UGANDA: NEEDS MORE THAN A GOVERNMENT OF NATIONAL UNIOTY

By Kilmala Lucoromoi

It Needs a National Re imagining

We are increasingly seeing the proposal for a Government of National Unity being discussed and championed by *Professor Ogenga Otunnu. While I appreciate the conversations surrounding this proposal, I find the idea somewhat absurd in its current form because it appears to respond to the immediate political circumstances of the times rather than addressing the deeper, structural needs of Uganda as a nation.

To me, this is yet another exercise in political window-dressing: an attempt to manage, contain, or temporarily patch up an impending political problem without confronting the fundamental questions that have continued to undermine the country’s nationhood. It is a short-term political response to a much deeper historical and structural crisis.

It makes me wonder aloud: When have Ugandans ever genuinely sat down to re imagine the future of their country?

Without such a conversation, we will continue moving in vicious political circles, repeating the same mistakes, recycling the same political arrangements, and expecting different outcomes.

Why can’t Ugandans come together and re imagine the country from the very foundations of its formation? The historical circumstances surrounding the creation of Uganda, particularly the colonial boundaries and arrangements that emerged from the Berlin Conference and subsequent British colonial administration, left us with a political entity whose foundations and internal arrangements have never been adequately interrogated. We inherited a state, but we have yet to fully agree on the nation we want to build.

A Government of National Unity, regardless of how attractive its political intentions may sound, cannot work meaningfully without addressing some fundamental questions:

1. The Re founding of Uganda

Uganda needs a genuine national re founding process. This should involve questioning the very identity, geographical configuration, historical foundations, and constitutional architecture of the country. It may even require a conversation about renaming the country and establishing a more historically and geographically representative national identity.

For instance, how do you remove the letter ‘B’ from Buganda and arrive at the name Uganda? What does that tell us about the historical and political circumstances under which the country was constituted?

Imagine having 64 sons and naming your entire household after only one of them. How would the other 63 feel every time they walked through the door? Would they genuinely feel equally represented in that household?

These are not merely questions about names. They are questions about belonging, identity, historical recognition, and equal ownership of the state.

Similarly, why should the southern part of the country automatically be understood or designated as Central Uganda? Does that geographical and administrative description genuinely reflect the country’s historical and geographical realities?

We must be willing to interrogate these inherited assumptions if we are serious about building a country in which every community feels equally represented and invested.

2. Reorganizing Uganda’s Administrative and Governance Systems

Uganda must also rethink and standardise its administrative and governance structures.

We cannot continue pretending that Uganda’s ethnic and cultural composition is irrelevant to how the country should be governed. The reality is that Uganda is a country of diverse peoples, nations, ethnic communities, and historical identities. These realities constitute important social and historical fault lines, and rather than ignoring them, we should develop governance structures that recognise, accommodate, and constructively manage them.

Our administrative system should be designed around meaningful representation, local autonomy, accountability, and equitable distribution of power and resources.

Furthermore, Uganda needs to seriously consider a bicameral parliamentary system consisting of a Lower House and an Upper House. Such an arrangement could provide an additional layer of representation, institutional oversight, and protection for the diverse communities and regions that constitute the country.

The objective should be to build institutions that genuinely reflect the complexity of Uganda rather than forcing its diversity into political and administrative structures that may no longer serve the country’s needs.

4. Reforming the Political Parties Act

The Political Parties and Organizations Act also requires fundamental reform. We cannot continue operating under political party laws and institutional arrangements that reinforce the same political dynamics while expecting a different democratic outcome.

We need a new legal and political framework that promotes internal party democracy, accountability, ideological clarity, equal political participation, and a genuinely competitive multiparty system.

The law should encourage political parties to become institutions of ideas, national development, and democratic participation rather than vehicles for individual political ambitions, personality cults, or the acquisition and retention of state power.

We need something fundamentally different, and it must be established through law.

Ultimately, Uganda’s problem is much bigger than the question of who shares political power with whom. It is a question of what Uganda is, who owns it, how it should be governed, and what kind of country we want future generations to inherit.

A Government of National Unity may offer a temporary political arrangement, but it cannot substitute for a national conversation about the country’s identity, constitutional foundations, administrative architecture, and political future.

We cannot keep negotiating political peace without addressing the historical and structural questions that make political conflict inevitable.

Uganda does not simply need a Government of National Unity. It needs a National Re imagining and, ultimately, a National Re founding.

Anything less risks taking us through yet another political cycle, only to arrive at the same destination.