In Defence of the “Lumpen”: Why Uganda’s Politics Cannot Exclude Its Wounded Majority.

By Lawel Muhwezi

This article was born out of unease. Unease triggered by a statement from my friend Samwyri, popularly known as “Chaos Theory”, a veteran activist whose efforts I respect, but whose recent reflection on X left me troubled. He said, and I quote, ‘the lumpen proletariat should have never been given space to keep rising and determining our politics’. It was a statement made, perhaps, in frustration at the quality of politics we see around us. But it is also a statement that reveals how dangerously detached our political analysis can become from lived reality.

I have been thinking about that assertion alongside a deeply personal and sobering story, that of Atuheirwe Patience, whom I recently hosted on the NUP podcast. Her life is not exceptional in the sense of rarity; it is exceptional only in how honestly it reflects the silent suffering of thousands of Ugandan women and young people.

Patience dreamed of becoming a lawyer. Like many Ugandan girls, she believed education would be her ladder out of poverty and vulnerability. That dream collapsed, not because of laziness or lack of intelligence, but because Uganda is a country where ambition is routinely punished by circumstance. After Senior Six, with limited options and no safety net, she did what many are quietly forced to do: she went to the Middle East to work. There, she encountered what countless Ugandan migrant workers know too well: low pay, long hours, abuse, illness, mental strain, and a profound sense of disposability. She returned home carrying scars that will never appear on a CV.

And yet, instead of retreating into bitterness or silence, Atuheirwe Patience made a choice that is as dangerous as it is courageous: she decided to run for Woman Member of Parliament in Kamwenge. In Uganda, such a decision does not merely invite criticism; it invites surveillance, intimidation, and social risk. It is not a rational move if one’s only goal is comfort. It is a political act born of pain, conviction, and the belief that the country must change.

Her story immediately reminded me of Olivia Lutaaya, an illiterate woman whose only crime was supporting the National Unity Platform. She has suffered endless imprisonment, suffering at the hands of the state, not because she wielded power, but because she dared to believe she mattered politically. Olivia does not speak the language of political theory. She does not quote Marx or Fanon. But her body has absorbed the consequences of a system that treats certain citizens as expendable.

These women are not anomalies. They are representatives of a generation that has been failed systematically. Young people whose education was interrupted, women whose labour is exported and abused, and citizens whose health and dignity are treated as collateral damage in the maintenance of power. To describe them casually as the “lumpen proletariat,” and then to suggest that their participation in political leadership is the problem, is not just analytically lazy; it is morally troubling.

The term lumpen proletariat comes from Marxist theory, often used to describe a class detached from productive labour and therefore politically unreliable or reactionary. But applying this label wholesale to Uganda’s poor, unemployed, undereducated, and dispossessed youth misunderstands both Marx and Uganda. Our so-called lumpen are not outside the system; they are its most brutalised product. They are not politically apathetic by nature; they are politically conscious through suffering.

The discomfort some feel when people like Atuheirwe Patience enter politics is revealing. It is not about competence alone; it is about class anxiety. It is the fear that politics is being reclaimed by people who speak a different language, whose pain cannot be managed by procedure, and whose demands are not polite. But history teaches us something uncomfortable: transformative politics has never been led by the comfortable. It has always been driven by those for whom the status quo is unbearable.

This does not mean that suffering automatically produces good leadership. Romanticising pain is as dangerous as dismissing it. Parliament is complex. Governance requires skill, learning, and discipline. But the answer to this is not exclusion; it is preparation, collective leadership, and institutional support. The solution is not to tell the poor to stay out of politics, but to demand that political movements invest in political education, mentorship, and accountability forexample the attempt by NUP under the school of leadership, especially for those coming from marginalised backgrounds.

What Samwyri’s assertion misses is that Uganda’s current political crisis is not caused by the entry of the “lumpen,” but by the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of an elite that has failed to imagine a future beyond itself. The emergence of women like Atuheirwe Patience and Olivia Lutaaya is not a degeneration of politics; it is a symptom of a society reaching its breaking point. These are not people seeking chaos. They are people seeking dignity.

If the choice is between politics that protects comfort and one that confronts suffering, Uganda’s future lies with the latter. Not because the “lumpen” are perfect, but because they are real. And in a country where reality has been ignored for too long, real people, especially wounded women and young people, may be exactly where political renewal must begin.