The Corruption of a Crime
Anita Annet Among was, until her recent fall from grace, the Speaker of Uganda’s Parliament and one of the most powerful officials in President Yoweri Museveni’s thirty-nine-year-old regime. She is accused of stealing colossal sums of public money, harassing political rivals and dismantling the legislature she presided over. Her downfall, engineered by the President’s son and Chief of Defence Forces, has been celebrated at home and abroad. What follows is an argument that the celebration is misplaced, and that the deeper rot lies elsewhere.
Corruption is a crime in Uganda. It is immoral and abhorrent. It steals from the hungry, the sick and the deprived. Yet Museveni’s military dictatorship, choreographed as a democracy, has never seriously treated it as such. Corruption anchors Museveni’s patronage politics, and has done so ever since he violently seized power. It worsens with time.
The dictatorship has let the Leadership Code Act and the entire scaffolding of anti‑corruption legislation gather dust on the statute books. The regime invokes those laws only theatrically, and only against the powerless or against erstwhile loyalists whom the First Family now suspects of rival political ambition. Otherwise, it ignores the anti‑corruption framework completely whenever the offenders sit at the high tables of the State.
The First Family - Mr. Museveni’s family - remains the first and most persistent problem with Uganda’s military dictatorship: a dictatorship that pretends to be a democracy through electoral cosmetics designed to lend legitimacy to rulers who captured power through military violence in 1986. The First Family is untouchable, yet no less corrupt or evil than those it now persecutes, including Anita Annet Among (“AAA”).
Museveni has always paid lip service to the fight against corruption, and has only resorted to it when it served a political purpose. He needs something to preach about. He fights corruption whenever he falls out with an erstwhile comrade or ally.
The son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the current Chief of Defence Forces, widely understood as his father’s heir apparent, and the only CDF to engage in partisan politics unconstitutionally and with impunity, now replicates his father’s hypocrisy on corruption for his own political calculations. This is not a war on corruption, even if Among is irredeemably, ruthlessly and visibly corrupt.
Muhoozi displayed that hypocrisy in full when he pressured the Judiciary to release the Sheema MP Michael Mawanda, on whom the police had found some 145 billion shillings in suspected ill‑gotten wealth.
A Dance of Devils
Worse thieves now hunt Among: thieves who have looted incalculably from the Ugandan State and repressed it in countless ways since 1986. Yet I am no admirer of Among, and I have no sympathy for grand thieves merely because worse thugs have turned on them. This is a dance of devils, and I have no dog in the fight. I refuse to sympathise with thieves who fall prey to the First Family’s hypocrisy and Machiavellian malice. The likes of Among are not victims. They co‑created the Museveni military dictatorship and worsened it. They praised it. Among is not only responsible for colossal sums of misappropriated money; she also aided and engineered the butchering of the legislature, openly boasting that she had swallowed the parliamentary opposition and intended to finish it off.
She is part of the problem Uganda is grappling with, not a solution to it. She is not the only criminal, but she sits among them. The point is not to protect, praise or sympathise with her. The point is to hold her to account, to refuse to defend her while simultaneously demanding that the other thieves, including the First Family, her deputy Thomas Tayebwa, and the PLU operatives, also be held to account, kept away from politics, and prosecuted.
My critical stance towards Among, both during her tenure as Speaker and now in her ordeal, rests on what she demonstrated herself to be: a ruthless thief who harassed and eliminated her political rivals, and who intimidated and blackmailed those who exposed her corruption and caprice. Many languish in jail because of her. Some, it is alleged, have lost their lives because of her. Comparing her with the First Family is comparing two monsters. I choose neither. I reject both Among’s corrupt and capricious mismanagement of the office of the Speaker of Parliament of Uganda; and the pretentious PLU, the “Patriotic League of Uganda,” a political pressure group run by Muhoozi to prop up his presidential ambitions. Ugandans cannot be confined to a choice between rival groups of killers and looters.
While she feathered the nest of her financial empire, she fought to silence her critics, opposition figures and ordinary people alike. A corrupt, malicious and incompetent Speaker draped herself in moral authority.
People who steal public money should not cry victim and expect us to defend them when others turn the fire on them. Between Among and the Museveni family, we should cheer neither.
We can, however, remind both of the truth. The First Family is now pretending to fight a fellow thief, namely the ambitious Among.
The Speaker’s personal misfortune is not a structural correction. The fall of an over‑mighty client does not weaken the patron; it merely opens a vacancy for the next client willing to perform the same services on the same terms. The Museveni system is not disciplining itself; it is discarding a politically thorny instrument.
