A Ugandan returning home after a decade abroad could be forgiven for wondering whether the country has drifted into a kind of social delirium — where reason is drowned out by paranoia, cruelty and moral confusion.
The evidence is no longer subtle. It is visible, loud, and deeply unsettling.
Families once bound by loyalty and sacrifice are fracturing in shocking ways. Consider the case of David Mutaaga, 69, and his wife Deborah Florence Mutaaga, 62, who returned after decades in Switzerland only to be brutally killed in their Entebbe home in July 2025. The fact that family members emerged as prime suspects speaks to a chilling erosion of basic human bonds.
In the digital sphere, the descent is equally stark. Over the past week, highly educated and outwardly rational Ugandans have taken to their keyboards to manufacture and circulate grotesque fabrications — including claims that the First Lady, Janet Museveni, was dying at Mbuya Military Hospital. Before her, Rebecca Kadaga was similarly declared dead in a wave of shameless misinformation.
What is most disturbing is not merely the creation of these lies, but their eager consumption. The same educated class — at home and in the diaspora — receives, amplifies, and redistributes this toxic content with little regard for truth or consequence.
Conformity has become coercive. Long-standing friendships now hinge on ideological obedience. Fail to echo the prevailing hostility, and you risk being labelled an “agent” of the regime. Independent thought is no longer just unpopular — it is punishable by social exile.
This is not dissent. It is intellectual intimidation dressed up as conviction.
The hypocrisy is equally glaring. Many of the loudest accusers benefit, directly or indirectly, from the very system they denounce. The moral outrage, then, rings hollow — less a principled stand than a selective performance.
Beyond politics, the social fabric appears equally strained.
A troubling normalization of exploitation is taking root. Stories abound of transactional relationships where sex is exchanged for money, favours, or survival. In affluent neighbourhoods, older men openly engage in relationships with girls young enough to be their grandchildren. Elsewhere, reports suggest older women are participating in similar arrangements with young boys.
Even spaces once considered sacred are not immune. Disturbing scenes circulate on social media showing pastors engaging in acts that blur the line between spiritual practice and abuse — touching congregants inappropriately under the guise of divine intervention. In any functioning legal system, such conduct would invite immediate scrutiny and prosecution. Yet here, it is often reframed as evidence of miraculous power.
More tragically, there are accounts of vulnerable individuals seeking spiritual guidance only to leave exploited or harmed — their suffering repackaged as “testimony.”
What kind of society normalizes the degradation of women and girls, trivializes truth, and casually entertains the death of its own citizens?
Perhaps literature anticipated this descent long ago. In King Lear, William Shakespeare paints a world where order collapses and chaos reigns — where betrayal, madness, and moral inversion define human interaction. It is a world where the boundaries between sanity and insanity blur beyond recognition.
Uganda today feels uncomfortably close to that vision.
The crisis we face is not merely political or economic. It is moral and psychological. It cuts across class, education, religion, and geography. It is a crisis of empathy, of restraint, of truth.
Until we confront it honestly, we risk normalizing the abnormal — and mistaking collective decline for everyday life.
I rest my case.