By Oweyegha-Afunaduula
The key words in this article are mafia, government, dysfunctional and irrelevant. If they are linked in one spectrum of thinking, reasoning and analysis, it spells both tragedy and disaster.
Many thinkers and analysts are united in the belief that one cannot effectively decipher the condition of Uganda without evoking and integrating the detestable word “mafia” in thinking, reasoning and reflecting on the condition and analysing on how the mafia have negatively impacted the relevance, functionality and meaningfulness of government in Uganda in the various dimensions of human life and human endeavour. There is convergent thinking and belief that if there is no meaningful and effective government in Uganda anymore, then its distortion is due too the manifestations, greed and selfishness of the mafia. Many believe that the mafia now manifest more as deep state than individually.
Explaining the Term Mafia
Originally, the term referred to the Sicilian Mafia, a criminal organisation that emerged in Sicily in the 19th Century. Generally, refers to hierarchically structured, secret criminal organizations, particularly those of Italian or Sicilian origin, known for engaging in various illegal activities like racketeering, money- laundering, loan sharking, gambling, prostitution and fraud. drug trafficking and extortion.
The term is also used to describe the Italian-American Mafia, an offshoot of the Italian Mafia. However, other famous Mafias and the Russian, Israeli, Turkish and Albanian Mafia.
Throughout its history, the Mafia has controlled everything from the street-corner drug trade to the highest levels of government. Its members operate outside the law, yet become accepted and sometimes feared parts of the neighborhood and cities they inhabit.
Glorified by movies and television, hounded by law enforcement, marked for death by their enemies, these mobsters live violent and often brief lives.
There is talk of The Mafia Family Tree consisting of a BOSS, an Underboss below him, then CAPO below that one, SOLDIERS below that one and then ASSOCIATES at the bottom. This structure is for La Cosa Nostra but other criminal gangs have similar structure or slightly different.
Therefore, while Mafia organizations are often referred to as “families,” the term is a misnomer; they are not actual familial groupings, but rather criminal organizations with a hierarchical structure.
These days the term Mafia is used informally to describe any criminal organisation that operates with similar hierarchical structure and methods, regardless of its origin.
In some cases, is even used to describe groups completely unrelated to crime. This has given the term a global reach, penetrating and interpenetrating even what appear to be systematic arrangements of institutionalisation and governance such as state agencies, Executive, Legislature and judiciary.
You can not describe the global village without evoking the term Mafia. Even global corporations such as those engaged in the pharmaceutical and arms industries may operate in Mafia-like fashion.
Wars may also reflect the operations of a Mafia culture, with all types of mafias involved from decision-making to execution.
When this happens countries may divert resources from social development to war-related activities, thereby denying their people quality life in terms of educatio, health and nutrition, or even quality infrastructure, which may involve firms belonging to well-connected Mafias that may even be protected by the powers that be.
In one short sentence Mafia sophisticated criminality”. If it penetrates a system everything that the agents of the system do will most likely be of a criminal nature but defended by the system as resolutely as it can.
Here is evidence that Mafia is in Africa and that the Mafia penetrates the African Economy. The Italian mafia has established a hidden but lethal presence in Africa. Its members own diamond mines, nightclubs and land, all with the complicity of corrupt regimes.
Is Uganda a Mafia Country?
The title of my article suggests that Uganda may have already found itself fully integra to the global Mafia network. The question is: Is Uganda really a Mafia Country and if it is what are the indicators that it is?
Well, if the Italian Mafia has penetrated the Economy of Africa and with the complicity of corrupt regimes, and Uganda’s regime is globally viewed as corrupt, it is not farfetched to state that the Mafia has penetrated the Ugandan economy.
Apparently the famous Coffee and Lubowa Hospital deals feature Enrica Pinetti, claimed to be an Italian-Arab business woman with no experience with coffee and construction of hospitals. But who can investigate to establish whether she in in the Mafia network?
I have read many articles on Uganda where the term Mafia has been alluded to but without properly explaining why Uganda should be perceived and understood to be a Mafia country.
A former Vice President of Uganda, Prof. Gilbert Balibaseka Bukenya claimed that his downfall from power was caused by Mafia in government. He later claimed that the Mafia Group in Uganda is a big network in the Government.
He was more or less supported by Prime Minister, Robinah Nabbanja alluded to the existence of a powerful corrupt Mafia in Government that can issue threats to those in and outside Government that threaten their interests.
Therefore, by the time Phillip Matogo (2021) wrote his article “Let the Mafia Run Uganda” the Mafia had long been evident in the Uganda economy.
Besides, many Government officials have talked of the existence of a Mafia network frustrating the system.
