When President Yoweri Museveni unveiled his new Cabinet this week, political analysts and politicians alike immediately began dissecting the list. Public attention quickly shifted not only to the surprise promotions and high-profile casualties dropped from the front bench, but also to a significant group that remained entirely untouched: the leadership of the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) Secretariat.
In a political season where many within the ruling party had expected sweeping changes at the Kyadondo Road-based secretariat, the party chairman instead chose absolute continuity. For many seasoned observers of Uganda’s political landscape, the decision was both deliberate and highly tactical.
While several senior party figures at the secretariat had long been tipped for juicy ministerial appointments following the NRM’s commanding performance in the 2026 General Election, insiders say the President was highly reluctant to dismantle a mobilisation machine that is now widely credited for engineering one of the biggest electoral rebounds in the Movement’s recent history.
The Scale of the 2026 Rebound
To understand Museveni’s hesitation to alter the status quo, one must look at the sheer numbers from the 2026 polls. Museveni secured an impressive 71.6 percent of the presidential vote. This represents a sharp, dramatic rise from the 58 percent he obtained in the highly fractured and violently contested 2021 general election, where the rise of Robert Kyagulanyi, alias Bobi Wine, and his National Unity Platform (NUP) severely dented the ruling party’s traditional strongholds.
The 2026 rebound has since triggered intense internal reflection within the NRM, with party strategists pointing to an aggressive, structural overhaul of grassroots mobilisation led by the secretariat under the stewardship of the Secretary-General, Mr. Richard Todwong.
Inside the ’63 x 72,000′ Architecture
At the absolute centre of the NRM’s 2026 turnaround strategy was what party officials describe as the ’63 x 72,000′ campaign architecture. This expansive, village-based mobilisation model effectively transformed the NRM’s traditional, often lethargic structures into a highly aggressive election machinery that stretched into nearly every household across Uganda.
‘Under the arrangement, the party recruited and activated 63 leaders in each of Uganda’s estimated 72,000 villages, creating an interlocking network of more than 4.5 million grassroots cadres,’ Rosemary Sseninde Nsubuga, the Director of Mobilisation at the Secretariat, explained in an interview.
According to Sseninde, these cadres were not random volunteers; they were systematically drawn from existing formal structures, including: Village mainstream NRM committees; Youth councils and women councils; Elders and Persons with Disabilities (PWDs) and Local Council I (LC1) leadership structures.
‘Each team was tasked with door-to-door mobilisation, direct dissemination of the NRM manifesto, voter education, and strict vote protection at the polling stations. It effectively turned every single village in this country into an NRM campaign command post,’ Sseninde added.
Shifting away from volatile taskforces
Political analysts contrast this systematic approach with previous election cycles-specifically 2016 and 2021-where mobilisation was heavily centralised around ad-hoc, temporary presidential taskforces and self-styled, highly transactional ‘volunteer’ groups. The 2026 strategy explicitly returned campaign control and financial logistics to formal party structures, moving away from loose yellow-coded pressure groups that often caused friction with the party’s official organs.
For years, internal critics had complained that the NRM secretariat had become politically weak, underfunded, and structurally disconnected from actual ground-level mobilization work. This disconnect left campaign operations to uncoordinated groups with competing financial interests.
That flawed arrangement, some insiders argued, heavily contributed to Museveni’s steadily declining presidential margins over the past two decades, even as the party continued to dominate parliamentary and local government elections.
Former government spokesperson and now Member of Parliament representing the Elderly, Ofwono Opondo, notes that the historical context of the 2021 losses necessitated a radical rethink. In 2021, the President suffered unprecedented, humiliating setbacks in the Buganda and Busoga sub-regions-historically considered NRM lifelines-while major urban centres like Kampala, Mukono, and Jinja increasingly slipped entirely into opposition hands.
Opondo argues that the 2026 campaign marked a vital strategic reset. He credits the current Central Executive Committee (CEC), together with the secretariat under Mr. Todwong, for ‘returning political mobilisation to where it belongs: the official party structures.’
‘For the first time in recent memory, the Secretary-General took direct, permanent, and institutional control of the President’s national campaign operations,’ Opondo stated.
