By : Executive Director of Uganda Media Centre (UMC) Allan Kasujja
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when the world was groping in the dark for answers, I watched President Yoweri Museveni’s national addresses religiously. I was in London, working at the BBC, watching one of the wealthiest nations on earth struggle to make sense of what was unfolding. Despite allocating nearly 15% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to fighting the pandemic, the UK was reporting hundreds of deaths every day. Sometimes thousands.
Ambulances became a constant on my street — I stopped counting after a while. And when lockdown finally eased, many of the elderly neighbours I used to pass on their evening walks were simply gone. The ones with the dogs. The ones who always nodded hello. They had died quietly, in one of the most resourced countries in the world, and life had moved on almost as if they hadn’t existed.
It did not make sense to me. And frankly, if this was happening there, I feared for Uganda. Then President Museveni spoke. He said he was going back to what he knew — the methods that had served the National Resistance Army during the bush war. To accurately assess an adversary, you stop, you observe and only then do you act. You let the picture become clear before you commit.
Something clicked for me in that moment. Here was a leader reaching into unconventional, hard-won experience to navigate a crisis that had already humbled far more sophisticated systems. I became convinced, from that point, that Uganda had a more grounded handle on what this pandemic actually required.
The numbers, as it turned out, supported that feeling. Uganda confirmed its first COVID-19 case in March 2020 and its first death — a 34-year-old woman — on July 23, 2020. By late September, 75 deaths. Just over 8,000 cases. Even by the end of that year, total fatalities were still in the low hundreds.
In England and Wales alone, official figures from March to early May put deaths at around 47,000. Some estimates placed the UK’s first-wave toll above 50,000. Uganda — many times poorer, with a fraction of the health infrastructure — was holding its own against something that had broken wealthy nations.
That wasn’t luck or coincidence. That was a considered response, rooted in a very particular kind of strategic thinking. And it was, I kept thinking, an extraordinary story. One the world needed to hear.
Because no African country was featuring meaningfully in the global COVID-19 conversation, the narrative was being written elsewhere, about elsewhere. Yet here was Uganda offering something genuinely useful — proof that resources alone don’t determine outcomes. That leadership and local wisdom count for something.
So I pushed for a BBC interview with President Museveni. The newsroom was interested. Editors were on board. For once, the world seemed ready to look at Africa not as a problem to be managed, but as a place with actual answers. The interview didn’t happen. I won’t go into why. But that story was never told — and the outlets that would have carried it, the shift in perception it might have caused, all of that evaporated. This was not a one-off. It is, I am afraid, a pattern.
The National Resistance Movement is not a propagandist movement by nature. Guerrillas keep things close to their chests — they move quietly, act decisively and rarely stop to explain themselves. In the bush, that instinct kept people alive. In today’s world, where perception shapes investment and policy and partnerships, that same silence becomes a liability. Uganda cannot keep winning quietly and expect the world to notice.
As I said at my inauguration as executive director of the Uganda Media Centre, this is not about public relations. It is nation building — and there is a difference. Uganda has set its sights on a $500b economy by 2040. That is achievable. But only if we own our narrative, push back against those who misrepresent us and make sure that when this country does something remarkable, the world actually hears about it.
We have the stories. We have the evidence. We just need to start telling them.
The writer is the Executive Director of Uganda Media Centre (UMC) Allan Kasujja and it was first published on the UMC website.
