In late 2005, I packed my post-graduate life, which barely fit in a suitcase, left the grey and soggy gloom of London and returned to Uganda during what felt like a seismic moment; the first-ever multiparty general election.
There’d been parties and elections in 1961, 1962 and 1980, but never a general election in which voters chose their political parties’ presidential candidates. A new Constitution in 1995 had the hallmarks of a fresh start, as did general elections in 1996 and 2001, despite those being held under the no-party or ‘Movement’ system.
We weren’t naive; the 2001 elections had been marred by violence and were followed by dark gathering clouds of what felt like imminent return to war. Kizza Besigye’s escape to exile and attempts by a few mavericks to form a new rebel group, the People’s Redemption Army, added to the tension.
But there was hope. The LRA war in northern Uganda had slowed down to smouldering embers. Despite the kerfuffle over the lifting of the presidential term limits from the Constitution, the prospect of free competition among political parties carried a sense of relief. At least it was presented that way, as a political pressure valve for those in and outside the Movement unhappy with the no-party rule. “Mubaleke bagende” (let them go) was the sentiment.
President Museveni’s conciliatory tone at the funeral of former President Milton Obote in October 2005 hinted at the burying of old and contemporary hatchets. Even Besigye had returned from exile to lead his new political grouping.
But there were pesky “check engine” lights on the political dashboard, and they refused to go away. Soon after his return, Besigye was arrested on treason and rape charges. On the day after my own return, armed commandos raided the High Court to block him and his co-accused from being released on bail.
Still, it felt like teething pains. Judges strongly and bravely remonstrated against the raid on the court premises. The Electoral Commission defied legal advice from the Attorney General and nominated Besigye to run despite still being in detention.
Once the election was held and parties competed without the sky falling, the country could begin to dial down the tension around political contestation, so the logic went.
Yet the election was bloody, and the culture of using violence to resolve political differences continued, including with the 2009 Kayunga Riots, and the clamping down on the walk-to-work protests that followed the 2011 election.
If the return to multiparty politics had been one important step forward, the tightening of public space (including, literally and metaphorically, the fencing off of the Constitutional Square in the capital, Kampala), the reintroduction of stringent legislation and regulations that hamstrung political mobilisation, the rolling out of mass surveillance infrastructure and the clamping down on independent media were several giant leaps backward.
Over the past few months, I have been reviewing my notes, preparing for new challenges and reflecting on whether it was all worth it. One nagging question has been whether we embraced political pluralism too soon or just without the right guardrails.
It was while reflecting on the just-concluded general election, driving through the heart of the opposition in central Uganda, past the tell-tale signs of fires that were lit in middle of roads, by protestors who seem to have vanished in the darkness of anger and the fog of confusion, that the broad outline of an answer began to form, by way of comparison.
In 2005, the main opposition candidate returned from exile and campaigned in jail. In 2026 he did not run or vote, because he had been in jail for more than a year, waiting for trial. The main opposition candidate in this last election, Bobi Wine, remains on the run and could possibly end up in exile. The political parties formed in the new dispensation have been eaten from within. The ruling party remains as meshed to the state as it was under the ‘no party’ system.
It is hard to argue against the view that the return of multiparty politics was merely a short-term manoeuvre to facilitate the removal of presidential term limits. The absence of political will to allow free competition, coupled by the removal of legal and institutional guardrails to centralised power, means that in real terms the Uganda of 2026 has regressed politically, not to 2005 but to 1995.
The challenge for the new entrants in Uganda’s political ring therefore isn’t merely how to compete on an uneven surface; it is how to rewrite the rules by generating a new elite consensus and a new constitutional order. Us as us, we did our best, but it wasn’t good enough.