A Weary and Soulless Country in the Grip of Savagery

It can be risky business for anyone to pin a label, point out systematic failures or direct blanket criticism at any national, ethnic, religious or otherwise identifiable group of people. Whoever does so could easily be labeled as intolerant, bigoted and even racist. The exception from such labeling may be when the commentator is an integral member of the group of people at whom the comments are directed. Even then, some people from inside the affected group could start accusing the community member who criticizes his/her own community of being unfaithful to the group. In the case of a nation, the person can easily be as called unpatriotic, and even worse, a traitor.

Yet, it is that risk that Muniini Mulera took in his posting on July 14, 2025, on Mulera’s Fireplace. Muniini Mulera posting touched  on matters concerning the circumstances of the widely reported murder of our mutual King’s College Budo schoolmate and friend David Mutaaga and his wife Deborah. The murdered couple had returned to Uganda in recent years after spending most of their adult lives overseas in highly successful professional careers. Though relatively short, Muniini Muniini’s post touched on several immediate as well as contextual aspects of this dastardly, and as yet unsolved crime. These include a) background information on the victims; b) the deep sense of consternation, revulsion and fear that the murders generated; c) the deeply degraded and unsustainable state of law, order and security of person and property in Uganda. Muniini Mulera goes on to suggest that this murder and other mayhem, as well as the general state of lawlessness, disorderliness and insecurity could lead to negative decisions for Diaspora Ugandans on returning to and/or investing in Uganda.

For enhanced context, two incisive paragraphs from Muniini Mulera’s post are reproduced in the box below. He describes Uganda in words that should cause any reader to pause and ask: what is Uganda about, and what is wrong with Uganda? In the first of these paragraphs Muniini Mulera describe Uganda as a country in which, “Greed, envy, devaluation of human life, culminating in murder, have become the trademark of a savagery that has the land in a firm grip.” He then states in the second paragraph, “Yes, my country’s soul was stolen long ago, now replaced with a dark one that has brought us the sickening spectacle of many sane citizens celebrating the deaths of people …. .”

These are words that suggest, to this author and to some other people that have read the article and witnessed the state that Uganda is in, to conclude that Uganda is a country that is suffering from an affliction that can be categorised as cultural sin. As a Ugandan, I have no trepidations about taking up Muniini Mulera’s lament and speaking up about the burden of cultural sin as an affliction that is tearing at, ripping apart and rotting the fabric of Uganda. It is a serious affliction that, left unaddressed, can lead to the demise of Uganda as viable or livable nation state.

This is the first of at least three intended articles on Uganda’s Burden of Cultural Sin.

Nature and Overlap of Cultural Sin and Religious Sin

While cultural sin is a violation of a society's norms, values and expectations, religious sin is a transgression against divine law. Thus, cultural sin is a violation of what is considered acceptable behavior within a specific community, while religious sin is often seen as an offense against God or a higher power. In terms of focus, cultural sin is about breaking the written and unwritten rules or expected behaviors within a specific community, and religious sin is primarily understood to be those attitudes and behaviours that displease or violates the will of a deity. In terms of consequences,

cultural sins can lead to social disapproval, ostracization, or other forms of social and criminal punishment. Depending on the particular religion, the consequence of religious sin can include spiritual punishments like damnation, excommunication, and karmic repercussions. While cultural norms and values can and tend to evolve steadily over time, religious laws and doctrines tend to be dogmatically slow to evolve and may be seen as unchanging. 

Thus, and, religious sin is about one’s relationship with the divine, while cultural sin is about one’s relationship with society. However, there can be significant overlap between religious and cultural sins, particularly in cultures like Uganda that are deeply influenced by religion. Hence, what is considered a sin in a religious context may also be condemned by cultural norms. However, there are also instances where a behavior might be deemed a sin within a specific religion but not necessarily a cultural taboo, or vice versa. For example, stealing is both a religious sin (as in commandment against theft in the Ten Commandments) and a cultural taboo in most societies (as in laws and edicts protecting property rights). In another example, eating pork and having more than one marital partner are religious prohibitions for some faiths but are not cultural taboos in many societies. And wearing clothes considered immodest in a culture that values modesty could be a cultural "sin" but not necessarily a religious one. 

The focus here is on cultural sin. At the same, it is useful to recognise that at different times and in different places and circumstances, cultural sins and religious sins can overlap to the point being impossible to distinguish.

