Let me rub it in one more time. The 2026 election is going to setback Uganda by Shs838 billion. It shall buy us all the theatrics at nomination, the huge rallies, the promises and pronouncements, demonstrating ‘a dispensation that sticks to the tenets of democracy.’ We might also have abductions, imprisonment, and death.
After all that, Uganda’s current president, Gen Yoweri Museveni, who has been in power for 40 years, is going to be announced the winner.
Barring ‘an act of God,’ he will go on for as long as he wishes. In parliament, you will have a trend similar to the one we have witnessed for the last 30 or so years.
About 70 percent of the incumbent MPs will find themselves out of job. Uganda shall swear in a fresh lot with pomp and magisterial ceremony.
The majority of those promising to abide by the Constitution will, by a country mile, come from the dominant ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) party or be independents affiliated to it. That alone will make the Opposition MPs hapless and helpless bridesmaids for the ruling NRM party.
For most parts, they will stage walkouts to demonstrate their disagreement with laws and motions passed by the ruling NRM. Many of these will be the outcome of meetings from the NRM caucus at State House with the President in charge.
At times, they will receive funds (It can go up to Shs100 million per MP) to help them consult their constituents. Once in a while, there might be physical fights with flying chairs and street demonstrations by Opposition MPs to ‘prove’ that they are fighting for democracy. But first, they will begin by electing a Speaker, of course, from the NRM.
After this, they will proceed to the most important function: determining their remuneration. It will kick off with the mandatory facilitation of Shs200 million for a vehicle befitting their status. Here we are talking about Shs100 billion in total. One or two will walk out, but then keep the money credited to their accounts.
Many will proceed to buy a second-hand Japanese ambulance and brand it with their portraits and the words donated by your loving MP 2026-2031, thus turning it into a moving billboard. They will then proceed to share out the lucrative positions of Parliamentary Commissioners and heads of committees.
For the next five years, we shall hear endless arguments about the need to curb Uganda’s bloated, rubberstamp parliament that is a burden to the taxpayer. On the lower level, the cities, municipalities, and local councils will also carry out similar rituals after ‘solomonly’ swearing in.
They will then proceed to fight over sitting allowances with threats not to sit in council if they are not paid. As of 2021, Uganda had about 2,775,492 elected officers, meaning that for every 16 Ugandans, there was an elected leader to feed off the taxpayer.
In most local governments, the lion’s share of the budgets goes towards salaries and wages, plus other attendant expenses to maintain the human resources. Meanwhile, the state of the roads and bridges will go into further disrepair with natural disasters exacerbating the predicament.
Ironically, the hospitals to which MPs ferry patients in branded ambulances will have inadequate medicine, staff, and equipment. The schools too will suffer a similar fate, Characterised by dilapidated or under the tree shade classrooms, absent or no teachers, inadequate learning materials, and high drop-out and failure rates.
The number of pupils who are functionally illiterate, the ones who complete P7 but can’t read, write and can’t solve P3 mathematical problems will remain high. At the higher level, students will strike under the weight of tuition fees that their parents find difficult to afford.
The news will be dominated by unchecked corruption and impunity. By struggles in the business sector with high taxes and low sales. An agricultural sector affected by climate change and all manner of challenges. Yes, democracy is expensive no doubt, but is it an act of folly to do the same thing over and over again expecting different of better results.
The next five years will be full of grumbling about poor service delivery. The powers that be will respond with more administrative units ‘to bring services nearer to the people’ and other selective programmes that hand out cash to an insignificant number of individuals.
Uganda, with its mounting debt, will continue borrowing and paying interest to bilateral and multilateral agencies to run the country, including for recurrent expenditure like salaries and wages. This means that there will be little money and effort towards meaningful investment into production. That we shall leave to the ‘foreign investors’ as ours is mostly about consumption.
Interestingly, some of the countries that are funding Uganda do not have the same level of obsession or compliance with ‘western democracy’ like we do. Take China, for instance. Most of the effort is geared towards massive production, creation of gainful employment, welfare, and economic growth.
The goal is eventual global domination which has been achieved. In the last 30 years (1995 – 2025), China has shot up to becoming the world’s second largest economy, past democratic Britain, France, Germany, Japan etc. It has pushed more people out of extreme poverty than the entire African population.
Yet African countries have periodic elections (funded by mostly the West) in line with the dictates of democracy. ‘Undemocratic China’ (by Western definition) is now one of the major funders of development projects in extremely poor and highly indebted African democracies. Unlike Africa and Uganda in particular, in China, the focus is the welfare of its people.
It is about bringing bread to the table of people and ensuring that they are in well-housed, employed, their children go to school, and all are in good health. Here we are keeping up appearances as a ‘democratic state,’ which in effect is empowering a cabal to run the affairs of state in perpetuity- and steal from it. This great investment affects production, infrastructural growth and social development.
The irony is that this creates armies of dissatisfied young people who have become a threat to the state and the NRM government. So, the latter has to invest huge sums in coercive instruments and use undemocratic measures like abduction, torture, and killing to secure itself in power. All this turns the whole project of democracy into a mockery.