Every time President Yoweri Museveni announces a new cabinet, Ugandans perform a familiar ritual. Political commentators parse the list for regional signals. Religious communities count their representatives. Ethnic arithmetic is performed on social media and radio talk shows. Tribal loyalists thank Museveni for “remembering and rewarding them” by appointing their ethnic kin.
Two troubling questions are generally lost in the excitement. First, are the appointees the best people for the job? Second, will they be allowed to be the real leaders of their ministries? The answer to both, after four decades of Museveni’s rule, is mostly no — and the reason is not that Uganda lacks capable people. It is that capable people, in Museveni’s political calculus, have often been a liability rather than an asset.
Uganda’s cabinet appointments have long followed a recognisable logic that has little to do with merit. Not that Museveni’s cabinets have been short of bright, educated and able people. Most of those who have served as cabinet ministers since 1986 rank high on academic and professional achievement scores. His recent preference for “fishermen” over intellectuals and seasoned leaders should not blur that truth.
But intellectual excellence and leadership ability has not been a major driver of these appointments. The President rewards personal loyalty. He accommodates powerful interest groups whose continued support he requires. He distributes portfolios as political currency, placating rivals and binding potential dissidents through the golden handcuffs of ministerial office. What emerges from this process is not a government of Uganda’s ablest citizens. It is a court. And like all courts, it functions primarily to serve the king.
Last week’s cabinet announcement largely confirms that tradition. The new cabinet contains a few individuals that are supremely underqualified to serve in leadership of any public organization. But the majority are very capable appointments, with a few placed in portfolios where their expertise matches the job very well.
For example, Henry Musaasizi at Finance is a serious technocrat who understands the machinery of Uganda’s fiscal architecture. Katumba Wamala at Public Service brings administrative discipline to a ministry that requires structural reform. Chris Baryomunsi, moving to Health, is a medical doctor with leadership and political experience. He succeeds Jane Ruth Aceng, another highly capable physician and experienced corporate leader. Charles Ayume, another experienced medical doctor appointed as Minister of State for Health, is held in high esteem by colleagues and others who know him well.
Jonard Asiimwe Akiiki, at Science, Technology, and Innovation, is a certified professional in mining and petroleum engineering, with an impressive resume that would get him shortlisted by most international head-hunters. Adonia Ayebare at Foreign Affairs is a veteran diplomat who has represented Uganda at the United Nations with distinction and is deeply embedded in the architecture of regional security and multilateral diplomacy.
These are not token appointments. These, and others I have not mentioned, are people with the knowledge and professional standing to lead their ministries — if they are allowed to. That last clause carries all the weight.
The distinction between a minister and a courtier is fundamental. A minister is appointed for competence, given a mandate, resourced adequately, and held accountable for outcomes. That was how former Kenyan President Emilio Mwai Kibaki governed - with very impressive results. A courtier is appointed for loyalty, expected to reflect the ruler’s preferences back to him, and measured not by what they achieve but by how reliably they stay in line. That is Museveni’s style.
For the capable ministers, this week’s appointments present a genuine and painful dilemma. They serve in a system where Museveni is, by all documented accounts, the ultimate micromanager. Major decisions routinely flow from State House. Ministers who show too much independence, or attract too much public admiration, or are perceived as building their own political profile tend to find themselves reshuffled out at the next opportunity.
This means that the capable appointees face a structurally impossible task: to be simultaneously excellent ministers and compliant courtiers. To exercise real authority without appearing to challenge or outshine the one who gave it to them. To demonstrate independence of thought without appearing to dissent from the president’s position. It is a tightrope that would test anyone, and Uganda’s political history is littered with capable figures who fell off it.
These bright spots should not obscure the broader picture. Alongside the many capable appointments sit the familiar signatures of Museveni’s patronage system. Some individuals occupy portfolios with little obvious connection to their expertise. Regional balancing — important in itself — has once again been used as cover for appointments that have more to do with loyalty management than competent governance. The inclusion of individuals whose primary qualification appears to be their closeness to the President, or their usefulness in managing a particular constituency, remains as visible as ever.
And this is precisely the point: the goals of meritocratic appointment and regional, religious, and ethnic balance are not in conflict. Talent is abundant and broadly distributed within Uganda’s vast human landscape. There are people of extraordinary capability in every district. Most are invisible to the appointing authority because the selection process is not about merit.
A genuinely merit-based process — one that searches widely and selects transparently — would produce a cabinet that is also representative. The countrywide talent pool is so large that it is impossible for a merit-based cabinet to fail the most rigorous scrutiny for ethnic, religious, and gender-balance.
The failure to achieve a balanced meritocracy is not an inevitability. It is a political choice that Museveni continues to make because a diverse cabinet full of independently capable and publicly credible figures would be harder to control. And control, after 40 years, remains the point.
The capable ministers are entering a system that is not designed to use their expertise. Rigorous debate and evidence-based decision-making is discouraged. The brightest and best must subordinate their intellectual and leadership abilities to the dictates of the king and his innermost kitchen cabinet. Ministers who understand this learn quickly to channel their energy into the margins of implementation, finding the small spaces where they can make improvements without threatening the political equilibrium.
That is not governance. That is management under a managed system, akin to schoolteachers under a domineering headmaster. And for a country with Uganda’s challenges, management within a courtier system does not cut it.
Uganda’s cabinet need not be a choice between competence and balance. This week’s list proves, in its best moments, that both can coexist in the same document. What it cannot prove — what no cabinet list can prove — is whether the capable people on it will be empowered to govern.
That question has only one answer, and it lies with one man. Museveni can continue his four-decade habit of appointing capable people and then constraining them into irrelevance. Or he can, in what may well be his final term, slow down and choose a different legacy: a cabinet of ministers, not courtiers — genuinely empowered, honestly accountable, and trusted to lead.
Uganda has the talent. What remains to be seen is whether its President, at this late hour, or his successor is willing to be challenged by the people he appoints.
©Muniini K. Mulera