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In his provocative new book, Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State, renowned Ugandan-Indian scholar Prof. Mahmood Mamdani delivers one of the most powerful and unsettling critiques yet of President Yoweri Museveni’s nearly four-decade rule.
The book’s central claim is both bold and deeply unsettling: Museveni, Mamdani argues, has become worse than Idi Amin, the dictator he once helped to overthrow. It is a striking assessment coming from Mamdani — a man whose own family was expelled from Uganda under Amin’s 1972 decree targeting Asians.
Yet, rather than writing from bitterness or nostalgia, Mamdani’s analysis is grounded in decades of scholarship on state power, nationalism, and postcolonial governance in Africa. Through meticulous research and clear-eyed reasoning, he challenges the widely held narrative that Museveni was the liberator who rescued Uganda from the abyss of dictatorship.
Instead, Slow Poison paints a far darker picture. Mamdani contends that Museveni’s government, once hailed as a model of stability and reform, has gradually eroded the very foundations of democracy, accountability, and justice it claimed to restore. What began as a revolution promising freedom and reconstruction, he suggests, has evolved into a regime sustained by repression, corruption, and the silencing of dissent.
“The tragedy of Uganda,” Mamdani writes, “is that the liberator became the system he fought to destroy — and then perfected it.”
In drawing parallels between Amin’s brutality and Museveni’s longevity, Mamdani does not argue that the two men are identical. Rather, he suggests that while Amin ruled through fear and violence, Museveni has mastered the art of ruling through control — slow, systematic, and suffocating, hence the title Slow Poison.
The book also examines how institutions, from the military to the judiciary, have been reshaped to serve personal power rather than the public good. Mamdani’s critique extends to the culture of patronage that defines contemporary Ugandan politics, where loyalty is rewarded and independence is punished.
Slow Poison is already stirring intense debate across academic, political, and media circles, not only for its fearless comparison but for its deeper question: What does it mean when a revolutionary regime becomes indistinguishable from the tyranny it once opposed?
In the end, Mamdani’s message is less about personalities than about systems — how states decay, how power corrodes ideals, and how history’s lessons are too often ignored.
Whether one agrees with his conclusion or not, Slow Poison forces Ugandans — and Africa at large — to confront an uncomfortable truth: the line between liberator and oppressor can be dangerously thin, and sometimes, it disappears entirely.
