African cities are currently experiencing some of the highest population growth rates in the world. Accompanying this growth is constant and continuing pressure on national and local governments to develop political and institutional structures that respond to the multiple demands this demographic change provokes in relation to service delivery, economic development and social wellbeing. In response to these challenges, national governments are reviewing the political and administrative structures of their capital cities, sometimes recentralizing authority. This article examines the reforms to Kampala, capital city of Uganda. The article explains how the national government gradually created the legal conditions necessary to take over the capital city directly, and the political rhetoric and conflict that ensued. We argue that while Kampala had deep internal problems and fared poorly in service delivery, matters were exacerbated by the national government's historical indifference to the city. Moreover, past service delivery failures offered an easy rationale for recentralizing authority. We demonstrate that this recentralization was a well-planned effort by the central government to regain political control of the capital city. This article illustrates how the national government's recentralization of authority in Kampala is a significant departure from its longstanding policy of democratic decentralization.

Uganda has been successful in broadening access to education. However, this achievement has been undermined by low literacy and numeracy levels and high drop-out rates. A political settlement perspective sheds light on the politics of education reforms. We find that there are weak political drives to implement qualityenhancing policies, first, because the formal and informal governance arrangements allow for a system of decentralised rent management that serves to appease lower level factions. Secondly, the NRM government is caught in the rhetoric of allowing free education in an appeal to rural constituencies. Finally, there is relatively weak pressure to push through education quality-enhancing reforms, be it from civil society in general, powerful interest groups, or parliament. At the local level, we find that how a school is situated within local elite networks is important in explaining local-level variance in the quality of government primary school performance.

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Although Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Movement (NRM) has dominated Uganda's political scene for over three decades, the capital Kampala refuses to submit to the NRM's grip. As opposition activism in the city has become increasingly explosive, the ruling elite has developed a widening range of strategies to try and win urban support and constrain opposition. In this paper, we subject the NRM's strategies over the decade 2010-2020 to close scrutiny. We explore elite strategies pursued both from the 'top down', through legal and administrative manoeuvres and a ramping up of violent coercion, and from the 'bottom up', through attempts to build support among urban youth and infiltrate organisations in the urban informal transport sector. Although this evolving suite of strategies and tactics has met with some success in specific places and times, opposition has constantly resurfaced. Overall, efforts to entrench political dominance of the capital have repeatedly failed; yet challenges to the regime's dominance have also been unable to weaken it in any sustained way. We examine why each strategy for dominance has produced limited gains, arguing that together these strategies reproduced a situation of intensely contested control, in which no single group or elite can completely dominate the city.