A senior government communicator says Uganda’s low Covid-19 death toll proves the power of leadership. The data tells a more complicated story.
🔴 Claim
Yoweri Museveni’s leadership and strategy were decisive in keeping Uganda’s Covid-19 deaths low. The argument, advanced by Uganda Media Centre executive director Allan Kasujja, rests on a contrast: a poor country outperforming wealthy nations such as the UK.
Despite allocating nearly 15% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to fighting the pandemic, the UK was reporting hundreds of deaths every day. Sometimes thousands. Ambulances became a constant on my street—I stopped counting after a while […] Then President Museveni spoke. He said he was going back to what he knew—the methods that had served the National Resistance Army during the bush war. To accurately assess an adversary, you stop, you observe and only then do you act. You let the picture become clear before you commit. Something clicked for me in that moment. Here was a leader reaching into unconventional, hard-won experience to navigate a crisis that had already humbled far more sophisticated systems.
🔴 Background
Covid-19 started in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. The World Health Organisation was notified of a cluster of pneumonia cases of unknown cause there on December 31, 2019. The novel coronavirus was identified as the cause in early January 2020. It spread rapidly and was killing hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people in just one day. Uganda reported its first case in March 2020 and its first fatality in July.
🔴 What OJ-UGANDA checked
- Whether President Museveni’s leadership was the main reason Uganda’s death toll was lower than that of the UK—and whether Uganda did better than other African countries
- Whether the comparison with the UK makes sense
🔴 What we found
- Deaths remained in the low hundreds by end of 2020
- At face value, that looks like success—particularly when compared to countries in Europe.
- However, while comparing Uganda to the UK is rhetorically powerful, it is analytically hollow because of the following reasons:
– UK has a much older population
– Higher prevalence of conditions such as obesity
– Large care-home populations, where deaths were concentrated
Uganda, by contrast, is one of the youngest countries in the world. Children aged 17 and under make up 50.5% of the population, according to the 2024 census. The youth demographic (18–30 years) accounts for a further 22.7%.
Covid-19 disproportionately kills the elderly, according to the WHO. That alone shifts the baseline dramatically.
🔴 The bigger pattern
Uganda was not an outlier, as our data visualisation below suggests. Across much of Africa:
- Death rates were generally low
- Even countries with weaker restrictions reported similar outcomes
Exceptions exist, notably South Africa, which recorded significantly higher mortality.
Key point: If leadership were the decisive factor, outcomes would vary sharply across countries. Instead, much of Africa shows a similar pattern.
🔴 Verdict
Misleading
Uganda did record relatively low reported Covid-19 deaths, especially early on. Government measures may have helped slow initial spread.
However, the broader evidence suggests:
- Structural factors such as age and health profiles played a far larger role
- Uganda’s experience mirrors a wider African pattern
- Data limitations make firm conclusions difficult
🔴 Conclusion:
- There is insufficient evidence to attribute Uganda’s low Covid-19 death toll primarily to leadership. Across Africa, the majority of countries—including some far larger than Uganda—recorded far fewer Covid deaths. Uganda’s experience fits the continental pattern rather than standing out as a leadership triumph.
Editor’s note: The quotation above has been updated to reflect what Mr Kasujja said about Mr Museveni’s leadership during Covid-19.
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