Happy 250th birthday, Sovereign America!

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OPINION

By Simon Kaheru

As we grapple with the concept of sovereignty here on our patch, the US is throwing parties to celebrate 250 years of sovereign nationhood. Dubbed ‘Freedom250’, the plan seems to be NOT allowing the US-Israel-Iran conflict to get in the way of anything, and so far, it is working.

You know why?

It is not just about politics as practised by politicians. The conversations they are having about ‘Freedom250’ are centred on the constitution and its elements from 250 years ago that have stood till now.

They even have a website with guidelines, tips, official branding and more for all their people to use and follow.

We sometimes get told that we are behind the US, mostly by people who don’t appreciate how redundant that observation is. One of the key conversation points about US Independence, for instance, is the focus “the Founding Fathers” placed on concerns such as copyrights.

Here, in Uganda, we have only just made amendments to our own law with the Copyright and Neighbouring Rights (Amendment) Bill, 249 years after the US wrote theirs.

We had one before — established during colonial times, since those people from those ends knew the importance of ring-fencing this stuff to make money from it.

In the US, even as they were forming their new country, having broken away from British colonial rule, they sat down and decided that innovation and creativity were going to be key to their survival as an independent, sovereign nation.

In our discussion, my AI friend even highlighted to me that the Copyright Clause in the US Constitution — written in 1787 — “is the only clause in the original Constitution that explicitly states its purpose right in the text”.

That clause granted Congress the power: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” (sic).

In the 18th Century, she goes on to explain, “science” did not just mean biology or physics, but represented knowledge and learning.

The goal of copyright, therefore, was to encourage the spread of information and create freedom within that new society for people to apply themselves at anything they wanted.

Those people could do so in earnest because they were protected by their government — their ideas, innovations and inventions would not be stolen.

The phrase, she adds, “Useful Arts” meant Patents — and, to this day, we still have people from all over the world (including Uganda) registering their patents in the US.

Elsewhere, the statistics show that China holds the world’s highest number of patent applications at 1.8 million, but the US leads in ‘foreign-oriented’ patents that are considered higher value.

Basically, we all register our patents (those who do) in our localities and then hop over to the US to file there as well. The reasons are obvious and go back to that decision 250 years ago to make innovation an asset.

To underscore how seriously the Americans took this, one of their citizens here in Uganda pointed out to me a couple of weeks ago that even before the US had a fully functioning currency, they had a Patent Office!

“The Founding Fathers did not just want people to have ideas; they wanted them to own them,” they said.

We, nations following many years behind, are going to celebrate ‘Freedom250’ for the Americans because we live together.

But as we do so, we should be serious about the development of our own nations, and take learnings from their one from way back then.

For instance, by the time the Arabs, British and French crossed into our territory here, we certainly had ideas, innovations and inventions.

But we were not equipped to protect them in any way as part of a key element of the structure of what we could have considered a nation, from village to kingdom.

It, therefore, did not take long for us to be swept up into a creation of foreign entities which, to this day, still holds sway, starting with our minds.

You may, some of you reading this, link this to the ongoing debate about the Protection of Sovereignty Bill, 2026.

A few will certainly read into this that our ideas should be protected from foreign influence, the way the US protected theirs back in 1787, and so on and so forth.

Choose what you will, but take it seriously — from the manufacture of bark cloth and the DNA of Ankole cattle, the recipes for matooke and eshabwe, the languages unique to us in their formation from dialogues connecting so many people...protect it all, to protect the collective nation.

Just as the US has done for these 250 years and counting, as we will be celebrating widely.

Happy 250th Anniversary, America — we all want to be like you when we grow up!

www.skaheru.com @skaheru