WHEN Yoweri Kaguta Museveni reaches for the pen, the continent listens. And when he invokes the Bible, the AK-47, and decades of liberation struggle in the same breath, the wise do not dismiss it as the ramblings of old age.
In a combative and statistic-laden open letter this week, Uganda’s long-serving president launched a withering counterattack against prominent Ugandan journalist and political analyst Andrew Mwenda, who had publicly questioned the wisdom of several of the government’s flagship economic initiatives. Museveni’s rebuttal was many things simultaneously: a victory lap, a policy manifesto, a pan-Africanist sermon, and a very pointed threat to his detractors.
But at its commercial core, it was a number: $7.48 billion.
“The Stubborn old man of Uganda who is senile, banned the export of all unprocessed minerals. There are now 10 gold refineries in Uganda. The gold exports have now hit USD 7.48 billion.”
President Yoweri Museveni
THE GOLD ARGUMENT: FROM RAW TO REFINED
Museveni’s central economic thesis is one that African policymakers have debated for generations but rarely enforced: the ruinous cost of exporting raw materials in their unprocessed state.
The president made the arithmetic brutally plain. Uganda – and Africa more broadly – had for years exported gold at 84% purity, fetching approximately $60,000 per kilogram. Fully refined gold, at 99.9% purity, commands $168,000 per kilogram on international markets. That gap, close to $108,000 per kilogram, is the price of a continent’s complicity in its own dispossession.
His response to that reality was executive: he banned the export of all unprocessed minerals. Uganda now hosts ten gold refineries. The result, he says, speaks for itself – gold export revenues have surged to $7.48 billion, a figure that would have been unthinkable under the old raw-materials-for-sale model.
The coffee figures are no less striking. Uganda’s coffee output has grown from three million bags to 8.8 million bags, now earning the country $2.4 billion annually. Again, the Museveni logic is consistent: a kilogram of processed coffee sells for between $25 and $40, depending on brand and market. The raw equivalent fetches $2.50. Processing is not merely an industrial ambition – it is, in Museveni’s framing, an act of economic self-defence.
“A kilogram of processed coffee goes for USD 25 to USD 40 and yet for raw materials we get USD 2.5 per kilogram.”
Museveni
THE MWENDA DISPUTE: MORE THAN A MEDIA SPAT
The proximate cause of the letter was a public dispute with Andrew Mwenda, founder of The Independent magazine and a journalist long regarded as one of Uganda’s most incisive political voices. Mwenda had reportedly questioned the viability of several government-backed ventures and, critically, shared internal discussions – including cabinet deliberations – on social media.
For Museveni, that was not journalism. It was sabotage.
The president accused Mwenda of being a neo-colonial agent, a do-nothing critic who “careens noisily” while the country builds. He challenged Mwenda directly: visit the Magoola factories in Matugga and Kamuli. Interview the people who attest to being healed by Senfuka’s herbal mixtures. Walk the Tugume plant in Ntungamo. Tour Professor Muranga’s banana project in Bushenyi. Museveni’s dare is the oldest one in African political tradition: if you won’t acknowledge what is being built, you are not a journalist — you are a wrecking ball.
He went further, reaching back to 2003 and the Bujagali electricity project, accusing Mwenda of having played a role in sabotaging Uganda’s partnership with American Energy Services — a deal that would have produced electricity at US cents 4.9 per kilowatt-hour. The resulting load-shedding crisis of 2005 and beyond, Museveni suggests, was the real-world consequence of that interference.
The motive, he argues, is transparent: Mwenda and those like him are frightened by Uganda’s success. The economy is now growing at 6.3 per cent per annum, and critics cannot afford to let that story be told.
BEYOND GOLD: THE BREADTH OF THE INDUSTRIALISATION DRIVE
Museveni’s letter is not solely about gold and coffee. It sketches, with evident satisfaction, a broader picture of structural economic transformation underway across Uganda’s productive sectors.
In the dairy industry, output in the cattle corridor has grown from 200 million litres to 5.3 billion litres annually. The fruit industry is expanding in Teso, Luwero, Kayunga and Masaka. Palm oil plantations are taking root in Kalangala, Buvuma, Bundibugyo and Maruzi. A steel industry is being established. Kiira Motors — notably, the one venture Museveni accuses Mwenda of being “ashamed” to acknowledge — is producing locally assembled vehicles.
On smallholder financing, Museveni is equally pointed. He asks, with barely concealed contempt, whether Mwenda lives in Uganda at all — a country that has the Presidential Development Model fund and other financing instruments already operational in communities where, he insists, they are delivering results.
“Even if we were to make a mistake in the effort to industrialize Uganda, it would be better than merely careening on in the neo-colonial doldrums.”
Museveni
THE LANGUAGE OF LIBERATION: STUBBORNNESS AS STRATEGY
Museveni closes with the register he knows best — the lexicon of the liberation struggle. He reminds his audience that Kabamba, the NRA’s foundational military assault, failed twice before succeeding on the third attempt. Failure, in the Museveni school of governance, is data, not defeat.
He draws on a Banyankore saying — “Siinga abarezi, siinga abarezi, tengerera, tengerera” — the encouragement a parent offers a baby learning to walk and falling. Mwenda’s criticism, by contrast, is the voice of the omwinazi: the ill-wisher, the one who says the child will never stand.
The letter closes, as all Museveni letters close, with the battle cry of the Mozambican liberation struggle — Aluta Continua — and the unshakeable conviction: Victory is certain.
THE AFRICAN MIRROR ANALYSIS: WHAT THE NUMBERS ACTUALLY SAY
Strip away the polemics and the numbers Museveni cites deserve serious interrogation — on their own terms, not on the terms of his critics.
The gold export figure of $7.48 billion is remarkable but contested in the sense that Uganda is not merely exporting gold, it mines domestically. A significant portion of that figure reflects Uganda’s growing role as a transit refining hub for gold from across the Great Lakes region — including, controversially, gold that originates in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Whether Uganda’s gold boom reflects genuine industrial transformation or a sophisticated re-export model is a question the letter does not address.
On coffee, the trajectory is unambiguous and impressive. Uganda is now Africa’s largest coffee exporter, and the domestic processing push is real, even if it remains incomplete.
What is incontestable is the larger political point. Africa’s commodity dependency — the structural reality of exporting raw materials and importing finished goods — remains one of the defining mechanisms of its economic subordination. Museveni’s argument that this cannot be reformed through cautious consensus but requires executive disruption is not without merit. It is also not without risk, and that is precisely the tension Mwenda’s criticism was designed to illuminate.
That both men may be more right than wrong is, of course, the one conclusion neither is prepared to admit.
