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By Oweyegha-Afunaduula
Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis
The rise of violence and the gun culture in Uganda, like in the United States, Canada and other countries cannot be separated from the rise in militarism. Militarism is the belief that a country must maintain a strong military capability and must use, or threaten to use, force to protect and advance “national interest” (e.g., Steuter and Martin, 2019).
During President Tibuhaburwa Museveni’s bush war in the Luwero Triangle of Buganda many children, called kadogos, were socialized into violence. Beyond the bush war, many school going children were socialized into violence via Mchaka Mchaka, paramilitary groups and exposure to violence.
Besides, militarization of everything possible, including legislation, justice fisheries and development, frequently involving violence, is teaching the present generation of Ugandans that violence should be at the centre of leadership and governance.
Adelman (2003) linked, military, militarization and the militarization of domestic violence. There is no doubt that over the last 40 years, one of the most thriving industries in Uganda is the militarization of domestic violence. Everywhere young people have adopted violence to survive. Unlike before, violence in homes regarding inheritance, property and marriage, increasingly resulting in killings and suicides, is now widespread throughout the country.
A rising or potential source of violence in Uganda today is land grabbing, either by government on behalf of investors, government officials, military officers, police officers or nomadic pastoralists with exogenous origins. This is pushing the settled indigenes of the country to the margins of survival where they are just etching a living.
An increasing number of them is exposed to hunger because farmers have been dispossessed of their land, displaced and forced to migrate to areas where they are not biologically, historically, ecologically, culturally and psychologically connected and their belonging and identities are not shaped.
They are angry people. Because they are now internal refugees seeking livelihood in areas where they have no belonging, they are meeting resistance in some areas, often violently. In some cases, violence has been used to settle differences in culture, belonging and identity, often unsuccessfully, promising more violence in future.
Steuter and Martin (2019) suggested that family professionals can help parents become aware of the militarization process and then give them strategies for reducing its effects. Thankfully, professionals, parents, and families can create change by focusing on the ways in which peace in the home extends to peace in the world. Parents can practice peaceful options in their own lives and encourage them in their family.
They can take care not to raise children as future soldiers by default, but to choose toys, video games, clothing, television shows, and movies that serve the values of peace. From a position of strength, parents, families, and communities can work together and advocate for policy changes at all levels that cultivate a peaceful culture (Steuter and Martin 2019). However, peace should not be primarily seen physical terms, because that will only lead to further militarisation of society and cultivate a culture of violence in a century of internet, new and different knowledge and artificial knowledge.
Access to resources, such as water and underground wealth, will be the main cause of clashes. Currently, underground resources, such as gold and rare earth minerals in Busoga, are being clandestinely exploited by people of Rwandese, Chinese and Indian extraction secured militarily by members of the security organs of the country at no benefit to the Basoga. Fortunately, the Basoga are naturally peace-loving.
They have not shown that they will resort to violence to secure access to their resources. However, like is the case in oil-rich Nigeria, where the oil firms have impoverished the people and the people have resorted to violence in pursuit of resource use justice, the increasingly young population of Busoga, with diminishing opportunities, could one day be compelled to resort to violence because there is no evidence that justice in resource use justice is a critical issue central to development in Uganda today.
The ten billion question is: Has Uganda been led and governed for peace and security well in future or for momentary peace and security for the benefit of leaders and governors?
There is evidence to suggest that peace and security building today is more to secure the leaders and governor of the country than for the current and future generations of Ugandans. This could explain the supersonically rising security budget and militarization of the country and everything -in all dimensions of our environment (ecological-biological, socioeconomic, sociocultural and temporal).
The greatest threat facing Uganda today is the duality of hereditary politics and hereditary militarism. If the duality is allowed to entrench itself, it will be extremely difficult for Ugandans to erase dynastic rule, political cultism, and family rule well in the future.
In this article, I want to write about hereditary militarism. I have before written about hereditary political leadership in Uganda (Oweyegha-Afunaduula, 2022), which has imposed a few, mainly closely ethnically-related families, as the source of leaders and governors at the national, district and local levels. This is internally potentially violence-packed in the medium and long-term.
It partly explains the rising state violence in the country, siphoning off a lot of public money to sustain and support the ruling, increasingly politically hereditary-like ruling families that do not want to lose their privileged political status, which affords them economic, financial and social domination of Ugandans..
Hereditary militarism, while not a widely used term, suggests a system where military values, traditions, and practices are passed down through generations, often within a specific family or lineage. This could involve a focus on military service as a valued profession, a reverence for the military, or a belief in the superiority of military strength.
Leaders and governors who value hereditary militarism tend to stay in power for a long time and manifest as if they are indispensable. Frequently they are called dictators or tyrants. They use their influence to create heredity by constitutional prescription.
Theirs is succession by force. However, constitutionally prescribed arrangements for ensuring the succession are not always so successful, and many countries whose constitutions contain very similar provisions have experienced succession crises that were resolved only by violence.
Frequently, the man of power chooses one of his offsprings to succeed him rather than pass the instruments of power to a member of his party or to another in another party. In another article “How Dictators Legitimise themselves and Consolidate their Power” (Oweyegha-Afunaduula, 2025) I showed that some leaders prefer to rule unchallenged and prepare their sons offspring to take over from them. However, many times members of the ruling family are compelled to use violence to liquidate each other. The survivor takes the reigns of power without any recourse to the people he is going to rule.
