The desperate and sometimes bare knuckle and even bloody fights for a parliamentary seat are driven by many factors, among them a search for a meal ticket or survival, opportunities, influence, power, and glory.
Little wonder that the Electoral Commission yesterday flagged off a whopping 2,700 plus candidates to fight for the 519 parliamentary seats across the country, with the campaigns expected to end on January 13, 2026, ahead of the January 15 polling date. Eight of these 2,711 candidates were cleared to join the 12th Parliament after the EC declared them unopposed.
The 519 seats include 353 for direct constituency, 146 District Women, and 20 for Special Interest Groups, including five each for the Youth, Persons with Disabilities, Workers, and Older Persons.
The MPs elected will join the 556-member 12th Parliament, alongside 10 representatives from the Uganda People’s Defence Forces and other ex officio members. For the upcoming election, 1,283 candidates will run as Independents, while NRM has fielded 514, NUP 297, FDC 214, and DP 94, while the remaining candidates are distributed among the smaller parties.
Costs of the races
But the battles for securing these seats do not come on a silver platter. Ahead of the campaigns, Daily Monitor would later establish from several MPs from different regions that the price of running a well-oiled campaign varied from region to region, but contests for constituencies in Western Uganda were the most expensive, ranging between Shs400m and Shs600m.
Campaigning in constituencies in Eastern Uganda, according to the Kigulu South MP, Mr Andrew Kiiza Kaluya, costs between Shs300m and Shs500m. But there are also huge rewards for winning these hot seats, as being an MP in Uganda comes with a hefty salary and other additional perks, according to information obtained from the Parliamentary Commission.
The heavy perks
Each MP is entitled to a monthly salary of Shs25m, a one-off vehicle allowance of Shs150m, a subsistence allowance of Shs4.5m per month, a town running allowance of Shs1m per month, a medical allowance of Shs500,000 per month, a sitting allowance of Shs50,000 for committee meetings, and a plenary sitting allowance of Shs150,000; as well as mileage allowances.
A seasoned city banker who asked not to be named thinks the clamour for MP seats is ‘a lack of economic opportunities’. He maintains that many people look at politics as a ‘meal ticket’, hence its do-or-die diktat.
He believes if there were a threshold imposed on who can contest, for example, demanding that one must be a billionaire, chances are the quest for parliamentary seats would carry less allure.
‘If these people had economic opportunities, they would not battle for these seats like it’s a do-or-die. If politics were ceremonial, had token pay and no corruption deals, people would not be so desperate to win it at costs,’ he says.
Mr Chrispin Kaheru, an Independent Election analyst and member of the Uganda Human Rights Commission, says politics in Uganda is not a contest for ideas, but ‘a contest for survival. Parliamentary elections feel like do-or-die battles because they carry both power and livelihood’.
He adds: ‘For many candidates, winning that seat will mean access to social status, income, and may be influence that are not easily available elsewhere in the economy. Politics seems to have become the most reliable ladder to opportunity, and elections become a scramble for limited foothold in a very small lift.
‘At another level, our politics still reflects personal-based networks more than institutional or ideological competition. So, a seat in Parliament isn’t just an individual win, but a victory for a whole web of dependents, supporters, and financiers who expect a return on their investment. Losing, therefore, can feel like collective bankruptcy.’
Mr Kaheru says. A 2021 report by the Alliance for Finance Monitoring notes an increase in overall campaign spending compared to previous elections at the parliamentary level, ranging from Shs50m for the lowest spender to more than Shs3.5b for the highest spender. The report found that the majority of spending was in the form of cash donations dished out for reciprocity on Election Day. Daily Monitor previously established that in Western Uganda, a candidate seeking to grab a parliamentary seat can spend up to Shs4b Mr Elioda Tumwesigye, the former minister for Science, Technology and Innovation, on June 20, 2019, wrote, reminding President Museveni of a promise he reportedly made to rescue him from campaign debts totalling Shs850m, which he piled up during a by-election campaign for the Sheema Municipality parliamentary seat in July 2018.
Mr Kaheru also adds the psychology of visibility to the lust of quests for a parliamentary seat, noting that politics in Uganda confers identity and relevance to the players. He says: ‘Once you have been ‘Honourable,’ life outside that title can feel invisible and that drives desperation; yet, beyond the drama and high stakes, these contests also reveal something positive – the intensity of political participation.
‘Ugandans take elections seriously because they know that whoever holds parliamentary office shapes their daily realities, including paying school fees, medical bills, and meeting funeral costs, among others. The challenge, therefore, is not the passion, it’s how to channel that passion into peaceful, policy-driven competition rather than winner-takes-all politics.’
Mr Simon Sonny Wejuli, a Human Resource for Health practitioner, describes parliamentary elections as ‘quite important’ because they define how laws will be made, and what the future of politics will be. These, among other roles, including being able to vote on decisions or put in place laws or policies that govern how the country is run, make them ‘very important’. ‘The people we choose to represent us need to be people of substance, those who understand what the people want and how best the country can be managed, and not be manipulated. In the past, MPs have been manipulated a lot by both ends of the spectrum; so, we need MPs with substance,’ he opines.
‘MP elections are very important because if you have stooges who can’t even reason in Parliament, and aren’t intelligent enough to reason things out and make decisions that positively affect the well-being of the people, then you are choosing the wrong people,’ Mr Wejuli says.
Mr Mike Buster Nandala, a technician, says parliamentary elections have recently become an issue of importance to almost every person in society, and have attracted many people, some of whom end up using up their savings and selling off their property in desperate bids to ensure they are elected. Mr Nandala says majority of the candidates aim at ’empowering themselves financially’, and other factors like attainment of social status, show of support for their political leaning, and participation in decision-making, among others, come into play.