Africa Cannot Be Sovereign While Africans Remain Captive

By Robert Kyagulani:

Thursday at Princeton University, I had the honor of addressing some of the University’s students and faculty about the place of Africa and Africans in the world, using Uganda as a case study. The overarching theme of my address, especially as Uganda just celebrated its 64th independence anniversary, was that Africa cannot be sovereign while Africans remain captive. It cannot be powerful while its people remain powerless.

Ugandans – Africans, really – MUST have a genuine opportunity to choose their leaders through credible democratic processes whose final outcome reflects their true will. Africans can’t truly exercise their sovereignty if they have no meaningful influence over the decisions that shape their lives and futures.

But even beyond elections, Africans must still have the freedom to criticize their leaders and influence public decisions. Otherwise, democracy becomes a sham periodic exercise in which Africans temporarily participate in selecting their next captors.

Although Africa need not blindly imitate institutions of other societies without considering our own circumstances, it must develop democratic institutions that are legitimate and responsive to the people they serve. Africa must build States strong enough to govern effectively, but not so powerful that their own citizens become helpless before them.

Those States, in turn, must then protect their sovereignty but without conveniently invoking it to insulate their ruling governments from being accountable to the citizens. Any legislation that African States enact to protect their sovereignty should be strictly tailored towards protecting the ability of their people to determine their own future without illegitimate foreign interference. It goes without saying that the rest of the world’s interactions with Africa should ultimately be to support these objectives, otherwise Africans will keep bleeding on the rest of the world.

Robert Kyagulani, better known as Bobi Wine, is leader of Uganda’s National Unity Platform party (NUP) and widely believed to have won the Jan. 15, 2026 Presidential election.