The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
COMMENT | NNANDA KIZITO SSERUWAGI | President Yoweri Museveni won his seventh term of office on 17th January 2026, polling 71.65% of the valid votes cast, amounting to 7,946,772 votes. The leading opposition candidate, Kyagulanyi Ssentamu Robert (Bobi Wine) came in a distant second runner with 24.72%, totaling 2,741,238 votes. Bobi Wine disputes these results, citing electoral irregularities. In a story reported by the BBC on January 20th, Bobi informed reporters that he does not intend to contest the electoral results in court, citing a lack of confidence in the judiciary. He instead announced plans to urge his supporters to take to the streets to “peacefully” protest.
There is a gap between this rhetoric and what Bobi really means, and one can read between the lines to see that Bobi has now followed his colleague, Kizza Besigye, in believing that only an insurrection can remove Museveni. Ironically, this lack of faith in constitutional mechanisms for democratic transfer of power is something Bobi criticised Besigye for in 2016/17 when his political star was rising while Besigye’s was setting. Bobi’s significant performance in the 2021 Presidential polls was partly built on his inspiring campaign message, charging the electorate to acquire national ID cards to be eligible to vote. He believed strongly in the possibility of pursuing democratic means to change leadership in Uganda, and denounced Besigye for not believing so. Unfortunately, it now seems that that is no longer the case. And we should not be gullible to call the campaign for protests a constitutional right, because it is clear that the constitution does not provide for protests as a remedy for dissatisfaction with electoral results. If Bobi already feels inconvenienced to obey the constitution as an opposition politician, how about if he had the latitude to disregard it using powerful state institutions if he were President? We should not look to the constitution only to tame Museveni as an incumbent. We should also look to it to hold those aspiring for power to account.
There are many commonplace arguments, accusations and narratives circulating now in the face of the electoral outcome. As usual, there are accusations of vote rigging, electoral violence, unleveled playing field, corruption and bribery, voter intimidation, etc. These issues raised are not false. But they are not the whole truth.
Any Presidential election happening anywhere in the world is likely to happen between an opposition candidate against an incumbent seeking another term or against a political party in power. By design, this means one of the competitors has an unfair advantage. The field is never levelled. The incumbent usually has more access to means of corruption and bribery since they are in control of the allocation of state resources. They also enjoy proximity to Electoral Commissions, making it easy to compromise those bodies. The command of coercive instruments of law and order is also deeply embedded in the hands of an incumbent, which they could use against their opponents. As such, many adversarial advantages we may consider unfair for an opponent to have are usually available to an incumbent, leaving opposition candidates with the burden to outmaneuver an entrenched opponent.
In Uganda specifically, the scales can be steeply tilted. What does it mean to run against Museveni? A candidate confronting Museveni is up against a colossus of politics. Museveni is among the world’s longest-serving presidents, having been in power for almost half a century now. He is one of the very few leaders who came to power through a protracted armed struggle, meaning they dismantled an existing political order to emerge victorious using strategic, patient, military maneuvers, and built their own systems. He has fought wars of liberation and conquest in multiple African countries. He did not inherit a national army but rather nurtured his own from a handful of gunmen he went with to the bush in 1981. Even if there was no electoral malpractice, anyone standing in an election against Yoweri Museveni is competing against a titan of political and military strategy, and in no way can there be a level playing field with such a competitor. His experience alone is so peerless that it puts any opponent at a disadvantage from the outset. This does not mean Museveni cannot be defeated. Instead, it raises the stakes for whoever intends to compete against him.
In that case, it is banal to complain about unfairness in the face of the outcome of this election. Whereas Museveni has had the advantage of four decades of holding power, his opponents have also had the advantage of four decades of studying him. And they have had seven opportunities to crack the Museveni-code. So far, all have failed. What does this failure mean? And what does Museveni’s win mean?
