Dependency, exploitation, and complacency failed Uganda

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OPINION

By Beatrice N. Were

For decades, donors including PEPFAR, USAID, and the Global Fund, provided crucial lifelines that enabled Uganda’s progress against HIV, TB, and malaria. PEPFAR alone ensured.

95% of Ugandans living with HIV received life-saving antiretroviral treatment, while Global Fund support drove malaria control and TB diagnostics. These partnerships helped slash mother-to-child HIV transmission from 20% (2000) to 1.5% (2022) and made Uganda a global benchmark in epidemic response.

Donor complicity

Yet these well-intentioned efforts also rendered donors complicit. Intended as a bridge to self-sufficiency, aid entrenched poverty instead of alleviating it by becoming a crutch, enabling bad governance and state theft.

Over 80% of Uganda’s health budget relies on foreign aid, agriculture remains unmechanized, and corruption thrives without reform pressure. By shouldering the bulk of health, education, and infrastructure, donors absolved the government of Uganda of accountability, trapping citizens between a predatory state and collapsing systems.

Shielded by donor funds, Uganda’s political elites privatise resources, diverting taxes and aid to vanity projects while essential services collapse. Members of Parliament demand lifetime perks like state burials and overseas healthcare, as hospitals lack basic medicines and doctors strike over unpaid salaries. The hypocrisy is glaring; elites underfund public systems, then seek treatment abroad, tacitly admitting their failures.

Climate crises deepen exploitation. Western corporations fund extractive projects like

TotalEnergies’ oil pipeline, displacing 100,000 people, poisoning farmlands, and triggering health crises. Donors then fund refugee camps and clinics treating pipeline-related ailments.

Climate displacement drives Ugandans to perilous migration, vilified as immigrants by the same nations enabling ecological ruin. Meanwhile, political elites weaponise anti-colonial rhetoric to evade accountability, framing donor exits as victories while auctioning national resources, even as aid cuts jeopardise millions of lives and risk the resurgence of epidemics Uganda once conquered.

NGO Complicity

Civil society, once a beacon of grassroots resistance and emancipatory change, has been co-opted by the aid-industrial complex and has become entangled in the very systems of power it sought to challenge. In their infancy, many NGOs worked alongside communities to challenge oppressive systems, fighting for land rights, gender equality, health and education equity, and good governance. But over time, the lure of donor funding distorted their mission.

Today, NGOs have become middlemen in a transactional aid economy, prioritising boardroom-designed SDG metrics over the messy realities of Ugandan life. A phenomenon accelerated by the MDG/SDG era’s reliance on partnerships and technocratic solutions has made organisations more accountable to donors than the communities they purport to serve.

Too many NGOs have devolved into careerist enterprises, prioritising donor targets over real impact, a shift starkly evident in the proliferation of projectised activism, where NGOs prioritise quantifiable deliverables like the quantity of workshops held or beneficiaries trained over structural transformation. Consider the absurdity:

• Gender programs fund legal aid for abused women but ignore shelters or economic alternatives, leaving survivors to return to violent homes. Women face retribution (murder, mutilation, ostracism) for daring to report abuse, yet donors applaud cases filed as an achievement.
  
  
• Livestock donations to empower women fail to address the core issue: landlessness. In patriarchal societies where women are barred from owning land, goats or chickens become burdens, not assets. Even worse, sometimes these donations become triggers for gender-based.
  
  

Civil society’s complicity is further compounded by the rampant duplication of NGO roles. In pursuit of donor targets, NGOs often replicate identical interventions across the same communities, saturating regions with redundant workshops, trainings, and awareness campaigns.

Overlapping NGOs compete for the same pools of “trained” individuals to meet metrics, diverting resources from structural advocacy while delivering nearly identical.

PowerPoints on “resilience” or “sustainability,” while local priorities land reform, debt relief, or healthcare, remain conspicuously absent from agendas. Far from empowering communities, this duplication hollows out trust in civil society, reducing grassroots agency to a scripted performance for donor reports.

