As Uganda heads toward the 2026 general elections, the national conversation is less about competition than about credibility. The integrity of the Electoral Commission (EC), particularly under its chairperson Justice Simon Byabakama, continues to dominate political discourse. For many Ugandans, elections have come to resemble a ritual rather than a genuine contest for power, with the outcome widely suspected long before the first ballot is cast.
This crisis of confidence was starkly illustrated when opposition leader Bobi Wine told a rally in Masaka that he would not be declared the winner by Byabakama even if he scored 90 per cent of the vote. The remark, ironically met with applause, should instead have alarmed every serious democrat.
If a leading contender openly admits that victory at the ballot will not translate into victory at declaration, what purpose do such elections serve? Are citizens being mobilised to change leadership, or merely to legitimise a process whose outcome is already decided?
The statement also invites uncomfortable questions about opposition strategy. If defeat is considered inevitable regardless of the votes, is participation an act of resistance or a tacit endorsement of a rigged system? Are voters being psychologically prepared for predetermined results under the guise of “realism”?
For ordinary Ugandans who endure militarised polling stations, economic hardship, and repeated disappointment, such pronouncements feel less like honesty and more like managed expectations shared between oppressors and would-be liberators.
What makes these current lamentations particularly hard to accept is that they follow a historic missed opportunity for reform. In 2023, Mathias Mpuuga Nsamba, then Leader of the Opposition and a senior figure in the National Unity Platform (NUP), presented comprehensive electoral reform proposals in Parliament that directly addressed the structural rot in Uganda’s electoral system.
Among other things, the reforms sought to:
– Reduce the President’s unilateral power to appoint Electoral Commission leadership
– Remove the army and police from election management
– Require presidential results to be declared at district level to minimise post-election manipulation
Had these proposals received unified opposition support and sustained public mobilisation, Uganda would be approaching 2026 under a significantly fairer electoral framework. Instead, the National Unity Platform — the country’s leading opposition party — distanced itself from the reforms. Its leadership dismissed institutional safeguards and assured an anxious public that change would come through sheer voter turnout and ballot strength, bordering on the promise of a political miracle.
Today, that same leadership decries electoral fraud and predetermined outcomes — a contradiction that seriously undermines its moral authority.
Meanwhile, rumours have resurfaced that the regime intends to declare only its preferred candidates, irrespective of votes cast. To politically conscious Ugandans, these claims sound less like speculation and more like painful recollection.
The 2016 Nansana Municipality parliamentary race saw an NRM candidate declared winner despite reportedly finishing third, after a petition exploited name discrepancies against the actual frontrunner, Hon. Wakayima Musoke. In the 2022 Kayunga LC5 by-election, NUP’s Harriet Nakwede allegedly swept most polling stations (with declaration forms to prove it), only for the NRM candidate to be announced winner. In Buikwe District in 2021, Diana Mutasingwa was declared Woman MP amid widespread allegations that she trailed both the FDC and NUP candidates. Kampala’s 2021 local council elections followed a similar pattern: candidates who won at polling stations were later replaced at tally centres.
In each case, evidence existed and public outrage was loud, yet meaningful collective action was absent. Petitions became prohibitively expensive after the regime amended laws in 2016, voters retreated into resignation, and impunity hardened into precedent. It is this silence that has emboldened today’s rumours that EC agents may once again sign fabricated declaration forms while authentic results disappear into institutional oblivion.
The deeper crisis, however, lies not only with the regime or the Electoral Commission, but with an opposition seemingly trapped between protest rhetoric and strategic paralysis. If electoral theft is foreseeable, why were reforms rejected when they were still possible? Why are citizens being asked once again to invest hope, money, and emotion in a process their leaders openly distrust? To promise miracles in an unreformed system and later cry foul is not strategy — it is irresponsible leadership.
As Uganda approaches 2026, the country faces a stark choice. Elections without reform risk becoming exercises in mass self-deception. Participation without resistance legitimises injustice; silence rewards impunity. Unless Ugandans insist on structural guarantees rather than inspirational slogans, the familiar post-election question will return — not “who won?”, but “why did we pretend, yet again, that we didn’t already know the outcome?”
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Kaweesa Kaweesa is the Chairman, Democratic Front – Mukono District
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