By Atwemereireho Alex who is a a lawyer, researcher & governance analyst.
When President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni and his National Resistance Movement (NRM) took power in 1986, Uganda was a country crawling out of the wreckage of civil war, economic collapse, and moral disintegration. Inflation had spiraled above 200 percent, GDP growth was negative, industries lay in ruins, and the very idea of the Ugandan state was teetering. It is from these ashes that “Musevenomics” emerged, a blend of liberal orthodoxy, pragmatism, and political centralism that sought to rebuild a shattered economy while retaining firm control over the state’s ideological and political levers.
Museveni’s economic philosophy, as captured in his own works What Is Africa’s Problem? and Sowing the Mustard Seed, anchored itself on two convictions: that political stability was a precondition for economic recovery, and that Africa’s tragedy lay in “unanalytical leadership”- leaders who, in his words, “did not understand the link between politics, economics, and ideology.” Musevenomics thus became more than a policy framework; it evolved into an economic creed shaped by history, power, and the President’s own intellectual militancy.
The early years of Musevenomics (1986–1995) were defined by an unflinching alliance with the Bretton Woods institutions. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank found in Museveni a disciplined reformer willing to implement structural adjustment programmes, liberalize trade, privatize state enterprises, and open Uganda’s economy to foreign capital. Under the Economic Recovery Programme of 1987, inflation dropped from over 200 percent to below 10 percent within five years; GDP growth averaged 6.5 percent, and Uganda was lauded by the IMF as the “model pupil of reform in sub-Saharan Africa.” This was a remarkable turnaround in macroeconomic stability.
Yet beneath the statistics lay contradictions that would haunt Uganda’s development path for decades. Structural adjustment, while stabilizing the macroeconomy, dismantled many of the state’s productive capacities. The privatization of public enterprises often to politically connected elites entrenched a form of crony capitalism masked as liberalization. Uganda’s domestic industry, which had been slowly recovering, was left vulnerable to foreign imports and speculative capital. As
David Sseppuuya notes in his book Africa’s Industrialisation and Prosperity, Uganda, like many African states, “failed to transform natural capital into productive capital,” exporting raw materials while importing finished goods, a cycle that perpetuated dependency rather than prosperity.
By the early 2000s, the second phase of Musevenomics emerged: the consolidation of neoliberal reform under a distinctly paternalistic state. Having won international acclaim as an economic reformer, Museveni began to fuse donor-driven market policies with populist rural programmes such as the Plan for Modernisation of Agriculture, the National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS), and later, Operation Wealth Creation. The rhetoric was powerful: “Prosperity for All.” But the reality on the ground was uneven. NAADS, conceived to transfer technology and skills to farmers, became riddled with corruption, inefficiency, and politicization. Inputs were often distributed along partisan lines, while extension services remained underfunded. Operation Wealth Creation, under military command, blurred the line between economic management and political patronage, prioritizing loyalty over performance.
Here, Musevenomics reveals its dual character: technocratic in theory, patrimonial in practice. The state remained a gatekeeper, deciding who accessed credit, land titles, or government contracts. This model mirrored what the renowned political economist Peter Ekeh once described as the “two publics” in Africa, one civic, one primordial where public resources serve private and political ends. Economic growth thus became entangled with the logic of political survival. Uganda’s GDP numbers continued to impress, but inequality widened, and poverty reduction slowed. While the national poverty rate fell from 56 percent in 1992 to 19.7 percent in 2013, subsequent surveys showed a reversal, with rural poverty rising again to over 21 percent by 2020.
Comparatively, countries like Singapore, which in 1965 had a GDP per capita similar to Uganda’s, were moving in an entirely different direction. Under Lee Kuan Yew’s visionary stewardship, Singapore invested massively in human capital, rule of law, and export-oriented industrialization. By 1990, Singapore’s GDP per capita had exceeded
$10,000, while Uganda’s remained below $300. The difference lay not in natural endowment Uganda had fertile soils, water, and mineral but in governance architecture. Singapore built institutions insulated from political capture, while Uganda built institutions serving political consolidation. Singapore’s technocracy was merit-based; Uganda’s became clientelistic.
Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations reminds us that “the prosperity of a nation depends on the productivity of its people and the security of its property.” In Uganda,
both have been compromised by corruption and weak rule of law. The World Bank’s 2023 Governance Indicators ranked Uganda poorly on control of corruption and government effectiveness. Public sector inefficiency costs the economy billions annually. Auditor General reports continue to reveal wastage and leakages that undermine development programmes. Despite ambitious slogans like “Vision 2040” and “Middle Income Status,” Uganda’s per capita GDP in 2024 remained around $1,100, a far cry from the global median.
To understand the internal logic of Musevenomics, one must appreciate its political economy. It is not purely economic; it is the economics of regime maintenance. As the Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani once observed, the NRM system evolved as a “movement-state,” blending revolutionary legitimacy with administrative control. Economic policies were crafted not only to grow the economy but to sustain the movement’s hegemony. Thus, initiatives like the Parish Development Model and Emyooga, while theoretically sound in targeting the grassroots, have largely reproduced the same inefficiencies that doomed NAADS poor implementation, elite capture, and lack of accountability. The model assumes that capital alone can transform communities, neglecting the institutional and governance frameworks that enable productive investment.