Among, who did everything in her power to ingratiate herself with the First Family, kneeling before the President, naming the wards of her private hospital after the President’s children, and similar gimmicks—now finds herself at the receiving end of the First Family’s pretense to fix corruption.
She is “vulnerable” now because even in her home area of Bukedea she ruthlessly harassed her local political rivals. She has dirty hands, a dirty history and a dirty mind. She now expects us, ordinary Ugandans, the victims of her thuggery and abuse of power, to clamour for her liberation. That takes us for granted. We can insist only that she be afforded justice and that her human rights be respected.
We condemn and reject the CDF’s childish and illegal threats against her lawyer, Caleb Alaka. The threats are consistent with the Museveni regime’s hostility towards lawyers representing its political rivals or critics. That is how the regime jailed at least two lawyers last year for the mere act of representing the veteran opposition leader Kizza Besigye, a four-time presidential challenger to Museveni who has spent much of the past two decades in and out of detention. I know lawyers in exile because Uganda’s military dictators disagree with their legal work or hate their clients. It is absurd. As Muhoozi grabs more power, this trend will worsen.
What the Regime Fears Is Not Corruption
Every sane Ugandan who has followed the country’s politics for a few years knows that Museveni has never punished the corrupt for being corrupt. What troubles Museveni, perplexingly, is the people who serve Uganda without blemish, the likes of Kizza Besigye, Mugisha Muntu and Bidandi Ssali. Such people are hard to blackmail. They are a headache for Museveni because he cannot easily discredit them.
Neither Museveni nor his CDF son is genuinely committed to the fight against corruption. Initial jubilation that Anita Among has fallen may look naïve, but it rests on a sound basis: Among is herself a monster. When monsters fight, we may keep quiet, refrain from interrupting them, or even cheer the fight. Some of the Ugandans cheering her fall are her victims. They cheer her not because they think this is a fight against corruption. They know it is not. They know it is the CDF leveraging her dirty hands to look good for his own political calculations. The episode also serves as a happy distraction for a regime after militarized elections in which the people’s true President was forced into exile. In a period when political prisoners such as Besigye, Muwanga Kivumbi, Waiswa Mufumbiro, Sam Mugumya and others rot in jail, the regime is content to fix all Ugandan eyes on the theatrical performance of dispatching a corrupt Among. The truth is that the regime is comfortable with the corrupt part of Among. What it hates, fears and now fights, is her political ambition. She is easy prey because she helped destroy the very institutions and people that would otherwise be demanding her liberty. She destroyed Parliament, the opposition and her political rivals; she silenced the media to the point of ejecting the Nation Media Group from Parliament; she illegally evicted the Hon. Zaake Francis, an opposition MP who had criticised her publicly, from his position as Commissioner of Parliament; and she defied a court order nullifying her misconduct.
She wielded harassment, intimidation and detention. For two successive electoral cycles, she stood as MP unopposed - by hook or by crook - whether her opponents liked it or not.
She even aided land‑grabbing in her own backyard.
She perfected dictatorship. She showered favoured colleagues with endless foreign trips while she stifled everyone who disagreed with her or opposed her corruption and her mismanagement of Parliament. The Hon. Francis Zaake is a telling example: she had him ejected from Parliament after he complained about her mocking his torture. One simply could not disagree with her in Parliament and walk away unharmed.
She created widespread fear among MPs and used that fear to marshal them behind her causes - causes that mostly coincided with Museveni’s career. Ugandans found it difficult to sympathise with her because of the rampant manner in which
she drove through anti‑people laws, including the Computer Misuse (Amendment) Act, 2022 (used to prosecute online critics of the regime); the Coffee law (transferring regulatory control of Uganda’s flagship export into the executive), during which an open mic caught her disparaging “those Baganda”; and the 2026 Sovereignty law (entrenching new executive immunities), among other oppressive enactments.
Where she intimidated and harassed her critics, she massaged her praise singers with appointments, money and gifts. She used Parliament’s funds to expand her patronage and splashed her wealth across a Uganda where, contrary to the Constitution’s framing, ordinary people remain poor, exploited and in despair.
Five Lessons
The first lesson is the most uncomfortable: nothing in this episode is a victory for the rule of law. The institutions that should have stopped Anita Among years ago did not stop her. The institutions now credited with her fall, the Inspectorate, the Leadership Code Tribunal, the police, the foreign sanctions regimes, acted only when it became convenient for the First Family for her to fall. Convenience is not accountability. The military should be nowhere near this problem called Among, yet it is the military, prompted by its biased CDF, that leads her persecution.
