Insight: The Old Gunpowder Problem
On a Ugandan president's remarks about the moon, and the pattern underneath them.
In November 2025, Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni made international headlines with a striking claim: outer space, he argued, is common property, and no African country currently has a presence there to show for it. Nations with established space programs, he said, hold a structural advantage over those without one — an advantage he described in vivid, unsettling terms, comparing the position of space-absent nations to that of a population watched from above by those with the power to decide its fate.
What's worth sitting with is a smaller phrase, almost thrown away in the middle of the same remarks: the “old gunpowder problem all over again.”
A pattern older than space
Strip away the moon, and the underlying argument isn't really about space at all. It's about what happens whenever a new technology divides the world into those who hold a capability and those who don't. Gunpowder did it once, reordering which kingdoms could project power and which could only absorb it. Museveni's argument is that orbital and lunar presence may be doing something similar now — and that no single African nation, on its own, has the scale to close that gap. His proposed answer wasn't a national space agency. It was deeper regional integration, on the theory that the gap can only be closed collectively.
Whatever one makes of the specific claim about the moon, the structural observation underneath it is worth taking seriously on its own terms: technological capability gaps are not neutral. They are where power actually accumulates, and where it actually gets exercised — often quietly, through who gets to set terms and who has to accept them.
The same asymmetry, at a smaller and more solvable scale
This work runs into that exact pattern constantly, just rarely at the scale of orbital rockets.
A government negotiating a mining concession without its own transparent licensing and revenue-tracking system is watching that negotiation from roughly the same position Museveni describes: present in the room, but dependent on someone else's account of what's actually happening. A ministry running its health data across a dozen donor-owned, disease-specific dashboards instead of one system it actually controls is living a smaller version of the same asymmetry — unable to see its own epidemic, its own budget, or its own performance with the same clarity the people funding it can.
The gunpowder problem, in other words, was never really about weapons. It is about who owns the infrastructure that determines what is knowable — and therefore what is negotiable. Museveni's proposed answer, for space, was regional scale and political integration, a genuinely long horizon. The same instinct, aimed at something achievable now rather than decades out, is exactly what building an owned licensing dashboard or an integrated health information system actually is: not a rocket program, but the same underlying move — holding the instrument that produces the numbers, instead of waiting to be told what they say.
The moon can wait for the regional integration Museveni is calling for. The dashboard, the ledger, the licensing system — the closer, smaller version of the same problem — does not have to.
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