In his landmark paper Commodity Prices, Stabilization, and Growth in Africa, economist Angus Deaton demonstrated that African economies dependent on primary commodities are inherently vulnerable to price volatility and fiscal instability. Uganda’s heavy reliance on coffee, tea, and gold exports means that fluctuations in global prices directly affect public revenues and foreign exchange reserves. Yet Musevenomics has not significantly diversified the export base. The industrial sector contributes less than 16 percent to GDP, compared to 30 percent in emerging economies like Vietnam, a nation that, in the same timeframe, transitioned from an agrarian to a manufacturing powerhouse through disciplined planning and export-oriented policies.
The third phase of Musevenomics, from 2012 to the present, can best be described as “Big State capitalism under debt.” Uganda’s infrastructure boom highways, dams, and the much-touted oil pipeline has been financed largely through external borrowing. Uganda’s public debt has surged to nearly USD 29 billion by 2024, with debt servicing consuming over 35 percent of domestic revenue. The government argues that these investments are necessary foundations for industrialization. However, evidence suggests that the return on these megaprojects is slow, uneven, and often inflated by corruption and inefficiency. Like many African nations studied by John Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hitman, Uganda risks the trap of “deb
dependency,” where infrastructure loans serve geopolitical interests more than domestic development.
And yet, Musevenomics has not been without genuine accomplishments. Uganda remains one of Africa’s most stable macroeconomic environments. Inflation has been largely contained below 8 percent; the banking sector is resilient; the country is food secure compared to many of its neighbors; and the entrepreneurial spirit of Ugandans continues to flourish. Uganda’s ICT sector, for instance, contributes about 9 percent to GDP, with a growing digital economy and fintech ecosystem. Kampala has become a regional hub for start-ups, demonstrating that beneath the political noise lies genuine dynamism. Moreover, Uganda’s peace dividend though fraying remains a vital pillar for investment and growth.
But the paradox persists: why, after nearly four decades of relative stability and reform, does Uganda still grapple with underemployment, inequality, and weak productivity? The answer, again, lies in the nature of the state. The political economist Thandika Mkandawire once argued that development requires “autonomous embeddedness”, a state that is autonomous enough to plan rationally but embedded enough to understand its society. Musevenomics, in contrast, has produced an embedded but non-autonomous state deeply entangled with patronage networks that distort economic rationality.
In sectors like agriculture, the persistence of low yields despite continuous interventions speaks volumes. Uganda’s average maize yield remains at 2.5 tons per hectare, compared to 8 tons in Malaysia and 9 in the Netherlands. NAADS, Operation Wealth Creation, and the Parish Development Model all share a similar design flaw: they treat development as distribution rather than transformation. As a result, they expand access to resources but fail to build productivity systems. No amount of handouts can substitute for coherent agrarian reform, agricultural mechanization, and rural infrastructure.
In Africa’s Industrialisation and Prosperity, Sseppuuya points out that “Africa’s failure to industrialize is not a failure of ideas but of execution.” Uganda’s Vision 2040 recognizes the need for industrial transformation but continues to invest disproportionately in consumption and political programmes. In 2023, only 12 percent of Uganda’s budget was allocated to manufacturing and industry, compared to over 35 percent in infrastructure and governance expenditure combined. Without a deliberate industrial policy that prioritizes value addition, Uganda risks repeating the pattern of exporting raw materials and importing inflation.
What then is the legacy of Musevenomics? It is both inspiring and cautionary. It demonstrates that an African state can sustain growth for decades without total collapse but it also exposes the limits of growth without institutional depth. Museveni’s pragmatism rescued Uganda from economic ruin, but his long incumbency and centralization have suffocated the very innovation that could sustain the next phase of growth. The state’s obsession with control has come at the cost of creativity, transparency, and equitable participation.
If Uganda is to transcend the limitations of Musevenomics, three imperatives stand out. First, institutional renewal: the restoration of genuine autonomy in fiscal management, anti-corruption agencies, and local governments. Second, human capital revolution: transforming education from rote learning to creative, technical, and scientific inquiry what Lee Kuan Yew called “the mastery of skills for the knowledge economy.” Third, industrial policy with accountability: targeted support for agro-processing, mineral beneficiation, and manufacturing value chains anchored in transparent governance.
Musevenomics began as a bold experiment in recovery and has endured as a paradox of promise and stagnation. It turned a failed state into a functioning one but not yet a flourishing one. Like many post-liberation economies, Uganda’s challenge is now generational, not merely to sustain growth but to democratize it, to transform political legitimacy into economic inclusivity, and to convert the stability of the past into the prosperity of the future.
History will record Museveni as a stabilizer, a reformer, and a political survivor. But whether he will be remembered as a true economic transformer depends on whether Uganda finally breaks the cycle of dependency, embraces institutional discipline, and rekindles the spirit of innovation that made his revolution possible. Musevenomics, for all its contradictions, has set the foundation. The unfinished task lies in building the house not for power, but for posterity. The author is Atwemereireho Alex who, for feedback purposes, can be reached via alexatweme@gmail.com. He is also a lawyer, researcher, and governance analyst.
