Capitalism without conscience is suicide

By Didan Kimathi

On Judgment Day, when the Almighty God asks us why we died so early, some of us shall put it to Him that capitalism without conscience killed us.

It is funny how our statisticians like to throw around figures showing how the country’s economy has, over the past four decades, risen from the abyss of $3.9 billion in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) terms in 1986 to $66 billion as of last year.

What they forget to question is the cost at which this growth has come.

Arguably, for the last 40 years under the National Resistance Movement (NRM) Government, the country has been ensnared in something resembling primitive capitalism.

Where everything has been turned on its head. The masses particularly those in the cattle corridor of central Uganda or Buganda, so to speak, have had to put up with constant fear of being evicted from their land by the capitalist class.

This mad dash has not spared nature, which as natives, we hold dear.

More like the colonial class that followed Christopher Columbus’ journey to the New World in 1492, the new bourgeoisie class appears to carry a certain vengeance that one can’t help but wonder whether these moneyed investors, enterpreneurs or big people, consider Uganda home or are Ugandans themselves.

Their disregard for the environment is sickening. Water sources that were once home to flora and fauna as we speak today, are largely unsafe for drinking because of the chemicals spewed by the industries sprouting around them.

Other sanctuaries, such as wetlands, have been backfilled and replaced with apartments and other investments.

Even when some of their developments flood, this seemingly encourages them to further destroy the remaining wetlands.

And, I must admit, they have done a good job in this regard. For example, growing up, places such as Kasokoso and Kirombe in Nakawa East, as well as the area between Kitantale and Bugolobi were swamps. Today, they are a mix of apartments, residential buildings and shanty structures.

Forests we learnt about in our Social Studies (SST) classes have, in some cases, become ghosts of their former selves. Either they have been parceled out to sugarcane plantations or degazetted for human settlement.

My uncle, whose name I would rather not mention, often jokes that Mabira is like a curtain that deceitfully prevents travellers along the Kampala-Jinja Highway from peeping at its nakedness on the outside. It is only those who have taken panya’s (shortcuts) behind the once-gigantic forest who can tell what economic activities are taking place there.

This flagrant assault on the environment has not gone unanswered. My maternal home area of Nyakishenyi, Rukungiri District, which used to be as foggy, especially in the mornings, as other parts of Kigezi, is no longer so.

Kampala, which the majority of us, the sons of the proletariat of the 1970s and 1980s, call home away from home, faces a severe air-quality crisis.

With pollution levels frequently rising to five to seven times higher than the World Health Organization (WHO) safety guidelines according to the Uganda National Institute of Public Health Quarterly Epidemiological Bulletin for October–December 2022.

Not much has changed since then, I suspect, given that the number of vehicles, especially the ganyegenya (DMCs) keeps on increasing. Despite once in a while clampdown by authorities.

No wonder during the National Resistance Movement (NRM) caucus at State House Entebbe on August 7, 2026, President Yoweri Museveni asked;

“People are contacting me to go to India for treatment. What is causing cancer? Why are cancers so much now? Why is it so rampant?”

Just the other week on September 1, 2026; Uganda Cancer Institute (UCI) executive director Dr. Jackson Orem while interacting with the House Committee on Human Rights revealed that the Northern region Oncology Centre in Gulu alone registered 927 new cancer cases in 2025, representing a 71 percent increase compared to 2024.

While 1,306 new cancer cases (representing a 15% increase) were recorded at the Western region oncology center in Mbarara during the same period under review.

I for one, a social scientist, do not have the competence to attribute it to environmental degradation but I highly suspect it must be among the causative factors.

If that is the case, then twesibe bbiri (time to tighten our belts), cancer is not a cheap disease to treat.

ENTER CITY SQUARE

And yet, amid all this, even the dwindling green spaces that we thought would help mitigate pollution problems have over the years slowly given way to what increasingly looks like a concrete jungle.

Among the few remaining green islands in Kampala city has been city square or Constitutional Square, if you like.

Until the early 2010s, when it was cordoned off by security over fears that it could provide fertile ground for a Tahrir-like insurrection, the spot served the city’s 4.5 million daytime residents as a relaxation spot for the tired, jobless and a meeting point above all.

Before it lost a swathe of land to developments at the High Court and now a Bourgeoisie the name of Hajj Hassan Bulwadda, has come to finish it off. From experience, this is as good as done.

But it will be a shame and is backward for Kampala, among all cities, not to have a public space of this kind. Kwaheri!

The writer is descended from peasant parents,Kimathi wa Kanyoro

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