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Sometime back, on a flight to Tanzania, I found myself on neighbouring seats with a son of a senior politician in the National Resistance Movement.
He spoke English with an accent, which meant international training. But you could tell he had formed his early childhood in the not-so-posh Kampala, and possibly only recently fallen in things.
An avid reader of mine in these pages – Alhamdulillah – he quickly recognised me and we started talking. We covered a lot of ground as I learned that all of them – a family of five children – had studied abroad in Canada.
Only recently graduated, he was heading to Tanzania, through Germany (where he spent a week seeing a close relative), to join the rest of the family who were holidaying in Zanzibar.
As for me, I was heading to the University of Dar es Salaam for a series of lectures. He was a generously loquacious fellow, and the more we spoke, the more intimate details he shared.
He seemed to know he was speaking to a writer who might one day find the details of that conversation useful. Deep into the conversation, I learned he lived in a community of Ugandans united by the political work of their parents.
He would say things like, “The son of so and so… you know him?” and drop a big-name NRM politician, to which I nodded in the affirmative, and then he would continue, “we were in the same university.”
He would then add, “the daughter of so and so, you know that one… visited us in Toronto last month, they are planning a wedding with the son of so and so…and both live in downtown Toronto.”
He dropped many, many names. My memory is so poor with names – especially of myriad mid-range officers. Had my memory been as good as Ssemujju Ibrahim Nganda’s, dear reader, you would be blown away.
While the children of wretches are building communities in slavery in the Middle East, the children of our “washed brothers” are building similar communities in Toronto, London, Berlin and New York – sadly on our money.
Beyond my interlocutors’ otherwise beautiful life – a Canadian education, and holidaying on the beaches of Zanzibar – this brother carried with him the pains of most Ugandans. He appreciated the fact that his father and his friends were thieves, and had they not been corrupt, they would never enjoy the lives they were enjoying.
However, he told me many of them did not see themselves returning to messy Uganda: “Our parents have really run-down that place,” he said despondently.
The few times they had visited Kampala recently, they increasingly find the place unbearable: the smells, the messy boda-bodas.
“Oh, the potholes. I cannot stand those potholes,” he said. “Did you follow Dr Spire’s exhibition, of course, you did, possibly participated,” he smiled.
As we bid goodbye at the baggage claim, he thanked me whole-heartedly for the column. He said he loved it very much. To which I told him to credit The Observer, whose editors have settled for a life of penury in service of country.
As we disentangled from the goodbye hug, he encouraged us – minus him – to continue pushing, telling me that their parents were actually cowards: “In private conversations, they do not only speak the truth, but they also sound scared. This is reason they encourage us to keep abroad.”
He told me he never understood their parents being so critical of Yoweri Museveni privately but singing his praise publicly.
“Our parents are thieves, I tell you, Yusuf. I don’t admire their snake lives,” he added pensively.
“Nowadays money goes through Dubai. With an account and some small business in the oil-rich country, you’ll not be questioned about possible money laundering.” He would often interject and say, “of course I know you know these things, Yusuf.”
Of course, I have an idea but not with the intimacy with which he spoke. Clearly, he was conflicted about the ugly lives of his parents, from which he earned his beautiful life. For endlessly arguing with his father – also privately – they called him “NRM during the day, and FDC at night,” that, he too, lived a double life.
Dear reader, I am the type who picks no grudges with silver spoons in the mouths of people’s children. Indeed, as children, they have no say in the decisions of their parents to educate or raise them abroad.
Neither do they even have an idea how their parents earned the means to send them abroad. Maybe later in life, when they refuse to learn and come to terms with parents’ wealth and decisions.
But this neighbour of mine was a different breed. He had no kind words for his thieving parents, and I will be forever grateful for the secrets he shared with me.
But this entire practice of our politicians building their lives and raising kids abroad is wholesomely instructive: on the one hand, one is forced to ask: when NRM politicians chant “protecting the gains”, for whom or for whose children are they protecting the gains?
Because their children and grandchildren are building lives elsewhere. On the other, one gets to see the Ugandan mess in a clearer perspective; many politicians see neither themselves nor their children building their futures in these ever-flooding streets.
More importantly, one is made to appreciate the stakes as we head into 2026: one small scare, most NRM politicians will be running to the nearest exit out of Kampala. They are like expats to this place.
Except their many constructions around Kampala – as impulsive rent-collectors – they already booked their lives abroad. As their son would say to me, “keep pushing. Our parents are the most afraid – and are waiting to run.”
yusufkajura@gmail.com
The author is a political theorist based at Makerere University.
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