The Measured Prophet · Uganda · Society

You Cannot Send Someone to Fetch Water

The medical interns debate is not really about medicine. It is about whether Uganda is willing to back up what it has been saying to young people for the last twenty years.

Segawa Elvis William June 2026

Doctors reviewing patient charts. The senior doctors are rarely seen on the ward. It is the interns who are everywhere — as Archbishop Kaziimba put it, "doing the donkey work."

Yesterday, after Mass, I found myself reading a Daily Monitor article reporting remarks by Archbishop Stephen Kaziimba Mugalu on the issue of medical interns and their allowances. And I felt I could not remain silent. Not because I am a doctor. Not because I am directly affected. But because this conversation is bigger than medicine.

The Archbishop's question was simple: how does a government find Shs158 billion for MPs' vehicles while arguing that approximately Shs28 billion for medical interns' allowances is unaffordable? Whether you agree with that comparison or not, the question touches something real. It is a question about priorities. And priorities tell you everything about what a country actually believes, as opposed to what it says it believes.

What I Saw at the Hospital

I went to hospital recently because I was having difficulty hearing. And while I sat there waiting, I started paying attention to the movement around me.

There was a young woman moving between the waiting area and the consultation rooms, carrying files, updating records, following up on patients who had been waiting too long. She looked like she was maybe 24. She had been on her feet since before I arrived and showed no sign of stopping. There was a young man at the nurses' station taking instructions from a senior doctor, writing things down quickly, then disappearing through a set of double doors to go act on whatever he had just been told. There were others like them all over that ward — people in their mid-twenties, holding the whole place together with a focused, quiet energy that the hospital would have struggled to function without.

Many of them were interns.

And I sat there thinking: if these people walked out tomorrow, this hospital would feel it by lunchtime. They are not observers. They are not here to watch. They are doing the work. The question that kept coming back to me, sitting in that plastic chair, was this: if someone is doing real work, why is it so complicated to pay them for it?

The Contradiction We Built

Uganda has spent years telling young people that science is the future. The President has said it consistently. Government policy has reflected it. Science teachers received significant salary enhancements. STEM programmes were pushed aggressively in schools. Parents steered their children away from arts toward medicine, engineering, and the sciences, because that is what they were told the country needed.

Young people listened. They enrolled in medical school. They studied pharmacy and engineering and computer science. They survived on chapati and borrowed money and the belief that the sacrifice would eventually make sense. They did exactly what they were asked to do.

Now many of them have graduated. They have reached the point where they are supposed to enter the workforce. And what they are finding is a labour market struggling to absorb them, internship programmes that offer work without compensation, and a government that seems uncertain about what to do with the very people it spent years encouraging to train.

You cannot spend twenty years telling young people that science is the future and then appear unprepared when those young scientists finally show up.

This is not a new problem Medical interns in Uganda have been raising concerns about delayed deployment, delayed allowances, and general uncertainty around their welfare for years. This is not a crisis that arrived suddenly. It keeps coming back because it has never been fully resolved. Each time it surfaces it is treated as an emergency when it is actually a symptom of something older and more structural.

And It Is Not Just Medicine

A young doctor writing notes. Not for themselves. For the patient waiting on the other side of that door. This is what the Shs1 million monthly allowance is supposed to cover.

This is the part of the conversation that does not get said enough. The intern who is not being fairly compensated is not always wearing scrubs. It is the accounting student spending three months at a firm doing real reconciliations, surviving on transport money from parents who can barely afford it. It is the law student. The statistics student. The education graduate deployed to a school with no support structure and no clear path forward.

And this is not a science-versus-arts argument either. Uganda needs doctors, but it also needs teachers, economists, journalists, and public administrators. A country develops when all forms of knowledge are taken seriously. The problem is not that we trained too many people in the wrong fields. The problem is that we have not built an economy capable of actually using what those people have to offer.

Omwana gw'otuma okukima amazzi tomugamba nti tasitudde ensuwa. You cannot send someone to fetch water and then pretend they carried nothing.

If an intern is adding value, that contribution deserves recognition. Internship is for learning, yes. But learning and exploitation are not the same thing. A system that depends on young people's labour while refusing to acknowledge it eventually stops being a training programme and starts being something else entirely.

What This Is Really About

My mother and my brother are in the medical field. I grew up hearing these conversations — the long shifts, the exhaustion, the uncertainty around deployment, the gap between what young doctors are expected to give and what the system gives back. So this is not abstract to me. It has a face. Several faces.

But even setting that aside, this debate matters because of what it says about dignity. About whether we mean what we say when we talk about young people being the future. We say it in speeches. Churches say it in sermons. Schools repeat it in assemblies. But there comes a point where every generation stops listening to what is being said and starts paying attention to what is being done.

Compensating interns fairly is not charity. It is consistency. It is a country deciding to back its words with something that actually costs it something. Because a country that asks its youth to carry the future should at least help them carry the present.

Amen. And selah.

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P.S. — To every intern reading this, in whatever field: what you are doing is real work. The hours are real. The exhaustion is real. The contribution is real. It should be treated that way, and one day it will be, because conversations like this one are the kind that eventually move things. Keep going.

IMAGE CREDITS: Both photos via Pexels, free to use under the Pexels License.