Our Leaders have issued their new manifesto for 2026–2031. It speaks of “protecting the gains” and taking Uganda into a “high middle-income status.” But the only thing it protects is the system that keeps the worker poor and the elite rich. Beneath its polished language lies the same colonial logic: extract from the many to enrich the few, and call the result development.
The manifesto celebrates that Uganda’s economy has grown seventeen times since 1986. Yet this growth has not liberated the masses; it has deepened our dependence and widened the gap between the rich and working class. The factories, banks, telecom companies and estates remain in the hands of the same comprador class that rose from structural adjustment and privatisation. They own because we labour. They accumulate because we are kept cheap. The wealth they call “national progress” is built on our exploitation.
The document demands that every household join the “money economy,” mocking subsistence farming as backward even though it once sustained us. Under colonial rule, our grandparents grew cash crops for export; under neoliberalism, we’re told the same, now in the name of “value addition.” The product changes, but the purpose doesn’t: we serve foreign markets, not our own needs. At the mercy of empire, an embargo on our coffee could starve us and despite our fertile soil, we import rice.
Their “wealth creation programs” Parish Development Model, Emyooga, and others disguise dependency as empowerment. They turn peasants into indebted petty traders, fighting one another in markets controlled by big buyers and banks. The state lectures about “mindset change,” but the true mindset that must change is that of the ruling class their worship of capital and contempt for labour.
The manifesto’s grand talk of industrial parks, ICT, and “value chains” promises modernity while reproducing servitude. These industries are financed by foreign loans, built by foreign contractors, and owned by local cronies of foreign investors. The Ugandan worker remains at the bottom: unprotected, underpaid, and disposable. The so-called “knowledge economy” turns educated youth into a reserve army for export.
Because the domestic economy cannot absorb its people, the regime has found another commodity to sell: our labour itself. Through labour-export schemes, the youth of Uganda are shipped to the Gulf as maids, guards, and drivers. Their bodies are the new export crop. Agencies linked to powerful officials profit from the recruitment, while the government praises the remittances as “foreign exchange earnings.” This is not opportunity; it is externalised exploitation. The manifesto calls it job creation, but it is a symptom of decay.
The same state that boasts of “peace and stability” allows its sons and daughters to be enslaved, beaten, imprisoned, and killed in foreign lands. The rulers benefit twice: they earn revenue from the export industry, and they relieve domestic pressure from unemployed youth who might otherwise rise against injustice. The imperial metropolises benefit too, they receive disciplined, cheap labor without granting rights or citizenship. Uganda’s elites act as brokers between our desperation and the empire’s demand.
This relationship extends beyond labour to the military. The regime sends soldiers to fight imperial wars under foreign command and calls it “regional security.” The state functions as both security guard and labour broker for global capitalism. It guards the empire’s interests abroad and supplies it with servants. The hand that signs IMF agreements also shakes hands in Washington and Riyadh. This is why our suffering is connected to the suffering of workers elsewhere: we are all bound by the same chains, forged in the workshops of neoliberalism.
The manifesto’s Pan-African rhetoric is hollow. The “East African Community” it proposes is a federation of markets, not of peoples, an economic bloc for capital, not a socialist union for liberation. True Pan-Africanism means collective control of Africa’s resources and the dismantling of foreign military influence, not a shared marketplace for our continued exploitation.
Let us speak plainly: Uganda is trapped in a neocolonial system. The economy runs on IMF loans, exports, and remittances; the political order endures through repression and patronage; and the ideology of “peace” silences the poor. Museveni’s government functions as the regional manager of this imperial arrangement, maintaining order, supplying resources, and exporting labor in exchange for aid, approval, and legitimacy. That is the hidden meaning of “Protecting the Gains.”
We, the workers and peasants of Uganda, reject this manifesto because it leads us deeper into dependency. We demand a socialist alternative rooted in people’s will: collective ownership of land and industry, planned production for social need, and democratic control of the state by the labouring majority. We demand regional cooperation based on solidarity, not profit; and foreign policy that defends Africa’s sovereignty, not imperial interests.
The youth who cleans houses in Dubai, the soldier in Somalia, and the farmer in Mubende are victims of the same order. Their liberation will come only when Uganda ceases to serve empire and begins to serve its own people. Every airport departure, every austerity budget, every repressive law is a reminder that our struggle is one: the fight against capitalism in all its forms, and the struggle to break free from neoliberalism.
Let us organise, educate, and unite, not to polish the chains of neocolonialism but to break them. The promise of the manifesto is false, but the promise of socialism remains real: the worker owns the factory, the peasant tills the land collectively, and the youth create a future free from servitude.
lilSatoshi13 Rukungiri
