President Museveni (right atop car) and his wife Janet arrive at NRM party electoral commission headquarters in Kyadondo, Kampala to be nominated for his party presidential flag and chairmanship on July 5, 2025. PHOTO/COURTESY MUSEVENI X
President Museveni picked up his nomination forms for the position of National Resistance Movement (NRM) party chairperson and presidential flag bearer on June 28. Things started looking up for the party at the headquarters of its electoral commission. NRM supporters must have uncorked that sparkling wine.
It might have been champagne. But sparkling wine is probably the best splurging they can do on a beer budget, thanks to the economy. NRM supporters had added reason to celebrate for it is taken as a foregone conclusion that Mr Museveni will win the 2026 presidential election. Ugandan presidential elections are so predictable that if they were a movie, they would perpetually be in reverse chronology. You know, the kind of movie where the first scene shown is the conclusion to the plot.
Predictable
It speaks to a predictability we are acculturated to: presidential elections are held, presidential elections are won by Mr Museveni. Anything outside of this dynamic would reveal the civil unpreparedness with which we would face an uncertain, post-Museveni future. Such precarious uncertainty cannot be good for business, metaphorically and literally.
Predictability of the don’t-rock-the-boat variety, on the other hand, reassures the business community that it will be business as usual. And thereby fosters a market confidence that bolsters market returns, increasing the nation’s taxable capacity to afford the official outlay on public goods and services, which improve our standards of living.
If this predictability is such a useful thing, you may ask, why do we need to confirm its utility with yet another election? After all, another brand of predictability, one which obviates the rituals of elections by preordaining its leadership, would serve for even greater predictability. Coronations being far less acrimonious than party conventions. This is where the problem lies, however. We live in political purgatory.
A twilight zone where electoral foregone conclusions are sedatives to our democratic consciousness, not periodic cures to a lack thereof. That is why the rippling electoral waters run deep with unfathomable animosities countrywide. I will say it once more. People are angry at the inertia in our government.
Sure, Ugandans appreciate President Museveni’s emphasis on resource-based industrial development, maximising agricultural-industry linkages, promoting greater markets through the East African Community and his good tidings of a hallelujah-provoking oil bonanza. They have heard Uganda's economy is experiencing a period of growth, with estimates indicating a rate of six percent. However, they just shrug their shoulders to all this.
It has nothing to do with them, the mostly urban Middle Class Ugandans say. The average Ugandan does not eat figures. Furthermore, economists agree, man cannot live on Gross National Product (GNP) alone. Especially when the Gross Domestic Expenditure (GDE), a measure of total spending within a country's borders, includes the Office of the President, which includes State House, munching on approximately 1.46 percent of a Shs72.136 trillion National Budget for the 2025/2026 financial year.
On April 30, 2024, Ibrahim Ssemujju Nganda, the Kira Municipality lawmaker, who is interim spokesperson of the Opposition People's Front for Freedom (PFF), and hard-bitten NRM foe, partly tweeted: “State House will have spent Shs2.1b daily, yet only Shs86m was spent on maintaining Kampala roads within the same period of 2023/2024.” State House's budget falls under the "Governance and Security" programme, with specific sub-programmes like "Logistical and Administrative Support to the Presidency.” Bearing in mind that the Ministry of Defence and Veteran Affairs was allocated about $1.1b in the 2025/2026 budget, why is security so high on Museveni’s agenda? The President is nobody’s fool.
He must be well aware of any potential civil disturbances in the country, even though he sometimes seems to fiddle (like Emperor Nero) as Rome burns. Accordingly, he knows Bobi Wine and the National Unity Platform (NUP) swept the polls in the central region in 2021. True, support for NUP was dismissed as “a wave”, but its eddies of dissent are still felt.
That is why Bobi Wine is reportedly calling on voters in the central region to make Buganda a “no-go area” for President Museveni. The war drums are sounded, clear within the President’s earshot. If anybody believes he is not making contingencies for the prospect of a conflict, think again.
Pre-emptive strike
Mr Museveni seems to be already waging a war against what he perceives as war. To understand how, let’s gaze into the ancient recent past. In 2021, Gen David Sejusa, the former head of Uganda’s military intelligence, said: "The Opposition should concetrate [sic] much to [sic] the election because by all means, the results will be doctored. Towards the 1980 elections, Museveni was already setting up an army to storm the bushes before even voting time. We had already made contacts with people in different villages where we were to set [up] our camps. We knew after [the] elections, we were heading for war. It was clear that Obote could not accept to lose an election." This time, however, the President and his party will not have to return to the hallowed bush in order to draw first blood.
For they have made arrangements to ensure nobody else has recourse to that beaten path, too. When the NRM took power, it established resistance committees countrywide. These were directly elected in villages, at which level delegates in turn elected indirectly a tier of further committees or councils at progressively higher and wider levels, culminating in the composition of National Resistance Council; Uganda’s “no-party” democratic mutant of a Parliament. Turn this pyramid upside down and place an all-seeing eye in it to illuminate the true purpose of the resistance committees (now local councils). And you will see that they not only massively co-opted Ugandans into the Movement, political parties being banned at the time; they politicised them towards preserving the NRM revolution.
Vision fulfilment
Subsequently, these committees not only surveilled Ugandans; they recruited them into Local Defence Units. President Museveni had promised to “democratise the gun” through the creation of a people’s militia when he ran for president in 1980, under the Uganda Peoples’ Movement party flag. His election ran aground, but his vision has not gone to seed. Instead, it has blossomed (with thorns) into a martial preponderance of NRM’s military readiness to do battle with the so-called enemies of the state on as many fronts as there were resistance committees (and are local councils) in operation.
This posture follows the tried-and-true Military Dispersal Principle, which is a military strategy referring to the practice of spreading out military assets (in this case, resistance committees and local councils) to reduce vulnerability and increase resilience to attack. So if anybody wishes to violently attack the NRM, they will be neutralised by the NRM’s far-flung para-military preparedness.
This explains why there has not been a popular uprising in Uganda, nor is there likely to be one for as long as the NRM continues to use the security agencies subtly if brazenly for regime preservation.
