Those familiar with my writings in the Monitor and my utterings on social media will know that I place great importance on the data generated by the American technology giant Google.
Google’s user data – based on billions of monthly searches, YouTube views, Google Play app store downloads, Google Maps references, Chrome browser cookies, and Android mobile operating system data – is the most comprehensive and most accurate picture of the world today.
For practically any topic, one gets a snapshot of the world’s tastes, interests, habits, and thoughts. Since we are now in the 2026 General Election season, I am naturally turning to Google’s tracking data to get a feel of the national mood and the prospects of the various presidential candidates and political parties.
One particular trend stands out – the National Unity Platform (NUP) appears to be gaining traction across Uganda.
NUP was founded in Kampala around 2017, at the fringes of the city economy and revolving around the local Afrobeat music scene, originally the populist, grassroots movement dubbed People Power.
In 2020, as NUP emerged from its embryonic form in the People Power movement and became a mainstream political party, it was perceived as a Ganda nationalist party, with all the political baggage that, historically, comes with all things Buganda.
When it embraced defecting members of the Democratic Party (DP), NUP changed from an image of a group of inner-city, marijuana-smoking youth into a kind of neo-Uganda Young Democrats, the student arm of the DP.
Over the last few years, barely noticed, NUP has evolved once more. NUP’s roots in the People Power movement led to perceptions of it as Buganda-focused, tied to Uganda’s historical ethnic dynamics.
Although it was founded in Buganda, NUP has three powerful westerners at the helm: Barbie Kyagulanyi, wife of party president Robert Kyagulanyi, alias Bobi Wine; David Lewis Rubongoya, party secretary general; and Benjamin Katana, party national treasurer.
Ms Kyagulanyi, who holds no formal position, is very influential and active in party events. Rubongoya is the heart of the party, an all-round, indefatigable activist and spearhead of the party’s endless legal battles with the NRM State and visits to prisons to check on NUP activists in jail.
Katana, quiet and low-key, manages the party’s finances. Viewers of NTV, this newspaper’s sister media house, might recall a bitter Katana live on NTV from Namboole stadium in January 2021, denouncing the Electoral Commission’s announcement of NRM candidate Yoweri Museveni as the winner.
In Uganda, where the NRM State has managed to infiltrate and compromise almost every public institution, these three westerners in prominent positions in NUP have inevitably attracted quiet whispers about their possibly being moles of the State.
But they also inadvertently helped NUP with a nagging problem – its image as a Ganda entity, a latter-day Kabaka Yekka party. With a large youth majority demographic and the sheer fatigue of 40 years of the same government, many in western Uganda hunger for change, but also are wary of being led by a Baganda-dominated government.
As time has gone by, over the past five years, much of the country has overcome the initial visual shock of People Power/NUP as an outfit of the riff-raff, school dropouts of inner-city Kampala.
Traditional besuited politicians such as Mathias Mpuuga and Joel Ssenyonyi, as NUP leaders of the Opposition, and other senior NUP figures such as Medard Sseggona have helped portray NUP as a conventional, sensible party.
Many older, more traditional, old-school people hesitated about supporting NUP in its earlier People Power image of unwashed school dropouts. Given the weak standing of the Muslim-founded party, Justice Forum (nicknamed Jeema), NUP provided a refuge for many Muslims who felt hounded by the NRM State, particularly in the way Muslims tend to be the vast majority of those arrested in the wake of terrorist incidents – or purported terrorist incidents.
Bantu-speaking eastern Uganda areas like Bugisu and Busoga were natural cultural extensions of NUP’s support. What was missing was support for NUP in western Uganda.
Recent reports show NUP fielding candidates in areas like Rubirizi and Ibanda, with their new manifesto aiming for a broader nationwide appeal.
What is the result of all this? Why, NUP as it is in 2025, is an interesting inversion of the 1981 National Resistance Army (NRA)-Buganda alliance that created the NRM? In February 1981, a band of mostly Banyankole and Banyarwanda Tutsi mutineers in the new national army, the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA), launched a guerrilla war led by Yoweri Museveni.
Being ever the politically minded, Museveni knew that his rebel group, the Popular Resistance Army (PRA), could only gain broad support if it could find a way of winning Buganda support, preferably in some form of alliance.
Talks between PRA and the Uganda Freedom Fighters (UFF) of former president Yusufu Lule led to their merger in June 1981 to create the National Resistance Movement (NRM) and its military wing, the NRA.
The most powerful alliance since 1962 was between Baganda and westerners, with affiliated Rwandan refugees. That’s what created the NRA-NRM and, arguably, explains the NRM’s longevity in power these 40 years.
Baganda elite like Lule, another former president Godfrey Binaisa; John Nagenda, Israel Mayengo, and many others in 1981 brought respectability to the westerner NRA perceived at the time as a “riff-raff” group. Now, in NUP, key westerners at the party headquarters bring a formality and respectability to the NUP “riff-raff”.
Westerners at the helm of NUP headquarters, combined with Baganda leaders like Bobi Wine, Ssenyonyi, and many others, is a powerful combination.
It is reminiscent of the Buganda-western Uganda alliance that was the NRA-NRM of 1981. In the southern half of Uganda, there is this mostly youthful, Luganda-as-lingua-franca, Bantu ethnic mass, represented by NUP.
In a nutshell, the NUP of 2025 is a mirror image of the NRM of 1985, forty years ago.
Colloquial Luganda, rather than formal, dictionary Luganda, is the lingua franca of Uganda and de facto national language. This youthful, Luganda-speaking, Bantu, NUP-leaning demographic in the southern half of Uganda (Buganda, Bugisu, Busoga, parts of western Uganda), is the most important political and social fact in Uganda today. It explains why the NRM state is so nervous about Bobi Wine rallies.
As the Kira MP Ibrahim Ssemujju Nganda remarked on a local radio station last week, nothing unnerves President Museveni like the sight of large crowds turning up at Opposition rallies.
NRM propaganda has convinced Ugandans that the NRM is everywhere, and efforts to challenge them both electorally and militarily are futile. Isolated in their personal frustration and struggle, many are pleasantly surprised to discover at campaign rallies that thousands of other, ordinary Ugandans share their sentiments.
Watch for police efforts to be stepped up even more when Bobi Wine takes his campaign to western Uganda, and his wife Barbara starts addressing crowds in Runyankole or Kinyarwanda – the NRM’s worst nightmare that NUP is no longer a Ganda party, but is evolving into a replica of the NRA-Buganda alliance.