They peddle “success stories” to secure the next grant, while communities drown in unfulfilled promises. The result? A civil society sector bloated with “experts” writing reports in air- conditioned offices, yet allergic to the messy work of dismantling patriarchy, land inequity, or economic disenfranchisement.

Ugandan Society’s Complicity

To speak truth to power, we must also speak truth to ourselves. Uganda’s predicament is not solely the work of external powers or bad governance; it is also a mirror reflecting our own societal failures. For too long, we have oscillated between righteous anger at failing systems and a paralysing complacency that allows those systems to thrive. We must reckon with the uncomfortable truth: Uganda’s suffering is sustained by our acquiescence.

1. Normalisation of Corruption: “It’s just how things are.” Corruption is not merely a government failing; it is a societal decay. How many of us have paid a bribe to skip a hospital queue or expedite a passport/ driver’s license? How many applaud the politician who steals public funds but builds a hometown church or mosque or throws some money our way?
   
   We rationalise these acts as survival in a broken system, but in doing so, we legitimise the theft of our own futures. When a parent bribes a teacher to inflate their child’s grades, they teach that merit is negotiable. When youth idolise “big men/ women” flaunting ill-got wealth, they learn that exploitation pays.
   
   Cynicism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; we insist nothing can improve, then refuse to act in ways that might prove otherwise. Corruption is not abstract; it is the sum of millions of daily moral compromises.
   
   
2. Hero Trap: “Let someone else fight.” We demand heroes, activists, journalists, and whistleblowers to confront corrupt officials, yet abandon them when the state strikes back. We hashtag their names when they’re arrested, but refuse to march or donate to their causes. We romanticise resistance until it requires sacrifice. The defenders are left to rot in jail while we return to business as usual. Heroes cannot dismantle systems. Liberation requires collective courage, yet too often, we outsource the burden of bravery.
   
   
3. Complacency: “Let me secure mine” echoes across a landscape of crumbling schools, drugless hospitals, and potholed roads- a testament to our normalised decay. From the educated elite who lament corruption over cocktails but invest stolen public funds in private ventures, and the middle class who prioritise private schools and generators over demanding functional public systems, to the youth who dream of emigrating rather than rebuilding their nation. We have internalised the lie that individual success can co-exist with collective ruin.
   
   Justice Mulyagonja’s grief laid this bare at her husband’s funeral in a blistering critique of Mulago Hospital’s negligence. No wealth or status shields you from a failed system. Rajiv Ruparelia’s tragic death, a young life cut short in a preventable accident on Uganda’s perilous roads, underscores this.
   
   Had a robust infrastructure existed, or functional emergency services arrived promptly, his story might have differed. Instead, his fate mirrors countless Ugandans: betrayed by a state that profits from crisis while outsourcing its consequences. Survivalism isn’t resilience; it’s collective surrender to a rot we refuse to dismantle.
   
   
4. No Solidarity: Even in resistance, we fracture, tribalizing grievances. Protest movements splinter along ethnic, religious, or regional lines. Farmers displaced by a corrupt land deal turn on each other instead of the kleptocrats. We weaponise historical grievances to justify present inaction, as if justice for one group must come at the expense of another.

Reclaiming our power

We stand at a crossroads. Uganda’s redemption requires us to confront our own contradictions. The choice before us is stark: continue feeding a corrupt and broken system or demand a radical reimagining of development, one rooted in justice, accountability, and real transformation. Uganda’s greatest threat lies in the myth that we are powerless. We have the numbers. We have intellect. What we lack is the audacity to believe we deserve better and the discipline to act like it.

The current model of development is not just broken, it is lethal. It is death by a thousand cuts; each dollar of aid, each conditional loan, each short-term project, each bribe, each tribal dispute slices deeper into Uganda’s self-sufficiency while propping up the very systems that keep its people in chains. The donor-aid model is a dead end.

Uganda’s future lies not in begging for scraps but in industrialising and reclaiming sovereignty. Aid cuts, tariffs and climate collapse will not end us, but our refusal to unite for a better future just might.