journalistiek over mondiale samenwerking

Damian Daniel Etumu does not speak like a man interested in polite reform. The Ugandan innovator dismantles everything from foreign aid dependency to imported education systems and political complacency. He argues that Africa’s deepest crisis is not merely economic or political, but psychological—a condition of learned dependence that keeps nations waiting for rescue instead of rebuilding themselves.

There is a question Damian Daniel Etumu likes to ask. He poses it the way a teacher might, not to embarrass you, but to force you to sit with the discomfort until something gives way.

‘What is the use of learning about the Tennessee Valley Authority? What is the use of studying the fall of Bonaparte? The man died a long time ago. Why are we still studying things that do not matter to our country? Why are we studying white dead historians?’

Daniel describes himself as both an ‘agripreneur’ and a ‘technopreneur,’ who transitioned from biomedical engineering into agricultural technology. He is not someone who softens his criticism for the sake of politeness.

Instead, he sees himself as being in the business of ‘debunking notions.’ For him, that means challenging inherited ideas that keep Uganda, and Africa more broadly, trapped in dependency. He describes it as a perpetual culture of ‘begging.’

To understand the force of his argument, however, it helps to return to where it began: a young boy, a blank notebook, and a dream he would eventually be priced out of. ‘When we were young, all of us wanted to be doctors or pilots,’ Daniel says, laughing.

‘I remember writing ‘pilot’ in my book. But as I grew older, I realised it was only a dream. It would never come true.’ The problem was not talent; it was cost. ‘I applied for admission, and the tuition was 92 million shillings (€21,000). I could never afford that. In Uganda, you grow up, and then the country decides your future.’

That sentence, ‘the country decides your future,’ became the lens through which Daniel would later examine what he sees as the failures of Uganda’s education system. He pivoted to medicine, reached medical school, and realised almost immediately that it was not his passion either. ‘We are studying to become literate, not educated,’ he says.

The distinction matters deeply to him. Literacy, in his framing, is the ability to decode text, pass exams, and graduate. Education, by contrast, is the capacity to think critically, solve problems, and respond to the realities around you.

Curriculum without context

The curriculum itself, he argues, lies at the centre of the problem. It is a ‘bulky copy-paste’ imported from countries such as Switzerland and Denmark, developed for environments that bear little resemblance to Uganda — its red soil, rural schools without computers, and students without reliable electricity.

‘So why is Uganda’s education system still failing? The biggest problem is funding. There are no textbooks, no equipment, nothing. This curriculum requires research, but schools lack computers or internet access. So how are students supposed to research?’

And now, he warns, a new threat has emerged. ‘AI has spoiled everything. People do not read anymore. They just upload coursework and get answers,’ he says. ‘In the long run, we are going to produce very raw graduates who cannot even inject.’

For many people within Uganda’s innovation ecosystem, the withdrawal of foreign funding from organisations such as the UNDP was a devastating blow. Competitions have stalled, start-up hubs have shut down, and the pipelines that once sustained a generation of young innovators have begun to dry up.

Daniel has felt the impact personally. He points to the disappearance of UNDP innovation competitions as one example. Yet he refuses to mourn the losses in the way many others do. ‘Budget cuts take us back to the drawing board,’ he says, with disarming directness. ‘They force us as Ugandans to sit down and ask what we can do for ourselves instead of relying on foreign aid all the time—begging.’

The argument is deliberately uncomfortable. Daniel is not celebrating the loss of funding; he is arguing that it exposes a dependency that had already become damaging.

The ‘begging mindset,’ as he calls it, has become so deeply embedded that many Ugandan innovators now organise their ambitions around what foreign donors are willing to fund, rather than around what the country itself actually needs.

Remove the external crutch, he argues, and Uganda is finally forced to ‘check its house’—to ask what it can build, finance, and sustain on its own terms.

Corruption, he adds, only deepens the problem. ‘A lot of the money, too much of it, goes into corruption instead of doing the intended work. So to me, cutting these budgets makes sense: sit down, check your house, and see what you can do.’

He is not calling for isolation. He is calling for ownership. To him, the distinction is everything.

Europe is not heaven

The moment Daniel’s worldview shifted permanently did not happen in a seminar room or at a conference. It happened first at an airport, then on a plane, and later on a street in Italy.

There, he encountered something that unsettled him enough to force him to confront the architecture of his own assumptions: two men kissing openly in public. He stared. A woman beside him leaned over and quietly said, ‘You have not seen anything yet. Wait until you land.’ But that was not the deepest rupture. The deeper shift came later—and more quietly.

‘When I used to hear about Europe, I thought it was heaven on earth. I felt like I was going to the land of opportunities,’ he says. ‘But when I got there, I realised people there struggle just like we do. The difference is that they do not sleep. They are not lazy like us. They do not just lament—they try to do something. That is when I realised the importance of mindset.’

The Europe he encountered dismantled several assumptions at once: the idea that white people were inherently ‘a source of income’; the notion that European women were somehow more beautiful than Ateso or Alur women; and the belief that struggle was uniquely African rather than fundamentally human.

He also became aware of how Africans are perceived from the other side. ‘They think we are warriors, but they also think we are not academically good. They think they are superior to us—until we compete with them in class. That is when they realise: ‘Oh, these people are actually good.’ They look at Africa as a dark continent full of diseases.’

The experience did not make Daniel anti-Europe. Instead, it made him more precise about what Europe is, and what it is not. A place of relative wealth, yes. A place with stronger work habits, perhaps. But not a saviour, not a universal template, and certainly not ‘heaven on earth.’

His grandmother, he says, laid the foundation for that perspective long before he ever boarded a plane. She taught him never to underestimate anyone, no matter how young they were. Europe merely sharpened that lesson into something he could act upon.

Sovereignty, youth, and co-existence

Daniel holds strong opinions on many issues, but when it comes to the proposed Sovereignty Bill, he is unequivocal. ‘That is the worst bill I have ever heard of in my life.’

He dissects its provisions one by one: a mother in a rural village required to register with a ministry before receiving money sent home by her child working in Saudi Arabia; a journalist or commentator facing up to twenty years in prison or a two-billion-shilling fine for questioning Uganda’s progress; a minister empowered to declare a citizen ‘not Ugandan.’

‘We are going to lose a lot of money,’ he says. ‘Ugandans in the diaspora contribute enormously to the GDP. Now, if you begin placing restrictions and barriers on them… we import nonsense. We do not sit down and analyse what is actually good for us.’

The irony, he argues, is that the bill invokes the language of sovereignty while undermining the very conditions that make sovereignty possible: democratic participation, a free press, and the ability of citizens abroad to invest back home. ‘It is a padlock on democracy, hidden inside something called the Sovereignty Bill.’

For him, true sovereignty does not come from restrictive legislation. It comes from a country capable of feeding itself, financing its own innovations, and ‘checking its house’ without relying on foreign support tied to conditions.

It would be easy to mistake his critique for isolationism. It is not. He is not arguing that Africa should close itself off from the world. He is arguing for something more demanding: discernment.

‘Not everything in foreign countries is bad. Not everything in Africa is bad,’ he says. ‘So what do we do? We coexist. We take the good from Africa, combine it with the good from elsewhere, and create something better. That is the best we can do: coexistence.’

He points to Rwanda as an example of a country that pursued its own priorities instead of relying entirely on Western templates: banning polythene bags, investing in cleanliness, and building systems that now attract international attention. ‘Even white people are now coming to learn from Rwanda,’ he says.

He also points to local examples closer to home: the NBS CEO helping fund a maternity ward at Rubare Hospital through Rotary; Ugandan innovators manufacturing HIV and sickle cell testing kits locally; and Covidex, the Ugandan herbal remedy developed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

‘Did the bazungu use Covidex? Yes,’ he says, with visible satisfaction. ‘And it helped them. It was herbal. So why do we not support these people, bring them on board, and finance them?’

Yet the most urgent part of his message is directed at Uganda’s youth—the demographic that makes up the majority of the country’s population and, in his view, its only real hope.

‘The old people are gone,’ he says bluntly. ‘They no longer see anything new. What they are waiting for is the day God takes them. But we, the young people, must ask ourselves: Is this the country I want to stay in? And if it is not, then what are we going to do about it?’

Exposure creates ambition

He points to Kenyan Gen Z activists as an example of young people who refused to remain ‘shy,’ who did not view politics merely as a source of income, and who chose to show up and participate. ‘When you look at Uganda, we are still shy,’ he says, the frustration unmistakable in his voice.

Then comes one of his more provocative analogies. ‘A man who has never seen a beautiful woman will think the ugly one is the most beautiful,’ he says, not cruelly, but philosophically.

You cannot aspire to what you have never encountered. Exposure, in his view, is the foundation of ambition: exposure through travel, through reading, or even through something as simple as crossing into the next district.

He urges Ugandans to move, to see more, and to widen the boundaries of what they believe is possible. To Ugandans living abroad, his message becomes even more pointed.

‘Home is home. Invest at home. Come back home,’ he says. ‘What are you suffering for? We have fruits, vegetables, everything. There, you are eating synthetic things; here, we still have organic food. Even if your family is poor, you do not abandon it. You work to improve it.’

What frustrates him most, however, is what he sees as the distance between political outrage and political participation. ‘It is painful to hear people shouting from outside the country: ‘We want democracy!’ Come home and fight for it here. You cannot build democracy when you are millions of miles away.’

He says this without romanticising Uganda’s hardships. He knows the country’s wages are punishing. An 800,000-shilling (€180) salary in 2026, he notes, barely covers rent and a hospital visit.

He understands why people leave. He is not denying the problems. He is arguing that they cannot be solved entirely from the outside, by people who have already exited the room.

Rewriting the blueprint

By the end of the conversation, Daniel circles back to hope, though he arrives there by a very different route than most optimists.

‘What gives me hope is seeing young people like you standing up and debunking notions,’ he says. ‘If I only saw old people, I would be scared. But when I see young people, I realise not everything is finished. There are still many things left to do. It makes me believe there can be a better Uganda, a better world ahead.’

Damian Daniel is not a man who believes Africa’s problems are too complex to solve. In many cases, he believes the solutions are more straightforward than the prevailing wisdom suggests.

Stop importing foreign curricula that do not fit local realities. Stop waiting for USAID to fund what Uganda should already be manufacturing for itself. Stop calling home from foreign embassies while expecting others to fight battles on your behalf.

‘It is like lacking food at home and constantly running to the neighbours to complain,’ he says. ‘At some point they will laugh at you and say, ‘Look at this fool.’ That is not the best way. Let us sit down ourselves. We have the African Union. We can solve these problems amicably.’

In Daniel’s telling, going back to the drawing board is not a retreat. It is the moment Africa finally begins to draw its own lines, and picks up the pen for itself.