Cultural Sin is Timeless and Geographically and Socially Ubiquitous Affliction

Cultural sin is a phenomenon that is as historically old and as geographically widespread as mankind. Every community, whether a home, family, corporate entity, country or the whole world, has been and is inhabited by cultural sins. Cultural sins are those traits, attitudes, norms, customs and practices that are deemed to be selfish, unjust, inhuman, or otherwise unpalatable and unacceptable for the proper functioning of the community and the comfort and wellbeing of individuals and society.  Such traits, attitudes, norms and practices are looked down on and shunned by the concerned entity. Cultural sins manifest themselves in various forms and degrees of intensity. They are subtly as well as openly and proactively discouraged by the community through shame, rejection, alienation, ostracization, legislated and unlegislated sanctions and other means of disapproval and punishment.

It is impossible to have a society in which there are no cultural sins.  In fact, cultural sins may even be viewed as an integral part of the frictional movements that drive and sustain communities. However, the desire and hope of communities that value stability, harmony and progress is that cultural sins are not the predominant driving influences of the functioning of the community. The logic here is that in order to fully experience and enjoy a good life, people need to have some measure of tangible understanding of the things that would lead to a bad life. In that way, means could be developed and implemented for keeping the infections of cultural sins at bay or in check.

The trouble is that cultural sins have ways of slipping through the cracks of scrutiny and suppression. When they do, they can become normalized and take over as the predominant driving influences in society. Once this happens, insidious behaviours, such as rampant materialism, worship of possessions, obsession with celebrity culture, bribery, discrimination, callous mayhem and murder, and other evil silently start to erode moral values and permeate socio-economic transactional and co-existence norms. The community and its members then `become stuck in a situation where most relationships and transactions only result in lose-lose situations, or at best in win-lose situations; and win-win situations are very rare or never happen at all.

Cultural Sin was a Generational Issue that Spanned Ancient and Christian Greece

Epimenides was a Greek poet and philosopher from the city of Knossos on the Island of Crete who lived almost 2,800 years ago. In the Sixth Century BC, Epidenides boldly confronted his fellow citizens on the Island of Crete and told them that they had built and were living in a society that was afflicted by cultural sin. He publicized the following statement about his Cretan compatriots, “Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, and lazy gluttons.” There is no doubt that Epimenides was using the literary technique called hyperbole in condemning all Cretans as “liars, evil brutes and gluttons”. In other words, Epimenides was over-exaggerating, in order to make a point about Cretan society. In today’s world, Epimenides’s pronouncement would be like a Chinese writer saying that “the Chinese are atheists.” Obviously not all Chinese people throughout the world are atheists. However, in general, modern Chinese society promotes atheism. In the same vein, Epimenides was saying that the Cretan society of his day was characteristically dishonest; engaged in behaviours that were violent to the point of being sub-human (i.e. were devoid of Obuntu/Ubuntu); and they had no qualms about growing fat, obese and unhealthy (mafuta mingi) while living off other people’s resources and efforts like parasites. In the same way, while not all Ugandans are lawless, Uganda society promotes behaviour that flaunts lawlessness and other undesirable attributes.

Six-hundred years after Epimenides, in the First Century AD, the Apostle Paul commissioned Titus to work among the Cretans as a Christian missionary. In the process, Paul used Epimenides’s assessment of the Cretans to instruct Titus in the task that lay ahead for the latter (The Bible – Titus, Chapter 1). Paul endorsed Epimenides’s (that is, the native Cretan’s) characterization of the Cretans in these words: “That testimony (i.e. what Epimenides had said 600 years hence) is true. For this rebuke them sharply”. Paul was non-circumspect in pointing out that that Cretan had not changed their ways in 600 years. He was especially scathing in his condemnation of Crete’s political, religious and other leaders and those around them. It was these leaders and their lackies that sustained the Cretans’ culture of sin by organising themselves into certain self-serving better-than-thou groups or parties. Paul wrote thus about these leaders and their groups, “They must be silenced, because they are ruining whole households by teaching things they ought not to teach – and that for the sake of dishonest gain.” Thus, directly based on Epimenides’s observations, Paul put his fingers on political and religious leaders and their close followers as the primary instigators and sustainers of the evils that he observed in Cretan society.

Cultural Sin is a Generational, Normalized Attribute of Independent Uganda

The trouble with Uganda is that there has been a widespread failure to identify and understand and mitigate against those beliefs, attitudes and practices that lead to bad sub-standard and/or intolerable lives for individuals, families, organisations, communities and the nation as whole.

In the respective descriptions of cultural sin in Crete by Epimenides in the Sixth Century BC, and by the Apostle Paul, who lived in the First Century AD, they could have been speaking about Ugandans and their leaders in the 21^st Century. From a religious point of view, Uganda is a fervently pious and sanctimonious society. Ugandans have embraced and openly exhibit all manner of religiosity. They have turned not only to Christianity and Islam, but also (albeit in more minor role) to Judaism, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnessism, Baha’isism, etc. Lately, there has even been a re-surgency in turning to traditional animistic religions. Yet even this religiosity seems to be just a veneer that tries to hide the nation’s true problems and to mask people’s and institutions’ true identities, ambitions and intentions.