“Protecting the Gains”
Instead of relying solely on the President’s personal campaign tours, senior secretariat leaders held independent, concurrent rallies and regional mobilisation meetings on behalf of Museveni. This reinforced the President’s central campaign theme: ‘Protecting the Gains.’
The head of the secretariat, Richard Todwong, maintains that the slogan became one of the campaign’s strongest psychological tools because it simplified the NRM’s otherwise broad and complex 40-year governance record into a direct, tangible appeal to ordinary voters.
‘The message linked concrete government programmes such as the Parish Development Model (PDM), Emyooga, Universal Primary Education (UPE), Universal Secondary Education (USE), major tarmac roads, health center IIIs and IVs, and rural electricity expansion directly to the NRM’s continued stay in power,’ Todwong explained.
Within the ruling party, there is also a growing acknowledgement that this aggressive structural presence was deliberately designed to counter what officials described as years of unchecked opposition propaganda and growing internal complacency among NRM leaders.
‘Party leaders had over the years focused heavily on their personal political survival while completely neglecting ideological mobilisation and the defense of the NRM record. This left the public narrative highly vulnerable to opposition influence,’ Opondo observed regarding previous electoral mishaps. ‘Under the new 2026 structure, however, local cadres were tasked not just with distributing posters, but with actively confronting misinformation at the household level.’
Furthermore, the strategy handed village structures direct ownership over campaign logistics, polling oversight, tallying, and result transmission. This drastically reduced reliance on external mobilisation groups that had previously dominated election periods and sparked internal corruption scandals over campaign funds. NRM officials privately say this shift restored a sense of dignity and confidence among ordinary party members who had felt excluded from the party’s decision-making and campaign financing structures for years.
The ride-on effect and security demeanour
Equally significant was the high visibility of senior party leaders during the campaign. Mr. Todwong alongside his Secretariat team maintained a constant, punishing presence on the campaign trail. Concurrently, NRM parliamentary candidates were explicitly required to prominently display Museveni’s portrait on their campaign posters-a move insiders say helped firmly reconnect local parliamentary races to the President’s national brand.
This approach marked a stark departure from the 2021 cycle, where several NRM candidates, particularly in urban and peri-urban constituencies in Buganda, subtly distanced themselves from Museveni’s imagery out of fear that association with the veteran leader would provoke a backlash from an angry, youth-dominated electorate.
Party officials also credit the remarkably disciplined conduct of security agencies during the 2026 campaign period. Unlike previous cycles marked by heavy-handed crackdowns that fueled international condemnation, a relatively calm electoral environment helped neutralise opposition claims of state-sponsored intimidation.
Remaining structural vulnerabilities
Yet, despite the celebratory mood within the hallways of Kyadondo Road, some party insiders caution that the 71.6 percent landslide victory should not mask deeper, systemic structural challenges facing the ruling party.
Internal party assessments acknowledge that while Museveni’s percentage share rose sharply, overall voter turnout figures and actual raw vote numbers still reveal structural vulnerabilities. The NRM still faces a steep mountain to climb among urban youth, the educated underemployed, and economically strained metropolitan populations who remain largely unreconciled to the NRM story.
Scribing a 71 per cent win on a lower voter turnout means the party is highly efficient at getting its core loyalists to the polls, but is still struggling to expand its footprint into hostile, changing urban demographics.
Furthermore, political analysts warn that sustaining a vast grassroots machinery of over 4.5 million cadres outside an active election cycle will prove financially and logistically impossible unless these structures are formalised into state governance and service delivery monitoring.
To counter this, party officials reveal that the 4.5 million village cadres are now expected to transition from purely political campaign mobilisation into active socio-economic monitors. Their new assignment is to track the implementation of the wealth creation funds like PDM and Emyooga to ensure corruption at the local government level does not undo their electoral gains.
Whether these massive village structures can survive beyond the immediate post-election excitement remains to be seen. Ultimately, it will determine whether Museveni’s 2026 electoral rebound is merely a temporary reprieve or the foundation of a permanent political recalibration for the ruling Movement.
For now, however, the message coming from State House appears unmistakable. At a moment when many expected the President to reward the architects of the NRM campaign with glamorous Cabinet dockets, Museveni instead chose to preserve the core secretariat team exactly where they are. In the President’s strategic calculation, the political machine that delivered 71.6 percent is simply too valuable to dismantle ahead of the governance cycle.