Writer: Musaazi Namiti. PHOTO/COURTESY
This article will surprise and even infuriate some readers, but I do not write opinion articles to please anyone. I care about what is true. I am not a politician trying to get elected. I take a cold, dispassionate look at facts and evidence and draw conclusions based on the evidence. We are only months away from next year’s presidential election, and the key contenders will be President Museveni and the president of the National Unity Platform (NUP), Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, aka Bobi Wine. Many Ugandans believe that the election is a foregone conclusion. They say Mr Museveni will rig it and win. And they insist he has been doing so since 1996. These accusations are not baseless, of course.
But they fail to demonstrably prove that rigging is what (in the main) enables Mr Museveni to win elections. It is hard to conclusively prove rigging altered the election outcome when you do not even know, for example, the exact amount of ballot boxes that were stuffed and the number of ballots that went into those ballot boxes. There are other forms of rigging, but you can only conclude they altered the election results if you can quantify their impact. Consequently, while rigging can increase the proportion of the vote for the rigging candidate, it does not necessarily mean that the candidate loses the election without rigging. Allegations of rigging by the Opposition will follow the 2026 election, as we have witnessed in the past. And there may be attempts to petition the Supreme Court.
But when you look at the distribution of registered voters across all 147 districts, you can see that the Opposition has a lot of heavy lifting to do, yet it lacks local party structures to look for votes. I contacted the Electoral Commission to try to get the updated voters list but got no response. So the numbers I have used in this article are from the 2021 list. In 2021, the districts with the largest number of voters were, in descending order, Kampala (1,280,409), Wakiso (1,154,857), Kamuli (236,917), Buikwe (235,640), Isingiro (233,099), Mukono (355,275), Kasese (384,058), Luweero (257,115), Mayuge (231,116), Ntungamo (268,541), Tororo (268,434) and Kyenjojo (215,012). Kampala and Wakiso are generally viewed as Mr Kyagulanyi’s strongholds. But Mr Museveni still has supporters in all the 12 districts ready and willing to vote for him.
Now let us assume, for argument’s sake, that Mr Kyagulanyi is able to sweep all the 12 districts while Mr Museveni gets no vote. Does this necessarily mean he is heading to the State House? Not quite. The answer lies in turnout and vote distribution across the remaining 135 districts. The EC website shows those districts had 12.9 million registered voters while the 12 voter-rich districts had 5.1 million. If turnout is high and Mr Museveni wins by a wide margin — over 75 percent of the vote — he could still surpass the 50 percent threshold nationally. He remains the only candidate with the capacity to traverse the entire Uganda and to have vote hunters on the ground in every single district, which is a big electoral advantage.
In little-known districts, such as Karenga, which had just 18,035 voters in 2021, it is more likely that Mr Museveni will have a vote-hunting team while Mr Kyagulanyi may not. The Opposition, like the NRM, is standing on glaring weaknesses. In 2016, the FDC even failed to challenge election results because it could not find 9,000 declaration of results forms, according to Maj Gen Mugisha Muntu, who led the party. Yet Dr Kizza Besigye insisted he won the 2016 election.
Mr Namiti is a journalist and former Al Jazeera digital editor in charge of the Africa desk
