By Peter Kahindi

There is a curious asymmetry running through public life in East Africa at the moment. 

Governments have shown they can move fast and act decisively when the target is a citizen’s private habits – what they consume, what they wear, how they bet, and so on and so forth. 

BUT when the intended target is the disappearance of billions by people with the right connections, the story changes. 

The contrast is not accidental.

Fast Action on Morality, Slow Action on Corruption

When it comes to corruption, for instance, some argue that dealing with low-level public servants without addressing the politically connected perpetrators leaves the floodgates of corruption and moral decadence wide open.

When Uganda’s Ministry of Local Government decided bars were opening too early, it took a single letter to impose a nationwide 3:00pm curfew “with immediate effect” and the threat of “punitive action” for non-compliance. 

When Rwandan police decided a woman’s outfit at a concert crossed a line, she was in a courtroom within days, and officers involved in the case reportedly threatened another with detention on the spot. 

Thereafter, the entire country came under an intense moral debate when they sought to intensify a directive on decent dressing in public spaces.

The arrest of the young woman in Kigali was publicly criticized in a manner that is unprecedented for those familiar with how the Rwandan society reacts to online topics of a controversial nature.

When Corruption Cases Move Slowly

Compare that to the pace of Uganda’s corruption cases.

For instance, arising from the infamous iron sheets scandal, Mary Goretti Kitutu, the former Karamoja Affairs minister, was charged in 2023 over the diversion of iron sheets meant for housing some of the country’s poorest communities.

Her trial has been adjourned and re-adjourned and she is now expected back in court on 12^th October 2026 – not that the case will be closed on that day.

Hon. Kitutu’s junior’s (Hon. Agness Nandutu’s) proceedings started around the same time but she was convicted and sentenced to four (4) years in April 2026. 

In another case, nine (9) Finance Ministry officials linked to a Shs60 billion “heist” through the Bank of Uganda were only committed for High Court trial in 2025, a year after the loss occurred.

In this case, you would have thought the financial amounts involved should have occasioned a higher level of urgency.

But, no – it is slow going as usual.

Progress, but Far Too Slowly

None of this means nothing is happening. It is just happening too slowly.

In Uganda, the Inspectorate of Government speaks of a deliberate shift toward “prosecution-led investigations” and faster asset recovery. 

And it is true that anti-corruption courts across the region are visibly busier today than they were a decade ago. 

Again, we do not intend to claim here that these institutions are inert; it’s just that their successes take too many years to arrive.

Worse, the further up the chain a case goes, the more likely it is to stall, get quashed by appeals, or quietly lose momentum.

Complexity Does Not Explain Everything

Some of this can be explained away quite innocently. 

Financial crime is genuinely harder to prosecute than a dress-code violation. Money moves through shell companies, front accounts and cross-border wires.

Admittedly, complex financial cases require forensic auditors, court-ordered bank records, mutual legal assistance requests to other jurisdictions, and courts willing to sit through months of documentary evidence. 

On the other hand, a dress code case requires only a police officer’s judgment call and a same-day court appearance.

Where Complexity Stops Being an Explanation

But complexity doesn’t explain everything. It doesn’t explain why a minister’s case can be paused for an appeal over her own alleged mistreatment while her junior gets convicted first and fast. 

Nor does it explain why officials accused of losing Shs27 billion in donor and public funds face charges only after a three-year gap, while a bar owner can be fined or shut down the same week a curfew is announced. 

Complexity lies in a society where the people accused of grand corruption are typically the same ones (or close to the ones) who appoint prosecutors, oversee anti-corruption agencies, and sit in the legislatures that write the laws meant to catch them. 

Power and the Pace of Justice

Uganda’s track record on the prosecution and conviction of people who are in favour with the sitting government has been reported as below per.

Enforcing a dress code costs a government nothing politically. 

But prosecuting a sitting or recently sitting minister briskly to conclusion can be politically expensive.

Finding a “delicate balance” is a real hazard rather than a rhetorical flourish. 

A state that visibly polices what ordinary citizens drink, bet and wear, while allowing the people who looted billions in public housing funds or donor money to remain free on appeal for years, is not neutral on the question of morality; it is teaching its citizens exactly where its urgency lies. 

Every swiftly enforced bar curfew alongside every stalled corruption trial reinforces a lesson: personal vice among the powerless is punished on sight; grand theft among the powerful is litigated into the horizon, and sometimes never resolved at all. 

That lesson corrodes the legitimacy of both projects. 

It makes morality campaigns look like a substitute for accountability rather than a complement to it, and it makes anti-corruption courts look decorative even when, case by case, they are doing real work.

The honest rejoinder from officials is that these processes take the time they take, that appeals are a legal right, and that a conviction rushed is a conviction overturned. 

That is a fair point, and worth taking seriously. 

Nobody benefits from anti-corruption trials that collapse on appeal because due process was skipped for speed. 

But if that same patience and procedural care were extended evenly to bar owners facing a curfew, to a woman turned away from a concert, the asymmetry would disappear. 

It hasn’t. 

The Message the Public Receives

The lesson your average East African is drawing from the last two years of corruption cases is not that financial crime is hard to prosecute. 

It’s that some crimes get urgency, and some get patience, and the difference tends to track who’s accused rather than what they did.

As a wise old friend said to me over drinks the other weekend, our morality is on a very short leash, and the dogs of corruption on a very long and loose one.