dilemmas.

Our exchanges, often sharp, always serious, are rooted in a common concern for the country’s political future. It is from this shared intellectual ground that his recent piece, “Dear Yoweri Museveni, give Uganda a chance while you still can,” invites a response grounded less in moral appeal than in the disciplined languages of political science, history, and statecraft.

Serunkuma’s argument is, at its core, normative. It proposes presidential exit as Uganda’s principal democratic catalyst and treats longevity, age, and political fatigue as pathologies that now outweigh continuity, experience, and institutional memory.

The prose is evocative, even elegant. Yet it operates largely at the level of ethical intuition, substituting affect for analysis, an approach that sits uneasily with Uganda’s historical and structural realities.

The state inherited by the National Resistance Movement (NRM) in January 1986 was not a malfunctioning democracy awaiting refinement; it was a collapsed polity.

The scholarly record, from Amii Omara-Otunnu to Mahmood Mamdani and beyond, is unequivocal: Uganda between the late 1960s and mid-1980s was trapped in a cycle of coups, militarized ethnicity, personalized violence and economic implosion.

The immediate political task confronting the NRM was, therefore, existential, not procedural: to reconstitute a monopoly over legitimate violence, unify a fractured security sector, and restore the most elementary grammar of governance.

This distinction matters. Liberal democracy is not a primal political act; it is an advanced institutional ecosystem. It presupposes conditions, administrative capacity, fiscal coherence, elite accommodation, and disciplined coercive institutions, that are themselves the products of sustained state-building.

To invert this sequence is to mistake aspiration for strategy. Viewed through a neo-realist and historical-institutionalist lens, the dangers of premature alternation in weak or post-conflict states are well established.

Contemporary Africa offers sobering evidence. Sudan’s celebrated transition after 2019 yielded renewed militarism and catastrophic civil war. Libya’s 2011 revolution dissolved the state altogether.

Mali, Guinea, and Niger illustrate how morally compelling exits can trigger elite fragmentation and authoritarian relapse when institutional scaffolding is thin. Against this backdrop, Serunkuma’s claim that Uganda has not been “given a chance” appears curiously ahistorical.

Since 1986, Uganda has experienced constitutional continuity unprecedented in the Great Lakes region, multiple electoral cycles, and the reintroduction of multiparty politics in 2005.

These processes are imperfect, often illiberal, and rightly contested, but to dismiss them as mere theatre is to engage in political negation rather than critique. The emphasis on President Museveni’s biological age is similarly misplaced.

Age is not an analytic category in political performance. What matters is strategic coherence: control of the security sector, clarity of national direction, and the ability to manage elite competition without state rupture.

On these measures, the Ugandan state remains operational and resilient, as evidenced by its sustained role in regional security, from Somalia to South Sudan, over nearly two decades. None of this constitutes an apologia for the NRM’s well-documented contradictions.

The regime is marked by personalization of power, entrenched patronage, and constrained pluralism. It embodies a familiar paradox of late-developing states: stability achieved through illiberal means; growth alongside inequality; order coexisting with exclusion.

The serious analytical task is to interrogate this paradox, not to dissolve it through moral exhortation. The real question, therefore, is not whether Uganda should transition, but how.

Would an abrupt presidential exit, absent a carefully engineered succession and institutional readiness, consolidate democracy, or fracture the political settlement that has thus far prevented relapse into systemic violence?

Serunkuma’s essay ultimately yearns for political poetry: a graceful, redemptive ending. Yet statecraft in post-conflict societies is rarely lyrical. It is often tragic prose, where virtue lies not in symbolic gestures but in stewardship, sequencing, and restraint.

The democratic horizon is not in dispute. The disagreement, between friends, is over the map: whether Uganda reaches that horizon through institutional maturation and managed succession, or through a rupture that satisfies moral impatience while risking political regression.

The author is managing partner at EMANS Frontiers Ltd.