With the completion of presidential nominations on Wednesday, Ugandans can look forward to an election which, while some things have changed a lot, still remains the same.
The faces on the ballot may be shuffled, the slogans refreshed, but the underlying script is familiar. President Yoweri Museveni, in power since 1986, strides into the race seemingly in rude health, his endurance itself part of the message. The point is never lost on his supporters: that after nearly four decades at the helm, he can still outlast, out-organise, and out-think those who come against him. For many Ugandans, this reliability—some call it fatigue, others call it stability—continues to be a powerful electoral pitch.
Yet the opposition has not always been a sideshow.
In 2021, Robert Kyagulanyi, the pop-star-turned-politician, mounted the most formidable challenge Museveni has faced in two decades. Not only did he come in a strong second nationally, but his National Unity Platform pulled off a bloodbath in central Uganda, ejecting every single cabinet minister on the ballot. It was a rout the NRM had not suffered since the days when northern Uganda was decisively opposed to Museveni’s government in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That wave, however, was not enough to dislodge the president from State House, but it signalled a generational shift: the urban and peri-urban youth, restless and wired, had finally found a voice.
Across the aisle today, though, the opposition is once again hobbled before the first vote is cast.
Kizza Besigye, Museveni’s long-time nemesis and once his personal physician, has spent nearly a year in prison. The charge, treason, has yet to solidify into an actual case, but his absence is tangible. It speaks to a pattern as old as these elections themselves: opposition heavyweights removed from the field, whether through legal limbo, intimidation, or attrition.
Justice Minister Norbert Mao recently said what many whisper in private: that Uganda’s transition from Museveni will not be achieved through the ballot. Coming from a senior government insider, this admission is less a slip of the tongue than a declaration of how tightly the levers of power are held. For the opposition, whose strongest card has always been moral outrage—corruption, human rights abuses, economic injustice—it is a devastating verdict. Even if you overcome fear and apathy, even if you pack stadiums and win the memes, the game may already be rigged.
Yet elections are about who shows up, and here lies the opposition’s greatest weakness.
The Electoral Commission’s own record shows turnout sliding: nearly 70 percent in 2006, down to 59 percent in 2011, a slight recovery in 2016, then just 57 percent in 2021. That meant five million registered Ugandans did not vote at all. By-elections in Kampala have sunk lower, to as little as 14 percent turnout. And this abstention is not neutral: Museveni’s rural, older base turns out consistently; it is the youth, urban, opposition-leaning voter who shrugs and stays home.
Uganda’s demography should be the opposition’s ace card: nearly 80 percent of citizens are under 30, most with no memory of the insecurity of pre-1986. Their complaints are contemporary—joblessness, rent, the high cost of living. If they voted, the arithmetic would tilt overnight. But abstention means those numbers remain theoretical. Outrage without turnout is theatre. And in that vacuum, the man who casts himself as the steady hand on the tiller sails on unperturbed.
So, as the 2026 contest looms, the paradox endures. The memes may be sharper, the candidates younger, the rallies noisier. But the rhythm is the same. Museveni, healthy and unbowed, strides into the race. His strongest historical challenger is in prison. His newest rival, Kyagulanyi, carries the scars of a 2021 campaign that rattled the regime but failed to break it. And a government minister has already told Ugandans what many fear—that ballots may not be the vehicle of transition.
For the opposition, the mountain is therefore twin-peaked: convince Ugandans that change is necessary, and convince them that voting is still worth it. Because in the arithmetic of abstention, silence does not punish the incumbent—it protects him. Unless Uganda’s youthful majority decides to break that silence, 2026 will look less like a turning point and more like a roundabout, circling back to the same place Uganda has been for thirty years.
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