Uganda’s President, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, is once again seeking re-election for an eighth term in office. But after nearly four decades in power, Uganda’s most urgent question is not whether Museveni can win another vote – it is whether he still has a vision for Uganda’s future. And nowhere is this question sharper than in the crisis of graduate unemployment.
Every year, Uganda throws over half a million fresh graduates into the unemployment line. They join a swelling army of desperate, overqualified, and underutilised young people, many resorting to riding boda bodas (motorcycle taxis) to survive. This is not just wasted talent. It is state-sponsored betrayal – training young people for years, only to abandon them at the gate of opportunity.
And yet, when a practical, scientifically backed model is laid before the President, his response has been silence. I am talking about the Global University Business Club (GUBCCo) concept, birthed from my PhD research on Learning by Doing in Entrepreneurship Clubs and Hubs for Graduates’ Gainful Self-Employment: A Study of Makerere University.
GUBCCo is not rhetoric. It is a scientifically tested proof-of-concept that connects graduates to investors, provides financing through savings and credit cooperative (SACCO) schemes inspired by Muhammad Yunus’s microfinance revolution, and uses e-commerce innovations modeled after Amazon to market graduate business ideas-transmuted enterprises.
I did not keep this vision to myself. I published it in painstaking detail in an eight-part article series in Pearl Times – here below:
- How government can save 500,000 graduates riding boda bodas
- Tackling graduate unemployment through government-supported entrepreneurship
- Why Ugandans deserve the development leaders see abroad
- A smart way to connect entrepreneurs to investors
- GUBCCo’s marketing and distribution model, inspired by Amazon
- The SACCO scheme for graduate financing
- An open letter to President Museveni
- Why leaders are ignoring calls to save graduates
I outlined how Uganda can save 500,000 graduates from last resort boda boda hustles, how the government can back university innovators to create jobs, and how GUBCCo’s finance and marketing model can transform youth desperation into national productivity. I even wrote an open letter to President Museveni himself. What response did I get? Deafening silence.
The irony is striking. President Museveni has raised scientists’ salaries several times higher than those in the arts, proclaiming his faith in science as the engine of national development. But when science produces a practical model like GUBCCo, the same President turns a blind eye. That contradiction exposes not vision, but selective sight.
Vision demands courage to confront uncomfortable truths. Uganda’s graduates are suffocating in unemployment. Their anger is simmering beneath the surface. Ignoring them is not mere morally bankrupt, it is political bankruptcy. A government that cannot guarantee meaningful livelihoods for its most educated citizens is writing its own obituary.
President Museveni and his defenders will point to skilling programmes, parish development models, and endless “youth funds.” But these scattershot initiatives lack coherence, accountability, and the structural capacity to absorb graduates into sustainable enterprise. They are band-aids on a cancer. GUBCCo is not another fund to mismanage; it is an ecosystem designed to fundamentally change how graduates engage the economy.
So the question is blunt: Why is Museveni ignoring this vision?
Is it pride – an unwillingness to accept solutions that do not originate from within the State House? Is it fear – that an empowered, economically independent graduate class would be harder to control politically? Or is it simply inertia – the fatigue of a long reign more concerned with survival than transformation?
Whatever the reason, the effect is the same: Museveni’s refusal to act on graduate unemployment reveals a leader clinging to power without a vision that matches the scale of Uganda’s crisis.
According to Myles Munroe’s warning, without a vision to address graduates’ unemployment in Uganda, graduates perish, their dreams perish, their potential perishes, and with them, Uganda’s future perishes.
President Museveni, as you campaign for yet another term, know this: Uganda’s graduates do not need slogans. They do not need handouts. They need a system that unleashes their potential. GUBCCo offers such a system. I tabled it to you in the eight-part article series. You have been called to it. And by ignoring it, you show not strength, but “science thought” bankruptcy.
The choice before you is stark. You can be remembered as the leader who prepared Uganda for a future beyond oil and patronage – or as the leader who squandered the dreams of a generation of graduates to secure one more election.
The late Dr Myles Munroe once said that vision is more important than people, buildings, or money, because those things are limited to what eyes can see, while vision is the product of the heart’s imagination. A leader without vision, Munroe argued, cannot take people where they need to go.
Vision is greater than power. And power without vision is tyranny.
Dr Julius Babyetsiza (PhD in Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and MSc and BSc in Economics with Statistics) is the founder of GUBCCo. Email: info@gubcco.ug.