There is a claim that the Mafia network has its roots in State House Entebbe and Kapeka where the President’s young brother operates and that frequently the network base in Kapeka can sometimes overrule the decisions and choices of the President of Uganda.
If this is correct, it explains the financial haemorrhage the country is suffering through State House and Kapeka as well as other avenues.
Moreover, the middle class the President has been building with much ethnic orientation is a highly greedy and selfish Middle Class. Sometimes, if not always, it is armed and has access to the national budget, which it can use to finance its network operations.
From what I have written about Mafia, racketeering, money- laundering, loan sharking, gambling, prostitution and fraud, drug trafficking and extortion are all detectable in Uganda.
For the last 40 years the word fraud has become a most common word spoken and written. A multiplicity of fraud or scandals have characterised President Tibuhaburwa Museveni’s Uganda, involving high ranking government leaders, bureaucrats, civil servants, and even the business world.
The country has lost trillions of shillings to the underworld criminals who may be occupying high offices and even representing the people in Parliament.
However, because they are a secret group integrated in the Deep State, they may be difficult to identify. One may conclude that another is a fraudster by evoking his or her supersonic rise from a pauper to an extremely rich person even when his monthly salary is only 3.8 million shilling a month.
So many gambling points have sprang up and proliferated throughout the country. Some have been established by high-ranking people in government who prefer to remain anonymous. Many young people have left school and university to be engaged in gambling. They have even used their fees, which may have been given to them by their poor parents after selling their land to Mafias.
Money -laundering is a gainful preoccupation of some mafia in and outside government. Some People highly connected to the rulers of the country have been arrested in some world capitals money laundering. Because they were highly placed, they were not embarrassed by being put behind bars. They could have been rescued by other mafias in the capitals where they were arrested.
Uganda, now being far more a land of poverty, than ever before, boasts of excelling in the evil trade of prostitution. The prostitutes may belong to mafia, who make a lot of money from prostituting young girls and women, or who may have hotels and guest houses where prostitutes practise their trade.
Many prostitutes may be men and women serving in government, public institutions or in the business world, reflecting the moral decay in the country.
Loan-sharking has become a menace of the mafia in Uganda. They have digital firms, which they are using to make the increasingly impoverished Uganda as dependent on loans as they can. Every where in the country, the Mafia have established loaning points where they are robbing citizens of their land and other properties in case they fail to pay back the loan money, moreover at very high interest.
Drug-trafficking picked up in Uganda in the 1990s and has persisted, with increasing ownership of the trade by mafias many of whom may be connected to power.
However, what has shocked Ugandans recently is the trafficking of young Ugandans in what appears to be modern slave trade to the Middle East. Most trafficking firms are said to be owned by those in the Mafia network nationally and globally. Connected with trafficking of human beings is the trafficking of human organs, which is a very lucrative trade.
I wrote about this trade but did not explicitly mention that it is a trade that is attractive and sustained by mafias.
Lastly extortion has become common in Uganda. It may appear official such as in form of national budget making by government and allocation of money by government.
For example, the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) may want 18 billion shillings for the healthcare of its staff and Members of Parliament may show reservations, but then it may proceed to extort the money from parliament by using money.
I am just giving an example because one time the boss of the Uganda Human Rights Commission (UHRC) told the nation that some Members of Parliament extorted money to have her organisation’s 2024/025 budged passed by Parliament.
Currently, the Mafia are feared to be working to ensure that the voters are confused in such a way that they cannot distinguish between National Unity Platform (NUP) and People Power Front (PPF) during the next Parliamentary and Presidential elections.
While Forum for Democratic Change – Katonga’s new party (People’s Front for Freedom, PFF) took so long to be registered by the Independent Electoral Commission of Justice Byabakama, PPF was registered in record time even if it uses more or less the same symbol and colours similar to those of NUP.
Has Uganda Government Become Dysfunctional and Irrelevant?
Many Ugandans think so. One school of thought believes that President Tibuhaburwa Museveni’s institutionalisation of poverty elimination through schemes such as Operation Wealth Creation (OWC), Myooga and Parish Development Model (PDM) have been penetrated by Mafias and extortionists, rendering them white elephants while enriching a few individuals connected to power.
Perhaps the worst operation of mafias in the country may prove to be land-grabbing in an ethnically oriented manner. Almost everywhere in the country landgrabbers belonging to the pastoral nomadic human energy system are wrecking havoc. The general belief is that behind the small land grabbers are mafias of the deep state. Many time the small land grabbers have a lot of money, which they use to buy the indigenes off their land.
