Museveni challenges Ugandans on domestic wealth creation amid Middle East outflows

Migrant workers board a plane at Entebbe International Airport in October. PHOTO | FILE

On June 4, 2026, President Museveni delivered a historically grounded, multi-layered State of the Nation Address at the Kololo Ceremonial Grounds. Marking his speech with an aggressive anti-poverty rally cry, Museveni re-anchored his classic economic narrative into a stern warning to public officials and citizens alike: the time for economic complacency has expired, encapsulated in his firm warning of "no more sleep" (obusi kuzi).

An underlying current in Museveni’s analytical history lesson was his fierce condemnation of modern under-productivity and economic dependency. To illustrate the antidote to poverty, Museveni traced the socio-economic evolution of Uganda's "cattle corridor" since the 1960s, shifting local populations away from the pre-capitalist paradigm of okukolera ekidda kyoonka (working only for the stomach) toward calculated, commercially structured, indoor livestock farming. This internal success, according to the President, demonstrates that regional assets—specifically commercial agriculture, manufacturing, services, and ICT—possess the low-cost capital and ultimate structural potential to make every single Ugandan household financially self-sufficient.

However, this inward-looking economic nationalism exists in stark relief against an ongoing domestic crisis: the mass flight of young Ugandans migrating to cities like Dubai for domestic and low-wage blue-collar work. Over the past decade, hundreds of Ugandan women and men fly daily to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and wider Middle East, with data indicating that over 270,000 Ugandan migrant workers left for the Arab states between 2016 and late 2023 alone. Driven primarily by acute domestic unemployment, a lack of local business financing, and low wages at home, thousands of young women seek jobs as housemaids, cleaners, and security guards, yielding average informal salaries of roughly Shs 1 million (USD 260) per month.

While the President’s 2026 address champions domestic wealth creation through government mechanisms like the Parish Development Model (PDM), Emyooga, and the Uganda Development Bank (UDB), the structural disconnect is hard to ignore. For many vulnerable youths, flying to Dubai serves as an immediate survival mechanism against local financial exclusion, despite well-documented hazards such as predatory employment practices, passport confiscations, and harsh working conditions under remnants of the regional Kafala system.

This focus on structural internal self-reliance marks a sh