On Saturday afternoon, I sat by my window on the northern shore of Lake Ontario and watched autumn perform its annual magic trick. In the foreground, a row of maples burned crimson and orange-gold. Across the water, islands and spits flickered with gold, rust and the last of the summer green. It was breathtakingly beautiful. It was also a public relations campaign for decay.
The trees are not celebrating, my friend. They are shutting down their own power grid, choking off nutrients to their leaves and letting the green chlorophyll drain away to expose hidden pigments. The brilliant reds and golds are the final gasps of structures about to be discarded, a gorgeous prelude to a brutal winter.
A Ugandan cannot watch this magnificent decay without a pang of recognition. We know what it looks like when a system puts on its most dazzling show just before the frost. Our summer was real. For four decades, President Yoweri Museveni has been the chief architect of Uganda’s landscape. In the late 1980s and 1990s, his National Resistance Movement (NRM) was a sun-drenched spring, despite some rainstorms and hailstones, that matured into a stable summer. After the dark winters of the Idi Amin and Milton Obote regimes, Museveni brought the sunshine back. He gave Uganda a growing economy, a new constitution, and enough security for ordinary citizens to sleep without the sound of gunfire. He earned his place as the towering mvule tree of our nation. But seasons change. Somewhere along the way, the green faded and a stubborn political autumn set in.
Political autumns love theatre, and nothing draws a bigger crowd than a loud war on corruption. When a leaf turns a violent red, it is often because sugars are trapped at its tip, unable to travel down to the roots. In Uganda, wealth is trapped at the top of the political canopy while public hospitals and schools starve below.
Consider what happened at home in Kigyezi last Thursday, October 22. At an accountability meeting at the Rukiga District headquarters, Mr Balaam Barugahara, the Minister for Local Government, ordered the arrest of the district’s chief finance officer, education officer, engineer, water engineer, fisheries officer, a former principal human resource officer and a former sub-county chairman. Video clips show the officers, two of them in yellow shirts, climbing into the back of a police pickup under the gaze of a large crowd. In our political autumn, it seems, yellow offers little protection to the lower branches.
The minister’s allegations, from chairs bought at Shs950,000 each, to roads that were graded but never gravelled may well be true. If so, the officers should answer for them before a magistrate, with evidence tested and their defence heard. But a minister pronouncing guilt before a crowd is not justice. Nor is it justice when the same minister, with the CID in tow, turns two public meetings into family courts to settle private quarrels among two sets of siblings that include prominent politicians.
This is not new for Balaam. In July 2025, he declared on X that the late Tamale Mirundi’s son was safe from arrest in his quarrel with a socialite, and assured him that the Attorney General, the Director of CID and the DPP would not allow it. When a minister speaks on behalf of prosecutors, Tingasiga, who will speak for the independence of prosecutors?
General Muhoozi Kainerugaba and his team deserve credit for making the fight against corruption their central plan. But if this campaign is to be more than coloured leaves catching the sunlight, it must start at the top. True justice spares no one, regardless of military rank, political influence or family ties. Nor can anyone campaign for the presidency using government time, ministerial state resources and taxpayers’ money and still claim to champion anti-corruption.
Real anti-corruption work rests on evidence-based investigation, independent prosecutors and due process applied equally to all. Without these, scapegoats are shaken from the lower branches and humiliated in public, while grand corruption at the top of the canopy remains untouched.
Humour remains our warmest blanket in this chilly season. Our politicians switch parties as effortlessly as leaves drift on an October breeze. One day a politician is a fiery red or soft green or sky-blue opposition activist. The next, after a closed-door meeting at the state lodge, he has turned an agreeable NRM yellow. They are simply adjusting their pigments to the shifting climate.
At dusk, a bright moon rose over Lake Ontario while the sun still lit the sky. For a while, the two shared the heavens. The moon glowed beautifully, but its light was borrowed.
Now the wind is blowing toward a new generation. As a citizen, Muhoozi has every right to seek the presidency after his father. Dynasties occur in nature, and they can occur in democracies too. He has a genuine opportunity to win a free election. I invite him, and all who seek to succeed Museveni, to shine with their own light, as modern leaders who welcome criticism and invite challenge. Let them seek power through free and fair competition, winning over sceptics and opponents with clear arguments and credible claims.
Above all, they must resist the ultimate temptation of long-enduring regimes: the urge to govern through fear. Fear is a temporary frost. It may freeze people into silence, but eventually it kills the very soil a leader stands on.
Autumn leaves can dance and flutter all they want, but winter does not negotiate. Every piece of artificial colour will be stripped away, leaving bare, honest branches against a grey sky. Power, like chlorophyll, eventually drains from every human hand.
Yet this is where our hope lies. Uganda’s future belongs to its youth, most of our population. They are new seeds, waiting to break through the frozen ground. But they must not discard the wisdom buried in older soil. They should sit by the fireplace and listen to elders who remember both the bright sunshine of the early independence years and the terrifying ice age of the 1970s and 1980s. The elders know how quickly a political climate can freeze over, and how costly it is to melt the ice of dictatorship. The youth bring heat and passion. The elders bring a reliable compass.
A brutal winter need not follow this political autumn. Those who want to succeed Museveni mut not allow the political winter to return to Uganda. We have the power and the wisdom to change course before the frost takes hold. And if we fail, it will not be the end of our story. It will be painfully cold and fraught with dangerous, slippery ice. However, the lesson of the northern forest is that life does not die when the leaves fall. It goes underground to rest, regroup and reinvent itself. The frost will pass, the ground will soften, and the trees will grow green again. This time, my friend, their shade must belong to everyone. But is it necessary to go through the pain?
©Muniini K. Mulera