Bobi Wine’s failure is not only caused by the disadvantages he faces in challenging Museveni, as I have described above. Mostly, it is a failure of learning (his inability to understand the kind of opponent he faces in Museveni, since he seems to grossly underestimates him) and a deficit of sincerity (his lack of a higher public goal to pursue in politics rather than the attainment of power at any cost). Like Kizza Besigye, Bobi has failed to learn to play a different kind of politics. Like Besigye, Bobi views his contribution to Uganda’s better governance as only tied to the removal of Museveni from power. Fraught in that saviour mentality are the seeds that germinated Museveni, who hoped to transform Uganda solely by destroying the Obote government, only to find himself now faced with the same contradictions and accused of the same excesses that Obote faced and was accused of. This makes Bobi a raw, undisguised, unvarnished version of Museveni. He has Museveni’s appetite for power without Museveni’s mental faculties to harness it. Neither Bobi’s lack of knowledge nor his absence of democratic integrity is excusable.
In shifting to Besigye’s extra-constitutional politics of planning to socially engineer regime change through protests that could morph into an insurrection, Bobi fails the test of being a good-faith actor in democratic contests. Unlike someone like Mugisha Muntu, who is sincere in his uncompromising faith in democratic processes as the only path to power, even at the risk of never standing a chance to attain it, Bobi seems too power hungry to bear the limitations of democracy. He may respond to this by saying Museveni is a dictator, but Museveni’s disregard of democratic practice is no justification for those challenging him to also pursue extra-judicial and extra-democratic methods of politics. We cannot be too tired of Museveni’s tyranny that we become welcoming of non-democratic means of attaining power. In fact, the more discontented with Museveni’s abuse of democracy and human rights we get, the more we must become more self-critical of our inclinations to play outside of democratic boundaries in seeking power.
Disputing this election is not helpful for Bobi Wine. It is an election that neither he nor Museveni won. I will explain why. In no poll conducted ahead of the election did Bobi Wine poll above 35%, and Museveni never polled below 60% either. So, for starters, Bobi was clearly losing this election from the start. The voter turnout of just 52% is very instructive in explaining why I say neither Museveni nor Bobi won the election. Out of the 21 million registered voters, Museveni garnered 7.9 million votes, and Bobi 2.7 million votes, meaning that over 10.9 million voters did not show support for either of the two leading candidates. If we consider Museveni’s performance against the total number of registered voters, it implies he won the election with merely 36.92% of registered voters!
Therefore, even if we are to take the official results as reflective of authentic performance, it is obvious that Museveni is not a very popular candidate, with just 36.92% of the electorate supporting him. If we subtract from that his alleged rigging margin, his popularity score would come even lower than 30%. If Bobi Wine could understand this, he would stop selling complaints and grievances about Museveni to voters. It is plausible that the majority of voters understand Museveni’s failures and have withdrawn their support from him, but that does not ipso facto imply they support Bobi Wine. Why can’t Bobi engage with the question of why many people who do not support Museveni also do not support him? Why does he seem entitled to being supported, by overlooking the dynamics and patterns of a declining voter turnout from 57% in 2021 to 52% in 2026? If Bobi ignores the fact that almost half of the registered voters never show up to vote for him, but feels entitled to lead them by claiming his votes are stolen by Museveni despite the low voter turnout, doesn’t that reveal characteristics of a non-democratic-minded leader? Bobi’s democratic spiritedness would be more apparent in how he broadens his base, which is steadily shrinking, rather than how virulently he attacks Museveni.
It is obvious to me that Bobi Wine is motivated primarily by the urge to rule… that self-crowned “Ghetto President” mentality from yore that defined his youthful zest for dominance over fellow musicians. His pursuit is of power, not of democracy. People who seek democracy like Mugisha Muntu are willing to overlook the high temptation of seeking extra-democratic means of grabbing power through armed struggle and insurrection. Bobi’s narrative now lacks democratic speech and increasingly incites an uprising. That is a field Museveni understands very well, since he came to power through violence. It is a field in which Bobi will lose faster than if he strictly continued to seek power democratically. He may not be president today or tomorrow or even ever, but by giving democracy a chance, Bobi would tower higher than Museveni, just like Raila Odinga towers over all his opponents who became President, yet he didn’t.
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The writer is a Ugandan thinking about Uganda.
