Anita Annett Among’s current circumstances were predictable. My column titled “Anita Among’s political suicide” (May 14, 2024) is worth re-reading. My focus today is on the psychological explanation for Anita’s avarice and cupidity, of which she has an excessive endowment.
Avarice — the compulsive hoarding of wealth – speaks of a deep-seated emptiness. Cupidity — the burning desire to acquire – betrays a restless hunger that cannot be satisfied. The two are related but not identical.
Avarice is about holding; cupidity is about reaching. In the worst cases of political corruption, we see both at work simultaneously: a leader who cannot stop taking and cannot bear to give anything up. But when that hunger extends beyond money into the accumulation of raw political power, the psychology of greed transforms into something more consequential still — a structural threat to the state itself.
Few contemporary figures illustrate this escalating pathology more vividly than Anita Among, the former Speaker of Uganda’s Parliament. Anita comes across as a woman who was either born and raised in difficult circumstances or had a very difficult past that probably included being ridiculed about her appearance and social standing. Through luck or craftiness, she found herself at the centre of political power, with enormous influence and access to plenty of cash. She took to it the way a child with Kwashiorkor does when they get food. If left alone, they will eat rapidly and excessively, risking what doctors call the “refeeding syndrome.” This is a very dangerous, even fatal development for the child if not controlled by experienced, competent and committed caregivers.
Anita’s excessive greed for wealth morphed into greed for political power. One thing to understand about political greed is that it is rarely about the money. Or rather, money becomes something other than money. Psychologists often tie wealth accumulation in highly placed individuals to “status anxiety”— the fear that one’s position is never quite secure enough, never sufficiently visible. For someone who began at the bottom of the social ladder and rose to the third-highest constitutional office in Uganda, Anita’s psychic vulnerability is not hard to imagine. Luxury goods are her language. A Rolls-Royce does not merely transport. It announces. It says: I have arrived and I am not going back.
Anita’s 3.5-billion-shilling Rolls-Royce was just the latest addition to her pricey fleet, including top end Mercedes Benz vehicles. These, together with her palatial mansion in Kamutur, Bukedea, and homes in the posh Kampala suburbs of Nakasero, Kigo, and Ntinda, made her arguably Uganda’s most luxury-oriented politician, in a country where 59.8 percent of the population, or 27.5 million people, live on less than 3 dollars a day, the current international definition of poverty.
This is where avarice tips into something morally grotesque. Psychoanalysts identify this pathological acquisitiveness as a displacement activity — filling of an internal void with external objects. But what distinguished Anita Among from the common corrupt functionary was that money, for her, was never simply an end. It was an instrument. And the thing she was buying was political power.
Using the large budget of parliament liberally, she allegedly cajoled, intimidated, blackmailed, and bought off many MPs to be subservient to her. She then used her role as Speaker to gain influence over other pillars of elite power. Under her tenure, the Parliamentary Commission, which she chaired, was a key instrument of influence, controlling jobs and resources often used for patronage, while parliament’s budget rose to over a trillion shillings, giving the Speaker considerable financial leverage to build a political base.
What makes Among’s case psychologically and politically distinctive is the moment when cupidity stopped being merely personal and started threatening the architecture of the state. President Yoweri Museveni initially welcomed and fuelled Among’s grip on parliament. She eliminated the headaches parliament had previously posed and established herself as a reliable instrument the president could use with ease and assured success. The Museveni-Among relationship was transactional. She received a licence to enrich herself in exchange for delivering legislative loyalty.
But the instrument developed ambitions of its own. Anita constructed broad-based power spanning the NRM party, parliament, the judiciary, the churches, and other pillars of elite power. This broad-based authority gave her the confidence to adopt and display Museveni’s ways, such as her invitation of Members of Parliament to her home in Bukedea and showing off her cattle ranch to them. The symbolism was not subtle.
Cattle, in Ugandan political culture, are a signifier of the presidency. Museveni has long used his own ranch as a backdrop of patriarchal authority. Anita was writing herself into the same iconography. She was now his equal.
Even more remarkable was how Anita brazenly converted her role as Speaker into a platform for direct citizen engagement, resolving issues the Executive itself had struggled with, earning trust beyond her office. She asserted authority over parts of the executive branch, and became a celebrity better known than the official vice-president and the prime minister. Again, she was equal to the president, an unforgivable mistake.
Her assumed proximity to Museveni and her financial resources blinded her to the danger she was courting by playing too close to the fire that had incinerated the political and military ambitions of numerous people that had had a longer history with Museveni and more influence in the regime than this upstart from Bukedea. It was suicide in a public space, evident to all but the wilfully blind.
The well-planned response from the Palace at Rwakitura was predictably overwhelming. The threat from Bukedea had to be neutralised without leaving her a chance for survival. The Rolls-Royce was a convenient excuse for booting her off the team and calling in the undertakers. And we have not seen anything yet.
By the time they are through with her, Anita Among will be a lonely figure, abandoned by her fawning supporters inside and outside parliament, and a synonym for evil and treachery. Not that this should surprise her, for we warned her in this column two years ago. She ignored us, of course, consistent with the Runyankore Rukiga saying: Eraafe tehurira nzamba. The ill-fated animal never hears the hunter’s trumpet.
The case of Anita Among is not unique — it is an unusually well-documented instance of a universal pathology: the way access to power, in the absence of accountability, transforms cupidity from a personal failing into a structural threat. She wanted money, then more money, then the power money could buy, and eventually built a parliamentary empire so large it alarmed the very presidency that had incubated it. The dangerous moment when the creature outgrew its cage had arrived. It was time for the hunters to close in. With overwhelming force.
Dr. Mulera is a paediatrician and neonatologist.