The Place of Political Militarism in the Governance of Uganda

“In Africa, the conservative realism of the military mind met the liberatory spirit of the decolonising mind’ – Read an excerpt from Soldier’s Paradise by Samuel Fury Childs Daly”

By Oweyegha-Afunaduula

I have written on hereditary politics, hereditary militarism, and environmental militarism. In this article, I want to write about the place of political militarism in the governance of Uganda. Militarism has penetrated every sphere of human endeavour and human life in Uganda, magnified by the fact that the militarists who captured the instruments of power through the barrel of the gun after waging a 5-year bush war in the Luwero Triangle of Buganda, have made it central to governance over the last 39 years.  

Militarism, or rule by soldiers, is a form of government where military objectives blur into politics, and the values of the armed forces become the values of the state at large. Militaries ruled by force, not consensus, but plenty of people liked their disciplinary verve. Whipping the public into shape, sometimes literally, had a real appeal to people who felt that the world had become too unruly. Independence did not always mean freedom, and soldiers’ rigid ideas shaped decolonisation in ways that we’re only starting to understand. (Daly, 2024).  Militarism is a freestanding ideology of the ruling Party, the National Resistance Movement (NRM), in which civilians are subordinate to the militarists.  

Militarism in Uganda in particular and on the African continent in general, cannot be deracinated from colonialism. The British Empire, for example, relied on military power and produced a class of trained military men to maintain its hold on colonised territory (e.g. Ahire 1990 cited by Akande, 2025). Even post-colonial governments, particularly that of NRM tend to rely farm more heavily on the military.

What they practice is not civic politics but political militarism, and their government is characterised as a politico-military government, with the civic population being at the periphery but sustaining it financially. Political militarism is the basis of politico-military governance.

We can thus define political militarism refers to the strong influence and emphasis of military values, ideas, and actions on a nation’s political system and its policies. It’s characterized by a prioritisation of military interests over other aspects of governance, sometimes leading to an aggressive or expansionist foreign policy, and a government structure where the military holds significant power.

This is the case of Uganda, where the vast financial resources available to the NRM government is not for social development (i.e education, health or agriculture), but for securing it against the people, controlling their actions and movements, especially with regard to political activities, and als extending the politicomilitary influence of the of the power in Kampala over East Africa and the Great Lakes region.

Using observational and archival research, Samuel Fury Childs Daly (2024) explored what happens when soldiers take over the government, and why so many found security in the option.

In his paperback book “Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa After Empire”, Samuel Fury Childs Daly tells the story of how Africa’s military dictators tried and failed to transform their societies into martial utopias. Across the continent, independence was followed by a wave of military coups and revolutions. The soldiers who led them had a vision. In Nigeria and other former British colonies, officers governed like they fought battles—to them, politics was war by other means.

Civilians were subjected to military-style discipline, which was indistinguishable from tyranny. Soldiers promised law and order, and they saw judges as allies in their mission to make society more like an army. But law was not the disciplinary tool soldiers thought it was.

Using legal records, archival documents, and memoirs, Daly shows how law both enabled militarism and worked against it. For Daly, the law is a place to see decolonization’s tensions and ironies—independence did not always mean liberty, and freedom had a militaristic streak. In a moment when militarism is again on the rise in Africa, Daly describes not just where it came from but why it lasted so long.

Today’s military regimes do not seem to have the same long-term visions of their predecessors, but the longer they stay in power, the more likely they are to start making plans. Despite all their promises to return to the barracks, they are not going anytime soon. If we are trying to anticipate what the continent’s military regimes might do next, it makes sense to look to the past. In the late twentieth century, military regimes promised to create a ‘soldier’s paradise’ in Africa. They failed, but their vision was consequential even in failure.

This vision has already reshaped regional politics, and it might have a knock-on effect for the larger global order. Not everyone dreams of freedom, and for those with a disciplinary frame of mind, militarism has an appeal that no other ideology does. Africa’s twentieth-century history shows us what happens when they take the reins (Daly, 2024).

Daly talked of liberating ideology, which the soldiers use to capture the civilian space, and discusses how the soldiers in power legitimate legalities to further their capture of the civilian space. Akande (2025) in his article “Militarism and Law in Africa: A governing Paradox” cites Daly’s (2024) observation that military dictators conceptualise their project as pursuing the liberation of society from corrupt colonial ideas, ideals, and institutions preserved by postcolonial elites. 

He also cites Daly (2024) that while many military governments paid lip service to customary laws and performed some degree of deference to traditional (legal) institutions, Indigenous values and systems are only recognized in so far as they were consistent – and did not interfere -with the goals of military administration. In this sense, military governments handled traditional legal institutions much like colonial authorities did: they co-opted them for administrative purposes and subjected them to “repugnancy” tests. 

Grewal (2023) in the book “Soldiers of Democracy? shows how the type of military each transition inherits shapes whether, and how, democracy breaks down.

In Uganda of the 21st Century, President Tibuhaburwa tried hard to make militarism a religion and tool of governance. He made Uganda a soldier’s paradise no longer subject to civilian authority. All he wanted civilians to do is to vote in 5-year elections, to impart legitimacy to his otherwise military regime for 40 years.

Instead of the soldiers being subject to civilian authority, he has structured his government in such a way that it is the other way round: civilians being subject to soldiers. The civilian politics, which used to be apart from the military, is now almost integral to the military. This could have moved the Chief of Defense Forces, Muhoozi Kainerugaba to publicly assert that civilians will never rule Uganda again.