The ultimate consequence of the operations of Mafias is that they have rendered the NRM government dysfunctional and irrelevant, leaving it to make promises, which it can never fulfill even if it was given another 100 years to rule.
Dysfunctional is the opposite of functional. Irrelevant is the opposite of relevant. When this is the case, the rulers will frequently be forced to use chaos and violence to compel people to choose silence and inactivity as the mafias do their acts. The Mafias will also deploy security organs to harass and quash the fourth estate so that only what promotes their choices and actions stands unchallenged. If people want social goods and services they must indefinitely wait as the Mafias enrich themselves.
If UBOS and NIRA have continued to disagree on how many Ugandans are, and if the “Independent Electoral Commission” is going to use the Census of 2014 instead of the more recent population census figures of 2024, this might be the best example of institutional decay and collapse in Uganda.
Have the Mafia penetrated the Electoral Commission and the Electoral Process in Uganda, ultimately confusing UBOS, NIRA and the Electoral Commission? If so, is the aim of the Mafia to render institutionalism meaningless and ineffective, and to ensure that regime change is not possible? Or to make Ugandans lose interest in elections altogether so that the country goes back to the time when elections were not allowed by the NRM regime.
When Electoral democracy fails, transparency and accountability are difficult to track and the Mafia have a field day. This is not surprising. Charles Onyango Obbo says Uganda has so far been governed by Mafias for 50 years (Onyango Obbo, 2023). Without people choosing who to govern them, we have gangarism at the centre of leadership and governance.
For God and My country.
Further Reading
Adam Nuwamanya (2024). Uganda Ranks 7th in Africa in Organised Crime -ODPP. NilePost, 2 April 204, https://nilepost.co.ug/news/196746/uganda-ranks-7th-in-africa-in-organising-crime—odpp Visited on 4 April 2025 at 13:23 pm EAT.
ANCIR (?). Mafia In Africa: How the Mafia Penetrates the African Economy. https://mafiainafrica.investigativecenters.org/ Visited on 4 April 2025 at 12:03 pm EAT.
Cretin, T. (1995). Attempted Definitions of Mafias., Revue de science criminelle et de droit penal compare Issue: 2 Dated: (April-June 1995). https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/what-mafia-attempted-definition-mafias Visited on 4 April 2025 at 11:26 am EAT.
Grabianowsk, Ed and John Donovan (?). How the Mafia Works. HowStuffWorks, https://people.howstuffworks.com/mafia.htm Visited on 4 April 2025 at 11:44 am EAT.
Kakoma.ug (?). Watch Out for Mafia in Uganda. https://kakoma.ug/writing/watch-mafia-in-uganda/ Visited on 04 April 2025 at 11:12 pm EAT.
Kungu Al-mahadi Adam (2025). BLOG: Gangs in Uganda: A Ticking Time Bomb. ChimpReports, January 4 2025, https://chimpreports.com/blog-gangs-in-uganda-a-ticking-time-bomb/ Visited on 04 April 2025 at 13:18 pm EAT.
Matogo, Phillip (2021). Let “the Mafia” Run Uganda. Daily Monitor, June 06 2025. https://www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/oped/commentary/let-the-mafia-run-uganda-3427628 Visited on 04 April 2025 at 12:37 pm EAT.
Mc Weeney, S M (1987). Sicilian Mafias and their Impact on the United States. FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin Volume: 56 Issue: 2 Dated: (February 1987) Pages: 1-10. NCJRS Virtual Library https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/sicilian-mafia-and-its-impact-united-states Visited on 4 April 2025 at 11:32 am EAT.
Olukya Godfrey (2022). Mafia buy children from some parents in Uganda to use them as beggars. AA 15 June 2022, https://www.aa.com.tr/en/africa/mafia-buys-children-from-some-parents-in-uganda-to-use-them-as-beggars/2614001 Visited on 04 April 2022 EAT.
Omar Kalinge Nnyago (2007). Uganda: Are the Mafia Devouring Each Other’s Throats? The Monitor, 30 August, 2007. https://allafrica.com/stories/200708301084.html Visited on 4 April 2025 at 13:30 pm EAT
Onyango- Obbo, Charles (2023). This Mafia has ruled Uganda for 50 Years. Daily Monitor, January 5 2023, https://www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/oped/columnists/charles-onyango-obbo/this-mafia-has-ruled-uganda-for-50-years-4098396 Visited on 04 April 2025 at 13:08 pm EAT.
UGANDA RADIO NETWORK (2023). Are there Mafias in Uganda? Uganda Radio Network, August 21 2023https://ugandaradionetwork.com/s/are-there-mafias-in-uganda/ Visited on 4th April 2025 at 12:19 pm EAT.
