NRM Grooming a Generation That Has Nothing to Lose

By Wilfred Arinda Nshekantebirwe

Uganda is currently suffocating under the weight of its own demographic success, as a surging youth population finds itself stranded in an economy too small to hold its ambitions. The National Resistance Movement (NRM) has held power for four decades, yet it has offered virtually no serious strategy to temper the explosive population.

The State of Uganda Population Report 2025 projects the country’s population reaching 48.2 million in 2026, propelled by a persistently high fertility rate of around 4.5 births per woman and the annual arrival of 1.5 million new babies. With 73.2% of Ugandans under the age of 30 and a median age hovering near 17 years, this is one of the youngest populations on the planet, a vast, swelling cohort entering adulthood with doors systematically slammed shut.

Rather than confronting this reality through robust family planning, reproductive health empowerment, or meaningful economic inclusion, the government has pursued cosmetic repression. In the name of “cleaning the cities” and “restoring order,” the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA), backed by police, has relentlessly chased informal hustlers and street vendors off the pavements of Kampala and other urban centres.

These young men and women, many trapped within the 50.9% of 18-to-30-year-olds classified as NEET (not in employment, education, or training), have seen their kiosks, stalls, and survival enterprises demolished or confiscated. Two-thirds of young Ugandans have endured moderate or high levels of lived poverty in the past year, according to Afrobarometer data. A high rate of youth unemployment, survival gigs that barely sustain life, and a crushing sense of exclusion.

The message from power is merciless: your desperate scramble for daily bread offends the aesthetic of the city. Disappear, or face the bulldozer and the baton.This pattern of callous neglect has now descended into something profoundly dehumanising.

A few weeks ago, Alex Waiswa Mufumbiro, a member of the National Unity Platform Party, who is detained on charges widely perceived as politically motivated, pleaded desperately for bail, first to stand by his wife, Edith Katende, as she waged a losing battle against terminal cancer, and later to attend her burial after she passed away on 8 April 2026. Both pleas were rejected. A husband was barred from his dying wife’s bedside. A grieving widower was denied the sacred duty of laying his beloved to rest.

This was a declaration that even the rawest human suffering must yield to the imperatives of control. Such acts pierce the soul of the nation and reveal a regime increasingly detached from the people it claims to lead.As the NRM navigates what many sense to be the twilight of its long dominance, this arrogance has hardened into a dangerous reflex. Grievances are answered with eviction, suppression, and institutional indifference. The NRM has nurtured a monster of a hungry and angry generation that has exhausted its reservoir of tears.The cries have been plentiful, over vanishing jobs, rampant corruption, soaring living costs, and justice perpetually deferred.

For millions of young Ugandans, the tears have run dry. They have lost livelihoods, futures, dignity, and any lingering illusion that the system was built for them. What remains is a hardened resolve forged in exclusion: nothing left to lose, and therefore nothing left to fear.

A population stripped of stake in the existing order does not tremble before threats of force. It no longer flinches at confrontation, because daily survival has already demanded every ounce of resilience. Nothing makes them cry anymore, not because feeling has vanished, but because grief has been spent to the last drop.

The most formidable enemy of the NRM is internal. Everyone is grabbing his share, everyone seems to believe that the reign is coming to an end. No one cares whatever happens to the citzenry,as long as it doesn’t harm the oppressors in the short run.

A restless, overpopulated bulge, economically marginalised and emotionally armoured by repeated humiliation, will not be swept from the streets indefinitely. When a generation concludes it has nothing to protect in the current arrangement, it will risk everything to dismantle it.True leadership would heed these warning signs, the unforgiving data, the demographic time bomb, and the deepening emotional wounds of ordinary Ugandans. Continuing to annoy, harass, and dehumanise a populace that has already lost so much is not governance; it is playing with fire at the edge of an inferno. The arrogance on display risks igniting the very explosion that prudent statesmanship should avert at all costs.

The writer is the LC 5 Male Youth Councillor for Rubanda District,and Workers’ Councillor Elect.
wilfredarinda@gmail.com

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