Author: Moses Khisa. PHOTO/FILE
A few weeks ago, the Centre for Basic Research (CBR) in Kampala launched a research project for the 2026 General Election in Uganda. CBR is my intellectual home, so I was honoured to give a keynote, framing the issues and nodes of investigation for the project.
For more than three decades, CBR has consistently produced ground-breaking research, provided an invaluable platform for critical inquiry and contributed immeasurably to pushing the frontiers of new knowledge in Uganda and beyond.
In my keynote remarks, I underscored that there is more to 2026 than the elections. There is so much at stake, in fact we would do better not having the elections altogether!
But considering the vast and varied personal and party vested interests, with the singular focus on securing an elected office as to access economic spoils of the political system, the actors across the political divide cannot heed a call to look past the elections.
Ordinarily, the political classes should freely compete for state power, especially when doing so under processes and mechanisms that are broadly fair and acceptable to all major actors. This, though, is patently absent in Uganda today.
We simply do not have the right conditions and circumstances conducive for competition for state power in a manner that guarantees fairness and a credible outcome. The fact that we have an incumbent president, in power for 40 years at the time of the 2026 elections, who’s unwilling to contemplate stepping down, means the whole process is fully subordinated to his singular determination to keep a grip on power.
There is a chance that Uganda’s electioneering, and the quest for genuine democratic government, would be a different ball game had the incumbent left office in 2006 after serving out two elected terms as allowed by the Constitution back then.
It is also possible that things could have worsened! But when you consider an overbearing incumbent with nearly unlimited incumbency advantages, the impossibility of an opposition victory, the sheer use of power to retain power, the fear of life without state power, it is clear the prospects of democratic deepening through elections are nearly absent as long as the incumbent remains a candidate. This is not to reduce the problem to an individual, for there is no doubt that the elusive quest for a functional democratic system is much more complex.
The reality though, is that having been at the helm this long and given the enormous power and control he wields, much of what goes wrong or right with Uganda’s politics, in the broader scheme of things, comes down to the incumbent president.
Not even the ruling party, one that exists more in name than concrete terms, is of significant consequence here. It merits noting that elections are important for all sorts of reasons, from presenting moments of excitement and gauging the public mood to engendering civic engagement as part of citizenship. What is more, the business classes and professionals in marketing, public relations, the media, etc., can cash in big time during the election season.
Politically, elections, even if falling short of serving the cause of accountable and responsive government, can, nevertheless, provide avenues for conversations that may help move the country forward. Yet, on the record of Uganda’s last election cycles, it is hard not to despair. The 2026 elections will be the seventh, in a five-year cycle, held since Uganda got a new Constitution in 1995.
Arguably, since at least the 2006 polls when the country returned to multiparty election, simultaneous with removal of presidential terms limits, every election cycle leaves Uganda’s political standing (or democratic status, if one wants to go that far) worse off.
The decline, decay and dysfunction in our politics have been at full-throttle and cannot be reversed or remedied by yet another election except to serve the façade of democracy.
If the political classes, and indeed the wider civically conscious public, were candid enough, they would recognise the urgent need to return to the political drawing board, to renegotiate a new elite pact and attain a wider social contract.
This would entail a concerted and comprehensive dialogue that results in rewriting the rules of engagement, primarily the supreme law of the land – the Constitution – that has been grossly eviscerated.It also would mean re-establishing independent institutions for managing political competition, national security and law enforcement in an impartial and professional manner.
This is the challenge at hand for all political actors and Ugandans keen on realising a proper system of government that meets our needs and aspirations.
