Wine for ministers, water for learners: A nation betrays its children

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OPINION

By Dr Bob Marley Achura

In 1997, Uganda did something extraordinary. It made a solemn promise to its children that no matter how poor or where they came from, every one of them would go to school. The launch of Universal Primary Education (UPE) and later Universal Secondary Education (USE) ignited hope across the country.

I remember the excitement. Classrooms overflowed with eager learners, families celebrated new beginnings, and, for once, poverty didn’t feel like a life sentence. But today, that hope feels like a cruel joke. The buzz is gone. In its place is a silence that’s hard to ignore, one filled with hungry children, exhausted teachers, and school buildings that are barely holding up. What once seemed like a leap toward a better future has, instead, become a slow-motion fall.

Let’s begin with something as basic as money. Right now, the Ugandan government allocates just sh20,000 per child per year in primary school; that’s about $5. I know it sounds unbelievable, but that’s the entire budget to educate a child for 12 months. Think about what $5 gets you today. It can’t cover school supplies, textbooks, lunch, or even soap for the school toilet, if there is one. Compare that with our own National Planning Authority, which recommends more than sh63,000 per learner in urban areas and sh59,000 in rural schools. The reality? We are short-changing our children at every turn, disbursing peanuts and calling it policy. It’s not just inadequate, it’s insulting.

And just to illustrate how obscene the imbalance has become: I have a good friend who’s a Minister in this very government. A man I respect in many ways. Every evening, to relax, he opens a bottle of premium French wine, each bottle costs around $135. That one bottle, one evening of leisure, costs the same as the entire annual capitation for 26 school children. Twenty-six futures. One drink. And he’s not alone; these are the same men and women who sit at the table to draft our national education budget.

Now tell me, what values are we projecting as a country?

Of course, the issue isn’t just funding. It’s also what’s not on the table, food. Only 3 out of 10 rural schools in Uganda provide even a single meal a day. Let me take you to Dokolo District, a place I know too well. Just 12 kilometres from the town centre, I visited a government school.

The lunchtime bell rang, but no one moved. The children didn’t line up or pull out their lunchboxes. There was no food. They just sat there, quietly. Some resting their heads on the desks, others tried to distract themselves with play. I spoke to a young girl, about 10 years old. When I asked her what she wanted to be when she grows up, she didn’t say “doctor” or “teacher.” She looked down and said, “I just want to be a school cook.”

That answer broke something in me.

We expect these children to learn algebra, read novels, and write compositions on empty stomachs? If only our policy makers could be subjected to one month, just one, without breakfast or lunch, and only water till 6pm, perhaps they’d finally understand the brutal truth: a hungry child can’t learn.

Hunger isn’t just physical; it eats into the brain, the spirit, the future. And while the learners starve, our teachers are in crisis too. Many of them graduated in the 1970s and 80s, and since then, they’ve never seen the inside of a training room. In rural areas, especially, most have never even touched a computer. That’s not just a tech gap; that’s an educational time warp.

In fact, a district in Northern Uganda recently administered a basic competency test to its own teachers, the same content they teach in class. Shockingly, 89% failed to score even 50%. And we wonder why the national exams are producing such grim results? It’s not just the students who’ve been abandoned; it’s the very people we entrust to guide them. The rot runs deep.

Many schools in Dokolo still lack the most basic facilities, no libraries, no laboratories, not even functioning toilets. Some children still learn under trees. They sit on stones, write on their laps, and balance their futures against the wind. Teachers juggle massive Class sizes average of 78 pupils per teacher, far above the recommended ratio. Teachers juggle multiple classes, low pay, and no materials. What is being taught in such chaos? And more crucially, what is being learned?

It’s no surprise, then, that the national dropout rate has ballooned. Nearly half of primary school learners drop out before completing. In Dokolo, the numbers are even higher. Teenagers with no literacy skills are ending up in boda stages, early marriages, or worse, on the streets, vulnerable to violence and crime. A generation that was promised education is now spiralling into survival mode.

Yet, somehow, the government always finds money for the wrong things.

Just the other day, the Ministry of Gender announced that it had spent sh12 billion on luxury V8 SUVs for cultural leaders, each worth about sh800 million. And they’re not done: they’re planning to release $180,000 per year per leader for operational costs. That’s more than sh10.5 billion annually. Now imagine what that kind of money could do for schools in Dokolo, ICT labs, stocked libraries, trained teachers, and feeding programs.

Instead, we’re fuelling egos and calling it governance, while children drink water for lunch.

You know what makes it all the more absurd? The Pope, yes, the head of the Vatican, drives a small Fiat. Our leaders, in contrast, cling to their air-conditioned convoys, convinced they’re kings while their children become statistics.

So, where do we go from here?

Uganda doesn’t lack money; it lacks direction. It lacks values. It lacks heart. We don’t need more policies; we need the political will to implement the ones we already have. That begins with raising the capitation grant to a realistic figure. It means scaling up school feeding to 100% of rural schools. It requires serious, continuous professional development for our teachers. And above all, it demands that we reallocate the billions wasted on luxury into building the minds of our children.

Because here’s the hard truth: a child who learns on an empty stomach, from a teacher who doesn’t understand the material, is a child whose dreams are being quietly buried.

Until we put the classroom before the convoy, the blackboard before the bottle of wine, and the learner before the leader’s ego, Uganda will not rise.

We must stop lying to ourselves. UPE and USE are not working, not because the idea was wrong, but because we’ve failed to honour it.

May God help Uganda—but only after we find the courage to help ourselves.