25/02/2026
KAMPALA CITY IS FOR ALL OF US.
By Mr Resistor Of Uganda.
We all long for a clean, calm, quiet and well-organized Kampala. Order, beauty and modernization are noble goals for any capital city. But the critical question remains, MUST cleanliness come at the cost of compassion? MUST order be enforced through fear?
For decades, young people have grown up hearing that opportunity lives in urban centers, and in Uganda’s case, that opportunity breathes loudest in Kampala. *With hope in our hearts, resilience in our hands, we left villages and small towns, not to cause chaos, but to search for dignity. We came not as invaders, but as dreamers.*
History teaches us that many of today’s tycoons, industrialists, job creators and top taxpayers once stood exactly where today’s hawkers and boda boda riders stand, at the margins. They started as hustlers. They sold sugarcane, second-hand clothes, snacks and airtime. The informal sector has always been the incubation center of enterprise.
According to national economic trends, the informal sector employs the majority of Uganda’s urban workforce and contributes significantly to household incomes. These are not criminals; they are survivors. They buy their merchandise from city wholesalers and retailers, pay rent, school fees, electricity, water and taxes embedded in the goods they purchase. They feed families, they sustain supply chains. They are part of the economy, not outside it.
And yet, what message do we send when empowerment turns into enforcement? When those who were once mobilized, encouraged and even supported through parish development Model-PDM are suddenly met with kiboko, arrests and confiscations?
When street food vendors who sought assistance from State institutions find themselves branded as obstacles to development?
A nation MUST never weaponize poverty.
True transformation is not achieved by sweeping away the poor as though they are dirt on the pavement. A capital city is not measured only by empty roads for luxury vehicles or glittering shopping malls, arcades or skyscrapers;. It is measured by how it treats its most vulnerable citizens. I mean the boda boda rider, the kiosk operator, the sugarcane seller,
the roadside food vendor.
Each carries not just merchandise, but responsibility-children in school, elderly parents at home, medical bills waiting to be paid. To destabilize their livelihoods abruptly is to shake entire households.
Governance demands firmness, yes-but also fairness. Reform should be consultative, phased and humane. Engage stakeholders, create designated vending zones, provide affordable licenses, and build structured markets before evictions. Transition, don’t crush and
Uganda belongs to all of us, rich and poor, urban elite and rural migrants alike. A stable society is built not by protecting privilege, but by expanding opportunity.
History warns us that when inequality widens and voices are ignored, frustration hardens.
Revolutions are not born overnight; they grow silently where hope is repeatedly betrayed. The lesson from historic upheavals, including the great social revolutions of Europe, is simple: an economy that works for only a few eventually works against itself.
As a committed CADRE who believes in stability and progress, I say this with sincerity: let us build a system that lifts rather than excludes. Development MUST have a human face. Modernization MUST carry moral legitimacy. Authority must be tempered with empathy.
We can build a better Uganda that works for all of us. one where streets are organized without being sanitized of survival, where policy is strong but compassionate, where leadership listens before it acts.
A prosperous nation is not one where the poor disappear.
It is one where the poor rise.
And that is the Kampala, and the Uganda-worth fighting for.
FOR GOD AND MY COUNTRY 🇺🇬🇺🇬