Author Archives: Dan

The just concluded Presidential and Parliamentary elections revealed a stark truth: fear has become the organizing principle of politics. Celebration belongs largely to those for whom the system worked, and to those who built that system. Disinformation is cultivated, protected, and weaponized. What emerged most clearly from this election cycle was not legitimacy, but fear. And where fear becomes the organising principle, truth becomes expendable. 

An Election Conducted in the Key of Fear

In Kawempe North, a story circulated almost immediately after the declaration of results. The returning officer, having announced Luyimbazi Nalukola as the winner with 34,985 votes, fled the scene with Nalukoola’s DR forms. This was after a confrontation with the NRM party candidate Faridah Nambi. 

Whether every detail of the story is verifiable or not, it reveals the atmosphere: officials do their duty while looking over their shoulders. That returning officer defied fear, briefly. Hundreds of others did not. Millions could not. Fear shrinks the space for truth, re-assigning power and risk.

The internet shutdown on January 13, 2026, was a stark example of fear made infrastructural. 

The government in its letter to mobile network operators cited familiar language: preventing misinformation, disinformation, electoral fraud, and incitement to violence. National security. Public confidence. The public was plunged into informational darkness, and the shutdown was exclusion.

One could argue that the government leaned on Article 43 of the Constitution, which allows limitations on rights in the public interest. But even the Constitution draws a line: no limitation should exceed what is acceptable and demonstrably justifiable in a free and democratic society. The irony here is that the internet was disabled to facilitate a “free and fair democratic process”.

As cartoonist Jim Spire captured it, just before the blackout: “And then the Lord said, Let there be NO INTERNET.”

When connectivity returned, social media remained blocked. Ugandans have since devised ways to access it, but like children under a strict parent, they’ve been warned that those who bypass the restrictions – and use it for “illegal” purposes – will be caught, because the state has the capacity. We all know how elastic the word “illegal” can become. 

Now, Ugandans browse, post, and share with a subconscious awareness that the authorities may withdraw the light again. One must be careful, after all, not to provoke them.

Fear Shrinks the Space for Truth

Fear does not announce itself loudly. It works by subtly re-assigning power. Who can speak? Who cannot? Who will pay the price?

In July 2024, during the aftermath of the March to Parliament protests against corruption, a comrade who came to visit me at Luzira Women’s Prison recounted a telling exchange. After leaving the prison, they needed a boda boda. Off-duty police officers offered to take them. It was something they did to supplement meagre wages.

The comrade asked a simple question: “Afande, do you think the protesters were wrong?”

The answers were raw. Painful. Honest.

“We also want change. But we want to survive.”
“Our conditions are bad.”
“It’s only the big people who are enjoying.”

One officer went further. He suggested that if protesters were many enough—enough to overwhelm the police and the army—they would eventually give in. Whether this reflected a genuine belief or a moment of candor shaped by the company he was in was impossible to tell. What was clear, however, was the depth of resignation beneath his words.

This is the anatomy of fear. The system does not rely on universal loyalty but on universal risk. Even those tasked with enforcing repression feel trapped by it. The result is paralysis. A peaceful protest is no longer met with solidarity, but with a fatalistic question: “You want me to die?”

Exemplary Punishment: Speaking So Others Stay Silent

A few people do speak anyway. And they are punished not simply to silence them, but to instruct everyone else.

Take the case of Cop Ampe. He had been under investigation for posts exposing corruption, human rights abuses, and mistreatment of lower-ranking officers. He did not issue threats or incite violence. He spoke calmly and publicly about injustices within the state, all of which could have been corroborated by colleagues—if they had the agency to do so. Ampe knew dismissal was inevitable. When it came, he accepted it and urged Ugandans not to let fear prevail.

He was subsequently abducted. 

Political theorists call this exemplary punishment. You need not arrest everyone. You only need to arrest—or disappear—a few, publicly enough, to make the rest imagine themselves next.

The lesson is absorbed instantly: silence is safer.

When Truth Withdraws, Lies Rush In

And when truth withdraws, lies do not hesitate.

Fear creates an information vacuum, which is quickly filled by rumours, half-truths, and- most effectively state-aligned propaganda. Those who spread misinformation face little risk. Some are paid. Others are protected. Many are amplified.

In the run-up to elections, influencers flooded social media with slogans about “protecting the gains.” Rarely did anyone explain what those gains were, who benefited from them, or why so many young people remain poor, harassed, and disposable.

