Imperialist Servant Constructs a Monument to an Empire: How Uganda Built a Statue to Its Own Invader

On July 4, 1976, an elite unit of Israeli commandos touched down at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. Operatives executed Operation Thunderbolt—a aggressive raid inside a sovereign African nation that left scores of Ugandan soldiers dead, destroyed a third of the Ugandan Air Force’s fighter fleet on the tarmac, and dealt a humiliating blow to the post-colonial state. Among the Israeli casualties was the raid’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan “Yoni” Netanyahu, older brother of current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Decades later, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba—chief of the Ugandan military, son of President Yoweri Museveni, and heir-apparent to a four-decade dictatorship—did something astonishing. Standing at Entebbe International Airport, he unveiled a permanent bronze monument dedicated to Yoni Netanyahu.

For a sovereign African nation to build a monument honoring an invading foreign soldier who died killing its own troops on its own runway is a historical absurdity. It is a posture of groveling servitude—a direct, real-world expression of Malcolm X’s classic critique of the "house negro" who identifies so completely with the house of the master that he mourns the master's losses more deeply than his own family's survival.

The Entebbe statue is not an isolated folly or a quirky diplomatic mistake. It is the ideological capstone of a forty-year trajectory in which the Ugandan state under Yoweri Museveni has functioned as a comprador regime—a client state traded away to service the military, economic, and geopolitical interests of Western imperialism and Israeli Zionism.

The Anatomy of a Comprador State

To understand how a regime reaches the point of building statues to its historical subjugators, one must examine the class character of the ruling Ugandan elite.

Following the 1986 victory of the National Resistance Movement (NRM), Yoweri Museveni systematically dismantled the remaining nationalist structures of post-colonial Uganda, replacing them with a neo-colonial arrangement structured around structural adjustment programs, foreign military aid, and absolute subordination to the International Monetary Fund and Washington.

In the lexicon of anti-imperialist theory, a comprador bourgeoisie does not derive its power, wealth, or legitimacy from the domestic working class or peasantry. Instead, it acts as an intermediary for foreign monopoly capital and imperialist militaries. Uganda under Museveni became the ultimate regional proxy—a militarized client state willing to outsource its soil, its strategic location, and the lives of its youth to maintain its own power at home.

The evidence of this vassal relationship spans decades:

• Shedding Blood for Wall Street and Tel Aviv: Uganda has consistently supplied infantry as cannon fodder for regional military operations across Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), South Sudan, and the Central African Republic (CAR). These deployments operate within strategic frameworks dictated by Washington and European capitals, protecting transnational mining and energy assets under the guise of "peacekeeping."

• Exporting Mercenaries to US War Zones: During the height of the US military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, private security contractors systematically exploited Uganda's structural poverty. Young Ugandans—including former child soldiers traumatized by decades of war—were recruited by local subcontractors and handed over to US firms to guard American bases for pennies on the dollar. When these guards were maimed or killed, they were quietly discarded and sent home without medical care or compensation—a pipeline of outsourced human labor feeding the military-industrial complex.

• Serving as the Empire’s Trash Can: Underscoring its complete surrender of national dignity, Kampala signed bilateral "third-country" deportation agreements with Washington. Under these deals, the US government charters flights to dump non-Ugandan migrants and refugees directly onto Ugandan soil, converting the country into a holding center for the imperial metropole's unwanted surplus population.

Zionism, Imperial Security, and the Legacy of Peripheral Hegemony

The unveiling of the Netanyahu monument highlights a deep, historical link between Ugandan comprador elites and Israeli intelligence.

During the early post-independence era of the 1960s, Tel Aviv cultivated close security networks across East Africa under its "Periphery Doctrine." Seeking to encircle hostile Arab nations, Israel trained Ugandan military officers and used Ugandan territory as a staging ground to arm insurgent forces in Sudan. When President Milton Obote attempted a mild nationalist pivot ("Move to the Left") that threatened British and Israeli interests, the 1971 military coup that brought Idi Amin to power was executed with explicit British and Israeli backing.

While Amin later broke with Tel Aviv over weapon deliveries, the rise of Museveni in 1986 restored and expanded this axis. Over the past four decades, Israel has supplied the Ugandan regime with advanced surveillance technology, intelligence hardware, and military training. This weaponry is not used to defend national sovereignty; it is directed inward to suppress domestic dissent, track journalists, and break labor strikes.

Gen. Muhoozi’s recent pronouncements—including declarations on social media that Uganda would send troops to fight on the side of Israel if Tel Aviv faced defeat, and bragging that a single Ugandan brigade could "capture Tehran in two weeks"—expose the psychological degradation of this relationship. The ruling elite does not merely cooperate with the imperial architecture; it aggressively competes to demonstrate its subservience.

The Human Cost

While the Museveni regime pours millions into international posturing and military parades, the domestic social order suffers catastrophic decay. The "stability" praised by Western diplomats is built upon systemic violence and economic inequality.

In northern Uganda, under the pretext of fighting Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), the regime forced nearly two million Acholi people—over 90% of the regional population—into unsanitary concentration camps for years. At the height of the crisis, international medical groups estimated over 1,000 excess deaths per week due to preventable disease, starvation, and military neglect. Washington provided diplomatic cover and military hardware throughout this campaign, viewing the pacification of northern Uganda as a small price to pay for a reliable regional gendarme.

Famine in Karamoja

In eastern regions like Karamoja, severe drought combined with sudden cuts to USAID and World Food Programme funding has driven widespread starvation. Having destroyed traditional agro-pastoral economies and rendered the country dependent on Western aid agencies, the comprador state stands idle when foreign capital pivots away, leaving over 1.5 million Ugandans facing acute hunger while the state budget funds military hardware and monument unveilings.

Corporate Plunder and EACOP

Along the route of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP)—a project led by French transnational giant TotalEnergies and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC)—state security forces act as private guards for foreign corporations. Farmers resisting land grabs, activists protesting environmental destruction, and youth demanding fair compensation face brutal beatings, raids on civil society offices, and arbitrary detentions.

The Trap of Bourgeois Opposition

The crisis in Uganda cannot be solved by simply swapping the manager of the client state.

Mainstream bourgeois opposition figures like Bobi Wine and his National Unity Platform (NUP) present no fundamental challenge to imperialism. Following election cycles marked by state repression, Wine’s strategy has relied almost entirely on lobbying Washington elites, meeting with hawkish US Senators, and pleading for Western sanctions.

Wine’s economic platform focuses on attracting foreign direct investment, creating tax-free special economic zones for Western corporations, and maintaining Uganda’s alliance with the US security apparatus. This is not anti-imperialism; it is a request to manage the colonial contract with better manners.

The Path to Real Liberation

The monument to Yoni Netanyahu at Entebbe stands as a permanent reminder of the Ugandan regime's role as a regional client state. True liberation for the Ugandan working class and peasantry cannot be achieved under a comprador leadership that trades national dignity, human life, and territorial sovereignty for imperialist patronage.

Real liberation requires:

1. Dismantling the Proxy Apparatus: Ending all mercenary exports, third-country deportation agreements, and military deployments acting on behalf of Western capital.

2. Rejecting Zionist Ties: Cutting off military, intelligence, and diplomatic cooperation with the Israeli security state.

3. Reclaiming National Resources: Reversing land grabs, halting corporate exploitation like EACOP, and building a planned economy structured around human needs rather than foreign extraction.

Until the working people of Uganda break both the comprador military dictatorship at home and the imperialist chain that holds it in place, the statue at Entebbe will remain a symbol of a state that turned its back on its own people to build monuments to its oppressors.