Thus, despite the religiosity of its people and leaders, over 60 years into the Independence Era, it is Uganda’s burden of cultural sin that has prevented it from developing into an environmentally healthy, economically stable, politically stable and socially harmonious country.

In his Independence Day Speech in 1962, then Prime Minister Milton Obote outlined a vision of a nation that was on the fast-track to progress “under the guidance and protection of God”. Post-Independence Uganda’s First Five-Year Development Plan (1962 – 1967) was couched in terms of a crusade to eliminate the scourges of ignorance, poverty, hunger and disease. Forty-five years hence, the country is still fighting the same afflictions of poverty, ignorance and disease. The only difference between those earlier times and today, is that the afflictions have metamorphosed and metastasized, and have become both more intensive as well as widespread and intractable.

Uganda has one of the lowest levels of per capita income as well as one of the most inequitable distributions of income in the world. Forty-two percent of the population live below the international poverty line of $2.15 per person per day. Ninety-one percent of the people live below the World Bank's poverty threshold for upper-middle-income countries, which is $6.85 per person per day. Uganda’s GINI Index stands at 43%, indicating a very uneven distribution of income. The country’s Prosperity Gap is 12, meaning that Uganda’s income per capita must increase by a factor of 12 (i.e. 12-fold) before the country can reach the globally accepted figure of $25 per person per day. With economic statistics like these, one wonders what the incumbent President of Uganda meant when he, as recently as June 2025, said that he wanted Uganda to take a "qualitative leap" and become a "high upper middle-income country". "Other countries in Asia with less natural resources, did it. We can do it," he added.

Besides the unfavourable economic situation and outlook, the country faces significant challenges with hunger and malnutrition, especially among children. Stunting, a form of chronic malnutrition, affects a large percentage of Ugandan children. Factors contributing to this include poverty, inadequate access to healthcare and healthy diets, and the impact of conflict and displacement, especially among refugee and displaced populations. There is precedented urban and rural squalor resulting from the complex interplay of rapid and uncontrolled urbanization, lack of and/or ineffectiveness of regional and rural development and land use planning, deep and widespread poverty, inadequate infrastructure and other factors. This had led to the development of slums, overcrowding, and various social and environmental problems. Inevitably, there are high rates of pollution, resource depletion, land conflicts, unemployment, and crime. 

A degenerated education system no longer contributes the same level and quality of human resource development and does not produce the same quantity and quality of world human capital and class research that emanated out Uganda immediately before and after Independence. There is high susceptibility to pandemics, resurgent malaria, TB and other diseases that had previously been on the decline. Life-expectancy has not kept with the pace many countries that were positioned like Uganda 60 years ago. The natural resource base as well as the environment have been decidedly compromised and degraded.

In short, Uganda is a land of unfulfilled potential and underdevelopment. It strides a tragic and near-inhabitable national landscape of undeveloped and deteriorated physical infrastructure, socio-economic malaise, bad governance, insecurity, and spiritual and moral decay.

Underpinning and driving these tragic circumstances is a national culture of pervasive and endemic lawlessness, impunity, and callous lack of concern for human life and the welfare of others. A lot of daily and nightly life in Uganda is dominated by acts of mayhem that includes armed robbery; revenge- and jealousy-fueled murders; routine rape; sexual defilement of children; impunity-laced fraudulent acts and corruption in offices, businesses and homes; and other forms of both violent and non-violent criminal acts. Brazen lawless, brutish (i.e. inhumane) and immoral acts are committed in the same ways by state, para-state and private sector actors as well as by religious and civil society actors.

Unless Ugandans can free themselves, including each other, from the clutches and shackles of their pervasive brand of cultural sin, the country will not be able to live up to its potential and to fulfil the aspirations and dreams of its founders and their descendants. It does matter how much oil is pumped out of the ground and exported, or how much domestic and foreign investment is infused into the economy, or how large and battle ready the armed forces are; all those and other apparently good things will easily be turned into curses under the burden of cultural sin. A colleague once used a medical metaphor to describe the futility of investing anything in Uganda without dealing with its pervasive lawlessness, brutish behaviour, corruption and other cultural problems. The friend said that investing Uganda is like transfusing blood and other fluids into a patient with untreated or terminal abdominal cancer; whatever is transfused is immediately picked up and pumped out of the body by the debauched and roguish cancer cells.