Although dictators still occasionally seek to establish their sons as their heirs, they usually rely on force rather than the claims of heredity to achieve their object. Apart from a few states where the dynastic ruler is the effective head of the government, the hereditary principle of succession is now almost exclusively confined to the constitutional monarchies (Heslop, 2025).
There is widespread belief that the President of Uganda, Tibuhaburwa Museveni, has for long been in for dynastic rule not only in Uganda but in the Great Lakes region, and his commitment to East African Community and its expansion towards including the whole of the Great Lakes region, is geared towards this goal.
People cite his almost cult-like personality, suppression of democratic norms, and his belief that he is the true representative of Uganda and democracy in the country as well as regional unity and cooperation in East Africa and the Great lakes region, as the resources he has built to project himself as most suitable candidate for a regional leader. However, they note that he is in his twilight of life and that all his recent decisions and actions indicate that he is aware that he cannot hold on to the reigns of power for ever.
President Tibuhaburwa Museveni has severally pronounced that he cannot hand over the instruments of power to people he calls criminals (read leaders of political parties). To this end, he has kept his criminals in political and military chains, ensuring that they are restricted to the headquarters of their parties so that they do not meaningfully interact with the populace the way he does.
Some of the political leaders are not known widely within the country, and are only heard of via television, radio, newspapers and social media. Meanwhile he has been fast-tracking his son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, through the ranks and posts of his army, Uganda Peoples Defense Forces (UPDF), which is actually constitutionalized National Resistance Army (NRA), which he used to wage a five-year bush war in the Luwero Triangle.
Indeed, during the promulgation of the Uganda Constitution 1995, he preferred NRA to UPDF. Today, Muhoozi Kainerugaba is not only a General of the army but also the Chief of Defense Forces (CDF) with far more powers than all other people who held that post before in the Army.
From that post he has also declared they (meaning President Tibuhaburwa Museveni and himself and perhaps his uncle, General Salim Saleh Akandwanaho Caleb) can never hand over power to the Criminals (read alternative political leaders). He also stated that civilians will never rule Uganda again. In both cases his statements were received with silence of approval from his father.
Therefore, already, General Muhoozi-Kainerugaba thinks, believes and is convinced that the next ruler after his father is himself. Most of his supporters also think, believe and are convinced that he will succeed his father as the ruler of Uganda.
He already has his political group called Patriotic League of Uganda, which is within the NRM but could be easily weaned off as his political foundation, so that he manifests as the political military ruler the same way his father has done for 40 years.
Recently, President Tibuhaburwa Museveni erroneously but legislatively engineered and fast- tracked the enaction of the UPDF Act 2025 to commit Ugandans to the military court. He used his executive, powers, his influence on the NRM caucus in parliament and money, to get the UPDF Act 2025 enacted.
His thinking, belief and conviction was that the Act could be used deter the militant young people from violence. It is also thought that he wants to use it against his political opponents. However, the one who will use it most after him will be the CDF. He already wields a lot of power under the reign of President Tibuhaburwa Museveni.
Already the military and military culture has surely invaded our everyday life and are set to do so even more when the UPDF Act 2025 is signed into law by the President. Totalitarian or autocratic rule is now legislatively served by law. The UPDF Act 2025 is also the blueprint for military justice over civilians.
This explains why President Tibuhaburwa Museveni and General Muhoozi Kainerugaba immediately thanked Members of Parliament for passing the UPDF Act into law. Totalitarianism is now legally legitimised in Uganda
Totalitarianism has been a chief form of autocratic rule in many countries. It is distinguished in its use of state power to impose an official ideology on its citizens. Nonconformity of opinion is treated as the equivalent of resistance or opposition to the government, and a formidable apparatus of compulsion, including various kinds of state police or secret police, is kept in being to enforce the orthodoxy of the proclaimed doctrines of the state (Heslop, 2025).
A single party, centrally directed and composed exclusively of loyal supporters of the regime, is the other typical feature of totalitarianism. The party is at once an instrument of social control, a vehicle for ideological indoctrination, and the body from which the ruling group recruits its members (Heslop, 2025).
Accordingly, with totalitarianism legitimized legislatively in Uganda, the NRM is destined to become and manifest as an instrument of social and political control, a vehicle of ideological control and the body from which the ruling family group will recruit its members.
I have already written an article casting NRM as a personalist political organization with a personalist ruler of Uganda, President Tibuhaburwa Museveni, as its chairman, enroute being succeeded by his son, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba in the spirit of hereditary militarism (Oweyegha-Afunaduula, 2025) .
Uganda of the 21st Century is squarely under hereditary militarism. The Parliament of Uganda has participated in building hereditary militarism in Uganda and is now integral to it.
Accordingly, the Parliament of Uganda is at the centre of building military justice and eroding civilian justice in the country and, therefore, also eroding the integrity of the Judiciary of Uganda by the Executive. In essence, the Parliament of Uganda has helped the Executive to erode constitutionalism in favour of disguised hereditary military in Uganda.
For God and My Country
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