Mwenda: The question of age and abilities

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OPINION

By Opiyo Oloya

Dear my brother Andrew Mwenda, thank you for acknowledging your mistakes in the article: When Old Age Strikes a Leader (The Independent, April 20, 2026), in which you attributed President Yoweri Museveni’s decisions to fund private start-ups to senility. Although you raised valid questions on how billions are awarded to private start-ups, such as herbalist David Senfuka and pharmacist Matthias Magoola, founder of Dei Pharma, your conclusion gratuitously and without evidence linked President Museveni’s age and the decision to fund these entities. You wrote: “This brings me to the choice of the title of this article. Museveni has grown old. He has become less able to rigorously assess the economic and business viability of the ideas and projects sold to him by the myriad wheeler-dealers who surround him like vultures do an animal carcass.”

But in trying to make amends with President Museveni (Independent, May 25, 2026), your apology left untouched on the floor the main issue of the President’s irritation — the question of age and abilities to make sound decisions.

Secondly, the central question you raised in the article and which you discussed in your response to President Museveni — how to ensure that state-supported start-ups are rigorously evaluated to determine viability — needs further articulation, with a clear understanding of what that looks like in practice. I will come back to this later, but first, about the old age issue.

For a well-read man who voraciously peruses the latest scientific journals, your generalisation adversely linking aging with poor decision making flew in the face of research on aging and intellectual viability. There are men and women known as super agers who remain sharp, creative and very productive well into their late 80s and 90s.

Many African cultures refer to them as wise old men and women. Science tells us that this wisdom is both hereditary and cultivated, which means one can inherit a molecular baseline from one’s parents, but also actively cultivate brain health to build resilience against cognitive decline. For example, lifelong cognitive engagement, eating a proper diet, maintaining vigorous exercise of the body, learning new things, staying curious about the world around you all contribute toward staying mentally young and sharp.

Just to mention a few, the list is long of famous people who completed some of their most creative work and masterpieces after age 80 — the age you attributed to mental decline. Spanish painter Pablo Picasso turned 80 in October 1961, yet remained extraordinarily creative in the last 12 years of his life. John B. Goodenough, co-inventor of key lithium-ion battery technology, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry at age 97.

Sir David Attenborough, who celebrated his 100th birthday on May 8, 2026, remains hard at work producing major documentaries about our fragile planet and the BBC has confirmed he is currently working on Blue Planet III to be released later this year. Toni Morrison, the first Black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, produced some of her best work in her 80s, until her passing in August 2019.

As you well know — and I have seen it many times — President Museveni is all these and more. He is very curious, always wanting to know more, and spends an enormous amount of time reading and writing (by hand), all of which keeps him cognitively sharp.

A couple of years ago, when I led a delegation of researchers from Western University to meet him at State House, his questions focused on the research on HIV/AIDs in Rakai by Professor Jessica Prodger, asking her about all aspects of the work. Last year at the celebration of Tarehe Sita in Kyotera, he spoke in Acholi to invite me to meet him at State House, but erroneously used the Luo phrase bin tin (come today) when he meant bin diki (come tomorrow). When we met the following day, the first thing he did was to correct the mistake — he is extremely proud of his learning of the Luo language.

These may sound like little things, but they point to the fact that at 82, President Museveni remains engaged and intellectually focused. The issue is not about old age. Rather, the issue is that Museveni has grown so distrustful of corrupt leaders that he would rather make a decision by himself. Which is why I agree when you write in your apology to the President that: “There needs to be an institution that receives applications and assesses them and qualifies them for such allocation of state grants, cheap loans, tax exemptions, state subsidies, etc.”

But to truly deliver what you are suggesting, Uganda must go beyond the MK Fund example you gave, mainly because we need an arm’s length process at the state level, which you correctly referred to as “guardrails within the state to protect the national interest of the country”. There are many global examples from which to borrow such a structure, including from “successful countries like South Korea and Taiwan, Japan and now China.”

Specifically, let’s look at Ottawa-based Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), which has committees made of multidisciplinary international experts that rigorously vet proposals for their research merit, institutional commitment, and socioeconomic impact before securing funding. There’s also Innovate UK, a national agency that utilises an automated, highly streamlined digital portal to assign independent, private-sector assessors to score commercial and technological viability before funding. Other successful and efficient examples include the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the US-based National Institutes of Health (NIH) Centre for Scientific Review (CSR), which acts as a giant sieve for all NIH grant applications.

Our work, in other words, is to persuade President Museveni to return to those processes, to create an arms-length parastatal agency that evaluates start-ups to determine their viability and whether they advance clearly articulated national interests.

This allows any Ugandan to wake up with a grand idea they believe will change the world as we know it, and for the President to rub his hands together and say, “Great, put your idea on paper and submit it to the independent assessor to determine its viability. And based on that assessment, the question can then be asked whether government or private equity should go into the project.

Simply, what you needed to do in the first place was support the nascent entrepreneurial spirit Museveni continues to champion by proposing the guardrails that ensure we are not throwing the baby with the dirty bathwater.

For your critically important ideas to continue to find fertile ground, I urge you to see the President as an ally, not the enemy. Remember the saying: With the Banyakore, if a baby is learning to walk and falling, we encourage the baby by saying: Siinga abarezi, siinga abarezi, tengerera, tengerera.

Opiyo.oloya@gmail.com Twitter: @Opiyooloya Dr Opiyo Oloya is the Inaugural Associate Vice President, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) at Western University, London, Ontario, Canada