Nations Are Built by Migrants – So Why Turn on Our Own Muganga?

By Immanuel Ben Misagga

Every great nation on earth was built by people who refused to let borders define their destiny. They came broke, scared, hungry, and unwelcome. And they changed the world.

America wasn’t built by America.  

It was built by Irish mothers fleeing famine with children on their backs. By Italians who worked 18 hours in freezing factories so their sons could go to school. By Chinese hands laying railroads, by Jewish minds inventing industries, by African backs breaking under chains and still rising to lead.  

Elon Musk is South African-born. Albert Einstein was a German refugee. Andrew Carnegie came with nothing from Scotland and built steel that built a nation.  They were called “foreigners” yesterday. Today, they are called “America.”

Britain didn’t rise on British blood alone.  

Its banks were shaped by Jewish and Italian immigrants who knew numbers better than kings. Its NHS survived because Caribbean nurses and Indian doctors left their homes and came to save lives in a war-torn land. The sound of London today – the music, the food, the hustle – is Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani, Nigerian.  Migration didn’t break Britain. It made Britain global.

France is France because of its migrants.

Algerians rebuilt Marseille after the war. Senegalese and Moroccans built Paris brick by brick. Zidane, Mbappé, Piaf – names the world cheers, all rooted in migration.  

France didn’t ask “are you French enough?” It asked “can you make France greater?” And they did.

Brazil is a symphony of migrants.  

Portuguese, Italians, Germans, Japanese, Lebanese, and millions of Africans forced and free. Without them, there is no São Paulo, no Carnival, no samba, no football that makes the world stand up.  

Brazil said yes to the world, and the world made Brazil unstoppable. Migrants don’t dilute nations. They electrify them. 

They bring the hunger that comfort kills. They bring the ideas that locals are too tired to chase. They bring the courage to start over when everyone else has given up.

So why the fuss on Dr. Muganga? 

The man has brains. Vision. Results. He has built and delivered where many with “pure” local names have failed and disappeared.  

But suddenly, because of where his grandfather was born, people are dragging the Rwandan tribe into the mud. As if a name erases a man’s contribution. As if history can be rewritten with tribal gossip.

Let’s speak truth: Muganga is a Kiganda name.  

But we name our children Mustafa, John, Abigail, Mohammed, and nobody blinks. Who is more of a migrant then?   For 200 years we have mixed, married, traded, and migrated across these hills and valleys. Banyarwanda, Baganda, Banyankole, Bakiga – we are one people with different colonial lines drawn through our grandparents’ gardens.  

The Rwandan card being played today is not about truth. It’s about fear.   It’s a cheap weapon used by small men who cannot build, so they tear down. Witless chaps with no legacy of their own, trying to create confusion around the very ancestors who fed, married, and fought beside each other. Muzei Kananura and his generation never divided Rwandese from Ugandans.

They saw family, not foreigner. They built trade routes, schools, churches, and communities together. They understood that our yoke is blood-deep, older than colonial borders and stronger than political noise.  To break that now is to spit on our ancestors. To betray the very history that made us who we are.

Leave Dr. Muganga alone. Leave the Rwandan tribe alone. 

We love Rwanda. We are yoked to Rwanda.   Blood ties us. Trade ties us. Language ties us. Struggle ties us.   Long before politics drew lines on maps, our grandmothers were marrying across these borders, our grandfathers were herding cattle together, our ancestors were burying each other in the same soil.   To attack one is to attack the other. To divide Rwanda from Uganda is to cut your own arm and call it strategy.

Nations that thrive don’t ask “where are you from?”   They ask “what can you build here? Who can you become here?” If America, Britain, France, and Brazil had chased out every migrant with brains, they would still be small, poor, and irrelevant today.   They said yes to the world, and the world made them great.

Uganda will not make the mistake of fear.  

We don’t fear migrants. We become stronger because of them.  

Because at the end of the day, a nation is not built by those who ask where you come from.  

It’s built by those who are brave enough to say: “Come. Build with us. Let’s make history together.”

And that is who we are. That is who we have always been.

MMJ Immanuel Ben Misagga

Emeritus President Villa and Nyamityobora FC