OP-ED: It has been said by a voice lost to time yet forever etched in truth “The state decays, but the dictator grows fat.” This haunting phrase, whispered through the corridors of forgotten history, captures the tragic fate of nations consumed by the insatiable greed of those who rule.
Few figures embody this prophecy more fully than Mobutu Sese Seko, whose parasitic 32-year reign over Zaire now the Democratic Republic of Congo was not merely a political era, but a grand larceny, a slow, calculated plunder of a nation’s soul. What remained was not a country, but a hollow echo of what could have been.
From 1965 to 1997, Mobutu transformed the state into his personal empire. His rule became the very definition of kleptocracy: power propped up by plunder. In his seminal book The Congo: From Leopold to Kabila – A People’s History, Congolese scholar Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja peels back the mask of Mobutu’s regime, revealing not a president but a kingpin cloaked in the robes of leadership.
Under Mobutu, the nation ceased to be a republic it became a criminal syndicate. Governance was reduced to theater, a performance meant only to distract while the nation’s wealth was siphoned into private hands.
By 1989, Mobutu’s personal fortune had swelled to a staggering $5 billion an amount eerily equivalent to the country’s entire national debt at the time. His wealth was not just a product of power, but a mirror of the nation’s collapse: a grotesque fortune built atop the ruins of a people left to suffer in silence.
The late Professor Merwin Crawford Young, in The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective, delivers a searing indictment of Mobutu’s economic vandalism. He details how state institutions were gutted, their functions reduced to shadows of their intended purpose.
Government remained in name only a ghostly bureaucracy haunting a looted state. Mobutu and his allies fed on the carcass of the nation with total impunity.
The consequences were catastrophic. Roads crumbled, hospitals withered, schools vanished into disrepair. Civil servants resorted to bribes for survival. Soldiers, unpaid and desperate, turned on the very civilians they were sworn to protect.
According to The Washington Post, Mobutu treated the national budget as his personal ATM. When he finally fled, he left behind a country spiraling into war and chaos the seeds of which would blossom into Africa’s deadliest conflict.
But Mobutu’s ghost didn’t die with him. It merely changed form and crossed borders.
Today, in Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni’s long rule is beginning to echo Mobutu’s darkest chapters. Nearly six decades since independence, Uganda appears trapped in a loop where political power is maintained not through service or vision, but through systemic plunder disguised as governance.
Recent headlines lay bare the truth. Every Member of Parliament regardless of party affiliation reportedly received an “Easter package” of 100 million shillings. This payout, totaling 55.7 billion shillings (about $15 million), was not meant for emergencies or urgent national needs. It was a political payoff an insult to a country crying out for hospitals, schools, clean water, and drivable roads.
And this is not an isolated event. Just last year, parliamentary commissioners quietly awarded themselves 1.7 billion shillings. Now, a proposed 500 million shillings “election package” is on the table for the same officials. This is not governance. This is organized looting, dressed in parliamentary respectability.
In Museveni’s Uganda, looting has become institutionalized. The system is so entrenched that even insiders admit it openly. One senior official confided in me, on condition of anonymity, “I know this system inside out. I can steal and sleep soundly. I just know how to play it when the watchdogs bark.” It was a chilling confession proof that accountability is dead, and impunity reigns.
Let no one be fooled. This government cannot fight corruption it is built upon it. To dismantle corruption would be to dismantle itself. While Idi Amin is remembered for his brutality, Museveni’s legacy may be one of pillaged public coffers and a political elite fattened by theft.
In this regime, looters aren’t punished they’re rewarded. Shielded. Promoted. And sent back to Parliament with “packages” of praise.
The eerie parallels between Mobutu’s Zaire and Museveni’s Uganda are not coincidental they are cautionary. Both regimes enrich a few while condemning millions to lives of poverty and broken promises. Mobutu’s fall plunged Zaire into chaos.
Museveni’s path may be leading Uganda toward a similar fate: a democracy in name, but hollowed out by greed.
This is not just the story of greedy men. It is a national emergency.
When leaders loot instead of lead, when corruption becomes custom, when billions earmarked for healthcare, education, and roads vanish into offshore accounts and luxury homes we are not witnessing politics. We are witnessing betrayal.
The haunting similarities between Mobutu’s past and Museveni’s present must serve as a warning: Looting is not a relic of history. It is the nightmare unfolding before our eyes.
Unless we confront it boldly and urgently Uganda may soon join the ranks of fallen nations, undone not by foreign enemies, but by the silent complicity of those who allowed theft to become tradition.
The writer Wilfred Arinda Nshekantebirwe is the LC5 Male Youth Councillor for Rubanda District in South Western Uganda.