The second lesson is that the system replaces; it does not reform. The seat she occupied still exists, with the same powers, the same patronage budget, the same capacity to crush dissent. Whoever sits in it next inherits the machinery she built and the precedents she set. Unless we dismantle that machinery, through parliamentary rules reform, enforceable conflict‑of‑interest standards, an independent budget office, genuine protection for dissenting members, transparency and a real commitment to the rule of law, the next Speaker will be one bad decision away from becoming the next Anita Among.
The third lesson is for ordinary citizens, the human rights community and civil society. Sanctions and external pressure can be useful, but they cannot substitute for domestic institutional muscle. We have outsourced too much of our accountability work to Washington, London and Brussels. The day those capitals lose interest - and that day will come - the only thing standing between Uganda and the next Among will be whatever domestic capacity we have built. On current evidence, that capacity is dangerously thin.
The fourth lesson is for the opposition and for the analysts who serve as its informal house intellectuals. Premature jubilation is a form of forgetting. To celebrate her fall as a popular victory is to let the regime launder its own complicity through her downfall. Among did not act alone. She acted with the protection of the Executive, the acquiescence of the security services, and the complicity of a parliamentary majority that voted for whatever she placed on the order paper. Each of those actors remains in place.
The fifth lesson is this: celebrating Among’s fall leads nowhere material, yet the celebration is understandable given the pain she inflicted on Ugandans - even if her tormentors are worse. Tortured people are bound to smile when their tormentor falls, even at the hands of a worse tormentor.
The Foreign-Hand Defence
Her narrative - the one she and her communications operation have spent months seeding - is that she is the victim of a homosexual conspiracy mounted from abroad, weaponised by ungrateful Ugandans, and amplified by political opportunists. She has tailored that narrative for a specific domestic audience and a specific psychological reflex: when in doubt, point to the foreigner.
It will not survive contact with the documentary record. The Inspectorate built its case against her not on testimony from London or Washington, but on Ugandan bank records, Ugandan procurement files, Ugandan property registries and Ugandan whistle‑blowers - many of whom worked inside Parliament itself. The sanctions regimes acted on Ugandan facts that Ugandan institutions had failed to act on. The foreign hand she gestures towards is, on inspection, her own.
Her legacy as Speaker of the 11th Parliament of Uganda lies in the institution she leaves behind, not in the wealth she accumulated within it. The wealth will be litigated, partially recovered, mostly hidden and eventually forgotten. The institution will remain. What she did to it is more dangerous than what she did with it.
She normalised the use of Parliament as a personal patronage instrument. She normalised the silencing of dissenting members by procedural means - ejection, suspension, committee reassignment, the strategic loss of microphone privileges. She normalised the passage of repressive legislation by acclamation rather than debate. She normalised the treatment of constitutional petitions against her conduct as mere irritants to be outwaited rather than answered. Each of those normalisations now stands as a precedent. Precedents in Parliament are sticky.
Her successor will inherit each of those precedents as a tool ready to hand. Whether the successor reaches for those tools or sets them down is what matters going forward. And that question will not be answered by sanctions, tribunal findings, investigations or the Inspectorate. It will be answered by us - by members of the public who either insist on a different standard or do not.
Her Real Legacy
Spare a thought for those she imprisoned, literally and politically: the journalists harassed under her watch; the members suspended for speaking out; the activists detained for protesting outside Parliament; the community in Bukedea whose land grievances she buried; and the petitioners who filed under the Leadership Code Act and waited years for a hearing that, on her terms, never came.
Their suffering is the part of this story that no Inspectorate report and no asset‑recovery proceeding will repair. Her fall will not give them back the years lost. It will not undo the legislation passed in those years. It will not restore the careers derailed, the businesses ruined, the names dragged through committee proceedings and tabloid columns at her instigation.
If there is a single useful thing the rest of us can do as her political chapter as a corrupt, rude and capricious Speaker of Parliament closes, it is to name them. To say their names in the same breath as hers, so that the historical record marks this episode not only as the fall of a speaker but also as the vindication of those she crushed on the way up. That, and not her downfall, is the part worth marking. It is also why I close by saluting the Agora Uganda team for documenting some of those stories and lives.
The author is a Ugandan human rights lawyer, poet and environmentalist.
