There is a common Ugandan debate “Village life is better than town life”. It has a history as long as the first dawn of urbanisation and its pall of aspiration on the imagination of rural folk. Urban centers after all were the staging ground of “civilisation”, forming a point of contact with the outside world. Even today the idea of the Ugandan abroad, in a town city or foreign country is associated with the pursuit of modernity and progress.
As Okot’P’bitek dramatised in Song of Lawino however, the dalliance with foreign gods, of capitalism and other progressive foreign ideas is a double-edged sword. It can be presented as an assault on the real society which still sits pretty in its bucolic moorings in villages upcountry. Politics does this well often relying on the implied innocence of the village for votes and understanding about what effort ruling parties are making to upgrade water, immunise children, extend education and roads – the sort of things that are modern and can be found in the city.
This certainly appears to be show board of the “Expose the Corrupt” campaign which has continued to generate images of poorly built bridges, cattle shed schools and big bellied local players mobbed, shamed and thrown into legal pits for abuse of office. It is a politically effective cleansing of the well-intended efforts of the central government to improve the village but for the bad actors and outright criminals now being excoriated and exorcised publicly.
The geography of Balaam’s politics is important for another reason. The failures of the decentralised state can be attached to identifiable officials, projects and budgets and sun lighted.The challenge is the large urban districts like Greater Kampala, Wakiso, Mukono and Entebbe where the campaign is yet to be felt.
As I have pointed out the difference between the village and the town persists. While political geography makes the village the well-pool of NRM’s popular mandate; economic and administrative power is concentrated in the cities. It is here that jobs, firms, capital, consumption and economic aspiration reside and where the promise of national progress is presented.
According to the World Bank, for example, the Greater Kampala Metropolitan Area contains about 14 per cent of Uganda’s population, 46 per cent of formal-sector workers and 70 per cent of manufacturing firms with five or more employees. It also produces nearly half of national GDP. In fact, the Bank says Uganda’s ambition to reach “upper-middle-income” status will pivot on whether Greater Kampala becomes more productive, resilient and liveable. What this means, just to repeat it, is that the national standard of what government is capable of doing can only be demonstrated at scale in the metropolitan arena. It is no mistake that Kampala’s road are a national discussion and the flooding of its streets and homes a point for national shame.
What will be Balaam’s effect here?
What is also important to note is that while the rural-urban divide is as described, in Kampala, the failure of the party and the governments over time to pursue progress is evident from the concentration of wealth and opportunity beside some of largest most deprived communities. Rural poverty is bad yes, but urban poverty is deadly. In Kampala for example, City authorities estimate that nearly 60 percent of residents leave in informal settlements. Here clean water is scarce, sewage flows openly, and crime is increasingly high. Put another way, the majority of the residents in the main metropolis, the very ones who are also the main source of labor supply, anchor food distribution i.e buy much of the rural food surplus, are the backbone of the small business economy also suffer the biggest effects of administrative failure.
Not surprisingly they also tend to vote the opposition.
So, I am keen to see who is shamed and sent to jail here. There are many areas where the Expose the Corrupt campaign can extend the progress seen thus far. Crime for example (from police reports over time) show a national decline but a rise in the city. Expert opinion is that crime, such as the killing of the national football captain by a juvenile offender recently, is an economic problem. A 2025 Youth Crime Report produced by Uganda Youth Development Link with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that between 75 and 80 per cent of incarcerated people are aged 18 to 35 and identified poverty, weak employment prospects, drug abuse and family breakdown among the conditions feeding youth offending.
But being the city, Kampala also reflects other inequalities worthy of political attention. Insecurity is not experienced equally. Those with money can buy layers of protection from the disorder around them. Thus, gated compounds, CCTV, private guards and, at the top of the income scale, armed escorts and executive protection defines the most successful in the national story of progress. This privatisation of progress in the city is an aspect of the rural-urban divide because villages are considered places where security is socialised and commonly held and it shows.
The private security economy is massive and growing mostly in urban areas. The industry estimates about 100,000 guards across 426 firms. At the police pass-out in June 2026, Inspector General of Police Abas Byakagaba put the total strength of the Uganda Police Force at 58,369 personnel (the prison service has approximately 15,00 personnel). In short, the private-security workforce is at least 1.7 times the size of the entire police force and about 6.8 times the size of the Prisons Service or 37 percent larger than police and prison combined. The idea of security as a public good is administratively difficult to achieve and thus must exist (like in the rural area) as something of a social good that politics must of necessity manufacture.
In these pro-opposition strongholds – this is the challenge.
There are many iterations of the corruption issue that squat in the squalid mess of Kampala’s 72 slums and produce disasters every day. The Kitezi landfill collapse is one of them. But to move on Kampala and the greater Metropolis is not isolated anymore. As a norm setting arena for government progress, its failures are not hidden from the countryside. We should then talk (in part three) about the technological highway of mobile phones, tiktok accounts, WhatsApp etc that radiate some of the toxic spill of the cost of corruption to the countryside dominated by the young and eager and what it means in preserving the idea of national progress free from waste.
