Gen. Muhoozi, Maliza Ufisadi, and the generational mission before our hands

___________________

OPINION

By Dr Arinaitwe Rugyendo

“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it,” wrote revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, around 1961.

Fanon wrote those words not for posterity but as a challenge — one every generation must answer with its blood, its sweat or its silence.

In less than seven days, Uganda has been cast under Operation Maliza Ufisadi — Kiswahili for “end corruption — by Chief of Defence Forces Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, who is also the senior presidential advisor on special operations. 

The operation opened at 3:00am with a joint Special Forces Command raid on the home of outgoing Speaker of Parliament Anita Among. Journalist Andrew Mwenda described it as “an unprecedented joint security operation, confiscating anything and everything of value, including cash and luxury items”.

Several anti-graft agencies should ordinarily be at the frontline of such operations. However, this reads as a military undertaking, driven by the CDF’s own publicly expressed displeasure — notably his tweet condemning Among’s purchase of a sh3.7b Rolls Royce vehicle. It is here that the central question of this piece presents itself: Has this generation, at last, discovered its mission?

To answer it, we must look at the long arc of Uganda’s generational wars.

Uganda’s modern political history is a story of successive generational missions, each with its defining enemy. The first was colonialism, which was resisted by leaders such as Omukama Kabalega, Kabaka Mwanga II and Queen Muhumuza. Then came the generation that named Aminism the enemy: Apollo Milton Obote, Yoweri Museveni, Yusufu Kironde Lule, Julius Nyerere and Tito Okello among them. 

Following President Idi Amin’s defeat on April 11, 1979, a bush war generation led by Gen. Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA) identified extrajudicial killings, electoral fraud, political impunity, ethnicity, divisionism, and so on, as the next enemy. Thus, from 1981 to 1986, this bush generation chose a mission for which scores of them paid with their own lives. They forged a new Uganda in the Luwero Triangle from where they emerged victorious on January 26, 1986, to reconstruct the state and build peace and stability as the foundation for socioeconomic transformation. For the next decade, Uganda registered national unity and growth not felt anywhere in its recent history. That was 40 years ago.

But signs of trouble came early. A 14-page open letter to President Museveni in 1999 titled: An insider’s view of how the Movement lost its broad base by Col. Kiiiza Besigye, then still a senior National Resistance Movement (NRM) figure, unleashed an unflinching diagnosis of what had suddenly crept into the revolution and disturbed that bush war generation’s mission. 

Besigye catalogues several misdeeds, including the emergence of a political and technical class insulating itself from accountability; the militarisation of decision-making; the erosion of the democratic principles the NRM had bled for in Luwero; and the quiet replacement of the collective Movement ideology with personal patronage. 

Col Besigye further warned that state power and decision-making were consolidating around individuals rather than institutions. He argued that because of this, their generational mission had become consumed by the very corruption it had promised to end. While the letter cost him nearly everything, its diagnosis was surgically precise and massively prophetic.

The new enemy

For the generation of Ugandans coming of age today, like Gen. Muhoozi — the Generation X, the millennials and the Gen Zs born towards the fall of Amin and raised under the NRM’s long tenure — the enemy is neither colonial nor primordial in the traditional sense. The enemy is corruption: not as an economic construct, but as a shadow system of governance.

Over the past four decades, the evidence of corruption is staggering. The first is the NRM-linked business arm, Danze company, that got entangled in a tax evasion scandal in the early 1990s. Then there were the privatisation scandals that dotted the World Bank/International Monetary Fund reprogramming of the country in the early 1990s as well.  

We remember the Global Fund vaccine heists. We do not forget the junk helicopters, ghost soldiers and pint-sized army-uniform scandals of the late 1990s and early to mid-2000s. Then there was the big one – the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting preparations scandal in 2007, the billions of shillings stolen from northern Uganda’s reconstruction funds in 2012, the pension funds in the Office of the Prime Minister, plus the billions worth of iron sheets diverted from Karamoja’s vulnerable households to ministers and MPs recently. 

In all these and more, the pattern is consistent: public money, appropriated for public good, redirected into private hands; from the COVID-19 response, the Parish Development Model, the $380m Lubowa hospital contract, to the Bank of Uganda’s unauthorised printing of billions of shillings. Across every decade, every ministry and every emergency, the architecture of theft has held sway. 

This generation is furious; furious because prosecutions of senior officials have remained the exception, not the rule. I am privy to over 100,000 corruption cases at the State House Anti-Corruption Unit. But those supposed to act are often conflicted: the implicated are friends, relatives, in-laws, OBs, OGs and villagemates. 

The NRM system has, therefore, found itself clogged by compromises demanded by a fractured history that breeds demands for regional balance, religious correctness, liberation war contribution prioritised over merit, transparency and accountability. Such a system demands a tenacious, resolute, Fanonian Operation Maliza Ufisadi. 

When leaders walk the talk

Uganda is not the first country to face this reckoning. Lee Kuan Yew built Singapore into one of the world’s most corruption-free governments on one unflinching principle: the rules applied to everyone, including those who helped him into power. 

Rwanda’s Paul Kagame transformed a post-genocide state into one of Africa’s most institutionally functional governments through a tone set from the top and enforced without exception. 

In China, Chairman Mao Zedong unified a fractured nation, much like Museveni unified Uganda — but it took Deng Xiaoping’s restructuring to transform national unity into developmental momentum. 

Whether Uganda’s Xiaoping turns out to be Gen. Muhoozi or another, the lesson is the same: the anti-corruption mission must be structural, not punitive. When it is, roads get built, hospitals get supplied, teachers get paid and servant leadership replaces extraction as the philosophy of government.

There is one critical risk in this moment: selective accountability. A probe that prosecutes opponents while shielding loyalists is not anti-corruption. It is propaganda — faction warfare dressed in the language of reform. It will not be a Maliza Ufisadi. Credibility demands that the net be cast wide enough to be believed, and that means accountability must reach the loyal as much as the opposed.

The colonial generation fulfilled its mission. The anti-Amin generation fulfilled its mission. The bush war generation initiated its mission, fulfilled it — then betrayed it by allowing greed to capture it.

The generation inheriting this moment faces its own Fanonian test. The mission is legible: dismantle the architecture of corruption that has redistributed state resources to the powerful few at the expense of the many who need roads, hospitals and schools. Gen. Muhoozi has fired a dramatic opening shot. 

The evidence from Singapore, Rwanda, and post-Mao China tells us that transformation is possible when leaders act against their own, when institutions are built on results rather than procedure, and when the anti-corruption mission is broad enough to be believed.

But as Fanon warned: a generation does not merely discover its mission. It must fulfil it or betray it. I dare add that the jungle is a complicated hunting theatre. The question now is whether the hunters know what they are really hunting.

The writer is the founder and managing editor of ResearchFinds News, a Streamline Consults Limited research communication platform in Kampala, Uganda, and can be reached at rugyendo@gmail.com and on X @RugyendQuotes.