My old friend Betty used to work as a top wildlife official so when she talks about tourism, she is taken seriously.

These days she is talking to the Bakiga of western Uganda, home of the world famous mountain gorillas of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.

And she is telling them that each tourist pays $500 for a permit to view the primates, and that the queue for the permits is several years long.

However, all the money is paid and consumed in Kampala. So what do the Bakiga, “owners’ of the gorillas get, she asks.

“Empty plastic water bottles thrown out of car windows by the tourists,” she answers her own question.

She is the only woman in the race for Uganda’s February presidential polls and spells her name Beti.

The other difference between Beti Olive Kamya and her seven male rivals is that while the rest want to take the job as it is, she wants the entire system of government changed so that power is taken away from the centre to the country’s natural regions — in other words, a federation.

Previously, advocating federalism was equated with pushing the Buganda kingdom agenda, viewed by some as secessionist.

Beti opposes the present unitary system because it cannot deliver equity in our simple society where national leaders still think tribal.

Born to a Kikuyu mother and a Muganda military officer and married to a Munyankole soldier, Beti is “composed” of different tribes, and could claim to be as neutral as can be.

Circumstances have led people to listen to Beti. People from the north of the country are nodding in agreement.

Over the past quarter of a century, the north has suffered immensely from civil war as the rest of the country grew.

They need a separate focus to recover, and if federalism delivers better than unitary government…

Then there is the Bunyoro kingdom in the mid-west, sitting on a basin of oil.

Under the unitary government, the Banyoro will of course not have any say about their oil. Beti has frustrating examples to give in every region where she goes to campaign.

Some of the classic cases of underdevelopment are of countries that are “too big” to run well under simple African governments.

For diplomatic reasons, she can cite only Congo, everyone’s punching bag.

There is every reasons to believe that smaller administrative units of that vast, resource-rich country would be more viable and prosperous if they were self-determining.

But the strangest thing about Uganda is that even the current unitary government has been vigorously promoting federalism, calling it decentralisation.

The district is the federal unit, complete with a periodically elected government and a civil service.

The problem is that the government has over-federated, to the point of it all losing meaning.

We now have 114 federal states in a country of 30 million and the current government is hell bent on creating districts along ethnic lines, thereby federalising even faster than Beti is advocating. It’s all pretty confusing, isn’t it?

Joachim Buwembo is a Knight International fellow for development journalism; [email protected]