Nairobi — The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed," warned Steve Biko, a legend of the South African anti-apartheid struggle.

He spoke during the widespread African student protests against the then Boer-imposed education system, which produced a form of anti-apartheid agitation spearheaded by his (Biko's) Black Consciousness Movement.

In Uganda, despite a prevalence of religious schools, the governance continues to suffer from high levels of distinctly unchristian conduct in public affairs.

And despite decades of state intervention in the education system, the country seems to have failed to inculcate basic civic values among its leaders.

Who then, is the custodian of the African mind in Uganda, and what does their custodianship lead to?

The first owners of the formal education system are the original mission organisations that designed and built the schools.

Out of roughly 8,000 secondary schools, some 3,000 are owned by the Ugandan Anglican church, hundreds others by the Catholic church and the rest fall in the hands of the newly formed private sector.

Mission education was marked by its anti-African tone and the imposition of new behavioural codes.

In the politically correct language of our times, these schools are termed as being Anglican and Catholic "founded", implying that ownership has moved to another entity -- the government of post-colonial Uganda.

This new "owner" did not make any fundamental reforms to the system it had forcibly inherited.

After a few actions such as "grants-in-aid", where some new buildings were erected at the schools and the teaching staff expanded on the government payroll, life settled down.

The irony is that despite the changes, Uganda's elite seem not to have become better people for all this mission-tinged education experience.

With the exception of Idi Amin, all the heads of state were products of Anglican schools.

In an internal 2008 document, the permanent secretary at the Education Ministry decried the poor standards of the Universal Primary Education programme which resulted in "no effective teaching and learning taking place".

This was in his preamble to an Action Plan document aimed at addressing the failure.

However, just as there was no indication as to how long these lamentable conditions had existed prior to his acknowledgement, there is also no available information as to how successful these corrective measures have been.

Given that UPE was and is the flagship programme of the ruling NRM party, and a major selling point in previous elections, this situation must be a cause of worry in the run-up to the coming election, now just over a year away.

However, the more important question is the impact that this failure by one of the owners of the education system will have on future generations.

The other owners -- the mission churches had long opposed the idea of UPE products being compulsorily admitted into some of their more elite establishments -- still held in government embrace -- under the newer Universal Secondary Education programme.

Their argument, dismissed as elitist at the time, but now verified by the PS, was that the UPE students were substandard.

Uganda will not benefit from an education system run by either the anti-African missionary system, or the dysfunctional post-independence governments' "jua kali" arrangements.

The beneficiaries of direct state intervention have been consuming a completely fake product.

As for the mission-school products, the results -- observable over a longer time -- have been the worst record of public administration in the region and beyond.

Despite all those minds (post-independence heads of state) passing through the hands of moral based teachers, Uganda remains a world leader in the fields of political mendacity and crude venality.

Lately, the country has been treated to the proceedings of the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee grilling very senior public servants about the finances of the 2005 Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference in Kampala.

One fascinating moment showed the well-educated PS of the Foreign Affairs Ministry attempting to explain his authorisation of $1 million payment to a privately owned hotel for the purpose of building some extra 200 rooms just two days before the date of the conference!

At the height of its rights violations, the chieftaincy of Military Intelligence was headed by a high-ranking army officer who apart from being a fully qualified lawyer, also held a masters' degree in Human Rights Law.

Uganda's post-colonial period has been marked by student unrest.

Many a now-respectable adult has stories of riots and expulsions that they would prefer to keep hidden from their offspring.

Nevertheless, the education system remains a captive of forces that would have Biko scratching his head in amazement.

Therefore, beyond this choice between mis-education and no education, the fundamental question remains: Who should be the custodian of the education system in an African country, and what should be its foundations?

The historian Basil Davidson ended his four-decades writing on Africa with The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the curse of the nation-state, which he described as his "conclusions of a lifetime." Based on his own hands-on experience, he describes European efforts in Africa as "an obstacle thrust across every reasonable avenue of African progress".

An early positive attempt at correcting this was the 1932 establishment of Aggrey Memorial School by one Dr Ernest Kalibbala, alumnus of the legendary all-black autonomous African-American Tuskegee University (founded in 1881).

He was later joined by a group of African teachers at King's College Budo, who, like him, balked at the anti-African colonial education policies.

More recently, Buganda has seen the revival of the traditional "bisaakate" camp retreats for adolescents, organised by the Nabagereka (First Lady) of Buganda, which has attracted parents from beyond Buganda's and Uganda's borders -- many not even Baganda -- keen to give their children knowledge of indigenous values.

The modern state has not been sleeping, however.

Earlier this year, ruling party parliamentarians approved the allocation of some $6 million to establish "Patriotism Clubs" in secondary schools.

The cash is to be disbursed through the Office of The President, and not the cash-strapped Education Ministry.

Not even Steve Biko could have foreseen this.