It will be depressingly familiar when Museveni is declared winner again

A reader who responded to the article I wrote last week emailed me an interesting question. What, she asked me, will become of the Opposition after next year’s presidential election, which many people know will be won by President Museveni? Should, she went on, the Opposition give up?
I told her that the Opposition cannot and will not give up. They will continue to exist and tell Ugandans things they already know once the election results are announced by the Electoral Commission.
The Opposition will tell Ugandans that the election was rigged. They will say that the body that organised the election is not independent. And they may even try to seek legal redress by launching a petition, which (honestly) is a complete waste of time. It will all be depressingly familiar.
The question the reader posed goes to show that the Opposition is caught between a rock and a hard place. Opposition politicians say they want to change the way Uganda is managed, but they can only do that by contesting and winning elections. In theory, they can; in practice, they have steep odds stacked against them.
They can and will win a few parliamentary seats, just as they have done in previous elections. But that counts for precious little. It leaves the ruling NRM with the majority in Parliament and Mr Museveni ensconced in power.
A boycott would be an option, but it remains an unpleasant alternative because it just cannot work. Boycotting the election would make sense if it left Mr Museveni the only candidate in the race—with no voter turning out to vote.
Although the way forward for the Opposition is to contest elections and cling to the seemingly forlorn hope that Mr Museveni can be unseated, the odds that they will win are slim.
Let us look at the facts. In the last election, local media named 20 districts with the largest number of voters. They included Kampala (1,014,493) followed by Wakiso (899,877), Arua (336,384), Kasese (335,164), Kibaale (322,342), Mukono (292,012), Mubende (281,901), Kabale (271,886), Mbarara (242,793), Ntungamo (238,334), Jinja (233,850), Tororo (233,437), Kabarole (233,385), Hoima (228,918), Rakai (223,904), Iganga (222,277), Mbale (220,340), Luweero (201,671), Isingiro (201,965) and Kamuli (200,258).
Obviously, there are new voters in these districts, but it is safe to assume that the 20 districts, out of a total of 134, still have the largest number of voters. For the Opposition to win—and that is assuming the Electoral Commission can pleasantly surprise us and declare them winners—they have to do better than the NRM’s Museveni in most of these districts and others.
Yet apart from Kampala and Wakiso, I do not see the Opposition polling more votes than the NRM in the 20 districts. In all these districts, the NRM, not the Opposition, using State resources and preventing the Opposition from reaching out to voters, remains the visible party with grassroots structures—at least during election time.
When you go to social media, you see a lot about the NUP, the party Kyadondo East MP Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, aka Bobi Wine, reportedly bought and merged with People Power, the FDC and Maj Gen Mugisha Muntu’s ANT. 
But deep in villages, in the districts mentioned, few people know what these parties do and stand for.
So how can the Opposition win the election? Well, everyone lives on hope, and Opposition politicians are no exception. Maybe they think God will help them. But the NRM also expects God to help them. We will wait and see how things pan out.

Mr Namiti is a journalist and former Al Jazeera digital editor in charge of the Africa desk
[email protected] @kazbuk