Last Sunday, columnist Musaazi Namiti wrote more as an optimistic patriot than the realistic analyst he often is. Whoever wins Uganda’s presidential elections on January 15, 2026, he reasoned, whether incumbent President Museveni or main challenger, the popstar Robert Kyagulanyi, aka Bobi Wine, the losing party should concede, and the winning candidate must be allowed to take power, especially if it is the latter.
Mr Namiti is a thoughtful writer, mostly objective in his analyses, with a knack for taking up controversial topics quite incisively, including hot button identity questions of religiosity, ethnicity and race. But his thoughts on the race for president of Uganda were quite shocking and underwhelming, one would easily think he knows nothing about the realities of today’s Uganda politics. Mr Namiti has illusions about Bobi Wine winning next year’s election; yet it is obvious he will not, and it is not about campaign crowds, popular support or the hunger for change.
While well-meaning and hopeful, it is patently naïve to imagine that the January presidential election will be a free and fair election such that the losing main Opposition candidate (Bobi Wine) must be prepared to concede defeat and move on. There will be no free, fair, and credible presidential election next year, just as nearly all past elections in which candidate Museveni was the ‘winner’ were neither free nor fair. It is not just what happens on polling day, and a lot does happen as to severely stain the outcome, it is also what transpires continuously since the last election.
Uganda’s presidential election is not just rigged on election day, the entire process from the get-go is a sham, heavily skewed for the incumbent and against any Opposition, thus, casting credibility questions on the results. For starters, we do not have a credible and competent election management body that holds all parties and candidates to the same slate of rules and code of conduct. An election in which the umpire is unilaterally appointed by one of the candidates is little more than a ritual, worse, it is a joke. That is not all, though.
There is something even more egregious. The incumbent candidate who is seeking re-election does not believe in competition and being challenged. Mr Museveni’s state of mind is one of a God-ordained ruler, one who should be undisturbed and unbothered by the motions of electoral competition. That is why he has never allowed a serious challenge in his party, instead he is perpetually the ‘ring-fenced’ party chairman and presidential flag-bearer. On the other hand, competing in a general election where opposing candidates run against him, but with a predetermined outcome, is an imposition he dislikes, forced on him initially by external backers.
It is also meant to grant him the bragging rights of a democratically elected president with some veneer of legitimacy. In the main, however, Mr Museveni sees any serious political challenger as someone who, at best, is a nuisance and at worst is engaged in criminal conduct, thus the entire State apparatus, from the coercive arsenal of the State and prosecutorial authority to the fiscal power of government, is brought to bear on the electoral process. To compete against Mr Museveni is to practically run against the entire governmental machinery and the full force of the State of Uganda. When purporting to seek re-election, Mr Museveni is not just a candidate, in fact he does not believe he is one; rather, he is the president, in charge of government and every lever of State power.
Nothing stops him from directing the security forces to unleash violence against his opponents and their supporters. He has an unmatched financial war-chest courtesy of a huge State House budget outlay, complete with classified expenditure, which he uses as he wishes. If the need arises, he may very well prevail over the Governor of the Central Bank and have a run on the Bank of Uganda, a la 2011. There are no legal and institutional guardrails against the incumbent, although he would likely ignore them anyways. No scintilla of limits to the exercise of presidential authority.
As matters stand today, commandeering the State and the use of State power to ‘win’ the election is so glaring that to expect another outcome other than the incumbent as ‘winner’ is to be either blindly optimistic or blatantly disingenuous. There is zero chance under the sun that the current Electoral Commission will announce Bobi Wine as winner of January’s presidential election. If Bobi believes he will be the official winner, he is lying to himself and his supporters, yet to be sure, it is the right thing for him to do by participating in the election, albeit at the risk of legitimising an otherwise sham process.
Whatever the costs of being a candidate, and there are many, including people’s lives, in the broader scheme of things in the struggle for a democratic Uganda, there is value in participating than boycotting the elections altogether. The latter is political suicide.