A country like Uganda – without its elders – has no future

On October 9, 2026, Uganda will mark six decades as a modern state. Yet the foundational pillars of this nation—the 15 ancient traditional nations—are witnessing the systematic impoverishment and neglect of their oldest members. 

The old and elderly are not merely aged bodies; they are living libraries of ecological resilience. However, the current regime’s politics of interests, enforced for four decades through the barrel of the gun, has marginalized these nations.

The result is a looming crisis of the future, where Ugandans will neither know who they are nor how to manage the ecosystems that sustain them.

Defining the custodians: Who are the old and the elderly?

In the Ugandan context, a distinction must be made. The old, approximately 60–79 years, have completed their active economic production cycles but retain full cognitive and ritual memory of pre-industrial ecological practices.

The elderly, 80+ years old, are custodians of oral constitutionalism and intergenerational seed sovereignty. They are the last living links to pre-colonial governance of wetlands, forests, and water systems.

Most of these individuals belong to Uganda’s 15 ancient traditional nations: Buganda, Bunyoro, Toro, Ankole, Busoga, Bugisu, Bukedi, Teso, Karamoja, Lango, Acholi, Alur, Lugbara, Madi, and Sebei.

Today, within their own homeland, many are treated as foreigners.

An endangered group of homo sapiens

The old and elderly in rural Uganda are an endangered demographic group because:

● Economic retrenchment (early 1990s): Following IMF/World Bank Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), the government summarily retrenched older public servants as “dead wood” without compensation.

● Health neglect: The seniors’ grant (80 years+) is peanuts, insufficient for non-communicable diseases, let alone the education of orphans under their care.

● The protection of sovereignty bill 2026: This bill requires ministerial approval for diaspora remittances—money that keeps elderly alive. It ignores the sovereignty of seeds, agroecology, and TEK, which only the old and elderly protect.

What the rural elderly hold for the 22nd century

Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is not folklore; it is empirical science accumulated over millennia.

For example, elderly Basoga fishermen know the spawning cycles of Nile perch without thermometers; elderly Bakiga farmers read weather patterns through bird colonization.

A developing Uganda needs TEK because climate models are useless if communities cannot adapt locally. TEK offers drought-resistant indigenous grains (e.g., eleusine coracana) and natural pest control (Gadgil et al., 2003).

Community ecological governance

Before the 1995 Constitution (made by a militarily captured state), clans managed wetlands through ekibaro (Buganda) or lukiiko (Bunyoro) systems. These councils, remembered only by the elderly, enforced following periods and fishing bans.

Neoliberal development destroyed these structures, leading to wetland encroachment and soil exhaustion.

The threat of President Tibuhaburwa Museveni’s politics of interests.

The politics of interests refers to a system where state resources, land, and contracts are allocated not by traditional identity or need, but by proximity to power. Whose interests? A small, ethnically cohesive group—which seized power in 1986 through the barrel of the gun—has monopolized the state for 40 years.

This group crafted a constitution that protects the incumbent but not the old, nor future generations. It has made members of the 15 traditional nations play second fiddle in their own country (Green, 2010).

This is politicised and militarised ethnicity: one group’s interests (access to army contracts, land titles, foreign education for their children) are enshrined as national policy, while the elderly of other nations are left to die without health care or remittances.

Why reject politics of interests and return to politics of identity?

Politics of identity here does not mean ethnic chauvinism. It means:

● Natural belonging: The recognition that one’s clan is tied to a specific watershed, hill, or forest.

● Ecological belonging: The understanding that sustainable governance requires the elder who knows the taboo against cutting muvule trees near burial grounds.

The old and elderly are the only group that can teach the youth to distinguish between genuine identity and manufactured ethnic hatred.

Without them, young Ugandans are vulnerable to mobilizations for land grabs and electoral violence.

Oweyegha-Afunaduula is a Conservation Biologist at Center for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis.