The Class Composition of the Ugandan Society

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”¹ – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Uganda’s society is divided in classes. Before the arrival of the British colonialists most of Uganda already was a class society, a feudal one under the rule of local kings, such as the Kabaka of Buganda.

The society of today’s Uganda is a capitalist one. Therefore the class structure is mainly divided between the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class, and the proletariat, the working class. The petty bourgeoisie (among them the working peasantry) forms the main intermediate class that can be allied by the workers. That is the class structure in the simplified way. But that needs further analysis.

The problem here is the typical one for Uganda: There is barely reliable data. But there is at least some that can be used to at least give an overview.

The main issue, the lack of data, is due to Uganda’s economy having 88% informal and only 12% formal employment². This makes it impossible to collect reliable data, no matter how honest and committed you are. The fluctuation is high and there are no contracts that could be taken as a basis in the informal sector. Therefore the available data are mostly estimations.

The Working Class

This is why in 2023 18.56% of the population were wage workers according to World Bank data, but the concrete fields of employment are not registered. Wage labor is what makes a person proletarian³, but this does not specify the field.

29% of the employed are skilled agricultural workers, 43% of the employed are working in the service and sales sector, mostly trading⁴, according to the ministry for finance data transmitted by Ramathan Ggoobi. That is 2024 data. When using these two numbers from government data on the 2023 World Bank data, about 5.4% of the people are agricultural workers and about 8% are employees working in the trade sector. On top of that the World Bank estimated for 2023 that about 7% of the Ugandan people were industrial workers⁵. As we can see, 5.4+8+7 does not add up to 18.56% but to 20.4%. The numbers are similar but not the same. Due to statistical fluctuations (which the World Bank data for the previous years suggest) we could still see these proportional numbers as roughly reliable, though not exactly.

That would mean that the proletariat in the productive sectors, industry and agriculture, are relatively weak compared to the proletariat in the service sector. For class struggle the concrete employment does not matter too much. As the Bible says: “Now he who plants and he who waters are one, and each one will receive his own reward according to his own labor.”⁶ But it shows that Uganda especially lacks industry for its further development. The working class can only fight for socialism to overcome its exploitation and oppression. Every “solution” in a trade unionist way under capitalism can only be temporary and incomplete.

The Peasantry

The peasantry as one big class does not exist. It is an umbrella term of different, special parts of the bourgeois classes. It would be self-delusion to see the peasantry as one big, united mass-class.

The small peasantry is a special part of the petty bourgeoisie. It owns means of production, like the petty bourgeoisie, but first of all land. The boundness to land, which is not reproducible like tools, makes them a special part of the petty bourgeoisie. Due to generating its own livelihood from the fields it can exist for longer than it is actually rentable. This is why the peasantry looks relatively stable from the outside while from the inside you can see the tendency of decreased rentability which will eventually lead, like in the developed countries, to a decline of the peasantry and the upcoming of big farms everywhere, as you can already witness in the sugar cane production between Jinja and Iganga.

Engels already said in 1894:

“The main point is, and will be, to make the peasants understand that we can save, preserve their houses and fields for them only by transforming them into co-operative property operated co-operatively. It is precisely the individual farming conditioned by individual ownership that drives the peasants to their doom. If they insist on individual operation, they will inevitably be driven from house and home and their antiquated mode of production superseded by capitalist large-scale production. That is how the matter stands.”⁷

In short: The small peasantry will either unite in cooperatives to become a collective bigger enterprise or they will be outcompeted by the capitalist big farms and will be proletarized. We already now see cases of land evictions in Uganda⁸. They will even increase in the future due to this tendency of capital centralization. The small and medium peasantry are our allies for a socialist society and it is our task to lead them on the track of collectivization into the formation of cooperatives.

According to estimations by the World Bank 65.91% of the Ugandan people in 2023 were employed in agriculture⁹. There are estimations of peasantry that range beyond the 70% mark¹⁰, sometimes even above 80%. The question is if they actually counted the peasantry or just the rural population. For sure Uganda’s rural population is something between 70% to 80% but not all of them are actually working in agriculture.

In Uganda the class of subsistence peasants is still a huge chunk among the peasantry. They do not engage in commodity production due to too low output or due to the lack of means of transport (which results in having no access to the market).

2024 33% of the Ugandan households were reported to engage in subsistence economy. 75% of them rely on subsistence agriculture, while 10% focus on “income-generating activities” and 15% engage in wage labor¹¹. These are probably all rural households because only on the countryside with its backwardness subsistence economy is possible. Those 10% are by definition part of the petty bourgeoisie. That would add 3.3% to that number of petty bourgeoisie in the general Ugandan population. The 15% are most likely field workers. 4.95% would therefore be added to the agrarian proletariat. That would fit to the number of about 5% agrarian proletariat already mentioned above. That makes this number more likely.

When it comes to the dominance subsistence economy, mainly the North of Uganda and especially Karamoja are affected, where 71% of the households are part of it. This is a huge indicator of economic backwardness.

The proclaimed goal of the Ugandan government is to bring the subsistence peasants into the “monetary economy”¹² (that means: integrating them into the capitalist market). This goal might ruin peasants in the process but there is no way around it. Subsistence peasants will also not form cooperatives because they are on a too low level of development of the means of production. The subsistence peasants must be integrated into the market just to integrate them into the national economy and then show them how being a small peasant is insufficient to survive in the long run¹³, like Lenin taught us.

The small peasantry owns little own land, therefore often rents land from others, and uses primitive means of production. They often even lack the most basic tools such as hoes or spades. There are many who already became half-proletarized and engage in some forms of wage labor like parts of the subsistence peasantry.

It is hard to say on how much land in average the small peasantry has to work because there are huge regional differences and different estimations ranging from 0.78 hectares¹⁴ to 0.97 hectares¹⁵ and even up to 2.5 hectares¹⁶. 66.2% of the peasantry worked on less than 1 hectare of land while only 13% worked on more than 2 hectare of land¹⁷. So we could orientate on 1 hectare as a sort of “average” number while the median is actually lower. Also due to splitting the inheritance of land the farm size might decrease. That process is called land fragmentation and is already recognized as a major problem in agriculture¹⁸. Also on that issue cooperatives are the solution.

On the medium peasantry there is no data to be found. They are peasants on (usually) own land with quite enough means of production while not being rich enough to employ field workers. They are still part of the petty bourgeoisie though being its upper stratum.

On the big peasantry the only data to be found is that only 13% of the peasants work on more than 2 hectares of land. Therefore they must be somewhere among this number, though also medium peasantry can be found among that number. Big peasants own more land than they can cultivate with their families. They exploit field workers and often also own other assets in the villages, such as mills or shop buildings they rent to others. This class is part of the medium bourgeoisie and often very reactionary. Due to the big land ownership their forms of exploitation even might be partly feudal as in the case of the gentry; the transition between big peasantry and gentry is fluent. They have no interest in socialism because cooperatives would break their rule over the small peasantry and therefore undermine their class privileges. They often treat the small peasantry badly, like feudal lords treated their serfs. In the Soviet Union people from this class were called “kulaks”, who were known to run storm against the construction of socialism. To say it in short: Big peasants are class enemies. Only a very small portion might be willing to join us for idealistic reasons.

The Gentry

The gentry is the landlord class. Also here clear data is lacking. The only data indicating a big amount of rented land is that only 39.6% of the households employed in agriculture own the land or are right holders of the land they work on, where there is even a gap in gender: 48.7% of the men but only 31.1% of the women own the land or are right holders of the land they till¹⁹. That means that over half of the land that is tilled by the peasants is not their own. But the question is: Who is the owner? The only ownership data relevant for the gentry might be that 9% of the land in Uganda (concentrated in Buganda to be more specific) is owned under the Mailo system²⁰. That could at least account for the gentry in Buganda region. 89% of the income of the Kingdom of Buganda comes from the feudal Mailo system²¹.

The gentry is a class that mostly lives from renting land to others while not engaging in own work. This class is feudal in nature. There might be many cases that are engaging in agriculture as big peasants too while renting most of their land to others. That does not change their mainly feudal class nature the slightest. As already said, the big peasants and gentry are in a fluent transition. Just as the big peasantry, they are class enemies, even in a much bigger sense due to the backwardness of the feudal character of exploitation they engage in. The assets of the gentry need to be nationalized and the land distributed among the working peasantry by land reform.

The Petty Bourgeoisie

The petty bourgeoisie is a class that owns small means of production (or trade) and operates them on their own, just analog to the small peasants. Independent merchants and craftsmen are the archetype of that class.

No class shows the lack of reliable data as blatant as the petty bourgeoisie. There can only be a rough estimation of its number through the mere method of elimination. When over 65% work in agriculture and roughly 20% are wage laborers only 15% are left for the petty bourgeoisie in the narrow sense (mainly merchants and craftsmen).

Uganda’s urban population was in 2023, according to World Bank estimates, 26.77% of the entire population²². Urban people cannot be farmers in general. There might be exceptions that live urban and work rural, but these are neglectable. So these roughly 27% can only be either proletariat, petty bourgeoisie, national (medium) bourgeoisie or comprador (big) bourgeoisie. The proletariat is what we already could estimate quite clearly. Of about 20% proletariat 5% are agricultural workers, so they cannot be part of the urban population. The 7% industrial workers for sure are part of the 27% of the urban population since industry in Uganda exists only in cities. The 8% employees in services are mostly urban but not exclusively. When we would therefore estimate 75% of the service workers as urban population, they would be 6%. 27-13 would still be 14% left for petty bourgeoisie, national bourgeoisie and comprador bourgeoisie in the cities. To that about 3% from the rural petty bourgeoisie must be counted. 14+3 would be 17% overall. The national bourgeoisie is not high in number, the comprador bourgeoisie is in number very tiny but big in influence due to managing foreign capital within Uganda. So in the end we can estimate that the petty bourgeoisie is probably around 15% of the Ugandan people.

This number seems possible but is also in itself, like in case of the peasantry, not very differentiated. The exact number of merchants, shop owners, craftsmen, hairdressers, tailors and so on is impossible to assess based on the available data. The only thing that can be said is that the trade sector is the largest one among them.

The petty bourgeoisie is an ally of us, like the small and medium peasantry, and just needs to be organized in cooperatives like them²³. The only danger is that some elements among them might have illusions to be able to expand and prosper under capitalism.

The National Bourgeoisie

As already mentioned, the national bourgeoisie is the medium bourgeoisie²⁴. It mainly consists of medium shop owners, small industrialists and bigger craftsmen enterprises where the owner exploits employees but is still working in the company. Supermarkets run by Uganda-Indians are a concrete example just as coffee factories run by locals. There are also African Ugandan national bourgeois. They often, like the big peasantry, exploit their employees in a very brutal way and even trick their employees for their wages.

The national bourgeoisie is mostly an exploiting class but not exclusively. There are contradictions between national and comprador bourgeoisie. That can be utilized for our purposes. The most recent blatant example is the opening of China Town in Kampala which puts the petty and national bourgeoisie under competitive pressure by the pro-Chinese comprador bourgeoisie²⁵. It is true, that this is a visible sign of undermination of the Ugandan national economy²⁶. And this is where we need to tell the national bourgeoisie: Either fight with us against the imperialist influence, for a common people’s republic, or get crushed by the concurrence of the comprador bourgeoisie.

In the end the national bourgeoisie is not a reliable ally. As an exploiting class capitalism is in their class interest, just the lower national bourgeoisie might be a more reliable ally when they give up the hope of expansion of their enterprise. Mao already noted that the national bourgeoisie might even just stay neutral²⁷. Its right-wing will oppose us, its left-wing could support us²⁸. That means: We need to try to ally as many of them as possible without compromising us into capitulation. We can ally with them but not rely on them during the phase of a people’s democratic revolution.

The Comprador Bourgeoisie

“The comprador big bourgeoisie is a class which directly serves the capitalists of the imperialist countries and is nurtured by them.”²⁹ – Mao Zedong

The comprador bourgeoisie is Uganda’s big bourgeoisie. Big bourgeoisie means that this class owns big monopolist companies. It is a class totally dependent on imperialist capital. The local CEOs of Pepsi, Coca Cola, Sinopaint and other foreign companies are part of that class. The comprador bourgeoisie is mainly composed of Indian and Chinese companies.

Kakira Sugar for example is such a company that is owned by an Indian conglomerate, the Madhvani Group. The company boasts on its website to control half of Uganda’s sugar production³⁰. That is likely since other sugar producers like Kamuli Sugar (also owned by Indians) are much smaller by output and often buy sugar from local licensed peasants. Kakira Sugar on the other hand owns a vast real estate of 9.500 hectares of land³¹. 14% of Uganda’s total land mass is owned under large scale land acquisition; that is land ownership of more than 200 hectares³². It should be obvious that this mass of land is not owned by gentry or big peasants but big capitalist agrarian companies, and be it, like in case of Kakira Sugar, just the raw resource production of a monopoly company.

The comprador bourgeoisie cannot be allied under any circumstance, they are the deadly foe of the Ugandan working class and working peasantry as well to a big chunk of the petty bourgeoisie. Their monopoly companies need to be nationalized to lay the economic foundations of a planned economy.

Final Remarks

The severe lack of reliable data is a big speed bump in sociological research in Uganda as well making solid economic analyses almost impossible. Still, the results of this class analysis of the Ugandan society might be good enough to work with it in the future.

Mao Zedong said for the period of the people’s democratic revolution:

“Who are the people? At the present stage in China, they are the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie.”³³

In Uganda it is in essence the same. The working class is the leading force in the struggle for socialism, the peasantry its main ally, the petty bourgeoisie also an ally and the national bourgeoisie a temporary ally that will later be bought off³⁴.

Was Obote so different on that matter? In his independence speech he said:

“I cannot forget our men of commerce and industry and also our peasant farmers and the working men and women. Our ability to have a higher standard of living will depend as in the past on their success, security and happiness.”³⁵

Obote does not talk in a clear Marxist class terminology, but the essence is similar. The workers, peasants, petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie can be found here as well. Uganda achieved a huge share of state industry and cooperatives among the peasantry, as the Common Man’s Charter declared. Declaring on 1st May 1970 to take 60% state shares in 84 companies of the national bourgeoisie³⁶ was similar to the policy of buying off the national bourgeoisie.

This is the logical conclusion from above’s analysis: The comprador bourgeoisie and the gentry, the landlord class, are in the current stage the main class enemies of the working people during the struggle for a people’s democracy as the transition stage to socialism.

Stalin said “that NEP is an inevitable phase of the socialist revolution in all countries.”³⁷ The people’s democratic (or as Mao called it: New Democratic) phase is in essence the same as the New Economic Policy (NEP). It is impossible to directly step into socialism, without transition. That was even true in the developed countries that became socialist, like Germany. Necessary phases cannot be skipped. But what we can do is to “shorten and lessen” them³⁸, as Marx said. Therefore:

Set course towards a common people’s republic to build the basis of socialism!