Kampala’s youthful Urban TV has been running a curiously named series — All You Need is 30 years — featuring short biographies of outstanding personalities who died in their thirties after making their mark. They have featured people like Patrice Lumumba, Bob Marley, Jesus Christ, Steve Biko and Thomas Sankara.

The series started at around the same time President Yoweri Museveni made a major reshuffle of his Cabinet, bringing in almost a dozen new and old faces with an age difference of up to 50 years. The new Minister for Regional Affairs Philemon Mateke is about 80 years old while his colleague, Minister for Youth Affairs Evelyn Anite, is barely 30 years old.

After successfully passing the vetting by parliament’s Appointments Committee, Mateke boasted that he is younger than Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe, and will have no problem picking up the modern technological skills required of an MP, now that he is an ex-officio member of the legislature.

These days, for instance, every MP is issued with an iPad to minimise the use of paper. Someone joked that a new iPad version called Octo-Pad should be designed for use by octogenarian ministers as we have several of these in the August House.

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These days, poking fun at ageing officials is getting rather too common in Uganda’s media, which now predictably and unfailingly focuses on dozing ministers on national Budget Day.

I don’t know why they don’t read the boring budget in the morning when everybody is still fresh, and continue to bombard tired old men and women with statistics of the gross national product after they have had a heavy lunch on a hot afternoon. But even as these elderly leaders doze, younger Ugandans don’t seem to have woken up to the opportunity.

You do not see any Lumumba, Sankara or Marley on the horizon. All that Uganda’s youth leaders seem to be good at is heckling and acting as mouthpieces for older politicians.

So, the setting of the agenda for Uganda’s future is still very much in the hands of octogenarians, septuagenarians and a few “young” men in their sixties. I don’t know why today’s youth prefer to remain appendages of old fellows.

Museveni himself was a teenager when he started his revolutionary quest to transform Uganda, beginning with a crusade to help peasants and pastoralists in western Uganda acquire land titles and start engaging in settled rather than nomadic agriculture.

In his twenties, he picked up the gun and started fighting dictatorship. In his thirties, he launched the major five-year bush war with a score of other colleagues, mostly university graduates in their twenties and became president as he turned forty.

But something has happened in the past twenty-something years and it is not good. Many of our youth finish university and immediately embark on a career of begging.

They start by begging for money to throw a graduation party. At the party, every speaker tells them that there are no jobs and they should try and create their own work, so they proceed to beg everybody they know to find a job for them and continue to beg somebody to buy them a smartphone, which they will use to beg somebody to buy them lunch…

The smart ones then look for big politicians and beg them to allow them to carry their briefcases for them.

I call these ones “smart” because at least they create their own job, even if it is about begging. After some decades, they will be seen dozing in parliament after having arrived into Cabinet jobs.