Some of the most economically vulnerable citizens were handed T-shirts and 5,000 or 10,000 shillings to campaign—to chant, to post, to praise. Many of them are themselves victims of failed systems. The “protecting the gains” slogan spread faster than facts, because it was safer than tracing the real gains—or lack thereof—for those who have been most underserved by power. In this way, the slogan sidestepped any accountability to the very people it should have served.

Oppressors do not need their supporters to believe the lie; they only need them to repeat it. Uganda’s digital propaganda ecosystem operates precisely this way.

Fear has trained society to look away.

When Institutions Lie

Perhaps the most corrosive development is institutional disinformation.

Police statements following incidents of brutality are routinely contradicted by video evidence. Everyone sees the footage. Everyone knows the official narrative is false. Nothing happens.

This erodes reality itself. When institutions lie with impunity, facts lose their authority. Political scientists describe this phenomenon as epistemic nihilism, a space where truth no longer matters because power has declared itself immune to it.

In such an environment, institutional disinformation flourishes not because citizens are foolish, but because official explanations have forfeited trust.

God, Too, Has Been Co-opted

Fear does not stop at politics. It enters churches and mosques.

Religious leaders know the cost of criticism. Many choose safety. Sermons emphasize “leadership comes from God,” “we thank God for peace,” “do not touch the king.” The rhetoric aligns neatly with power. Those who challenge abuse are framed as destabilising agents.

When Catholic priest Fr. Deusdedit Ssekabira of Masaka Diocese was arrested by the military in December 2025 on allegations of “violent subversive activities,” President Museveni later confirmed that he had been arrested over alleged involvement with NUP’s Robert Kyagulanyi, noting he had declined requests from church leaders to have him released.

Even God, it seems, has boundaries.

Fear as an Accelerant of Lies

When factual truth is punished, people do not simply come to believe lies; they also lose trust in reality. Uganda is living that warning. Fear has become the accelerant that allows disinformation to outrun verification, propaganda to outpace testimony.

Lies move faster because they are sponsored. Truth moves slowly because it must hide.

Yet fear has a shelf life. Regimes that rule through fear eventually convince people that peace is impossible without them. This is the final lie of authoritarianism. History—from Eastern Europe to Latin America—suggests otherwise.

Fear is often strongest when power is weakest. The arrests, the abductions, the shutdowns, the propaganda blitz are not signs of confidence. They are signs of anxiety.

When a nation fears its own flag, its own citizens, its own truth-tellers, it has already lost moral authority.

Disinformation may dominate the moment. But fear cannot forever suppress reality. There comes a point when the cost of silence exceeds the cost of speaking. And when that threshold is crossed, no amount of propaganda—no matter how loud, no matter how funded—can hold back what follows.

Uganda’s elections are routinely described by state authorities as “peaceful,” a claim repeated with such regularity that it has come to function less as a factual assessment than as a narrative shield. Violence, in this telling, is either denied outright or reduced to “isolated incidents” or “lawful arrests” involving “indisciplined elements.” Yet a closer examination of the pre-election period reveals a pattern of coercion, intimidation, and physical violence that rarely enters official tallies.

January 4th, 2025. It is the mid-hours of the afternoon.

The sonorous sounds of pre-recorded kadodi beats, now signature to Robert Kyagulanyi’s campaign trail, ring intermittently in the air. The chants that ride those beats, “Eh Bobi, Bobi,” create an atmosphere that almost pulls you in, invites you to surrender to the moment.

But if you place any premium on your life, if the smell of blood unsettles you, you might want to stay away.

The air in Sironko hangs heavy with dust from traffic, stirred endlessly by roadworks along the Nalugugu–Namagumba road.

For Kyagulanyi and his supporters, however, this road would soon smell of something else entirely. Blood. Just as the campaign trail has smelled of blood in so many other parts of the country before.

A few hours later — predictably — a doctor part of the campaign, Dr. Hamza Lubulwa, is shot at close range.

He is travelling in a Toyota Wish, registration number UBM 430K, together with Dr. Uthman Wetaaka, the Mayor of Mbale Industrial Division. Dr. Wetaaka later recounts the events that led to the ordeal.

“We were coming from Buyaga Town Council. When we reached Nalugugu, police were trying to stop boda boda riders from following the Kyagulanyi convoy. Our vehicle was the last. As soon as our car passed, they crossed their vehicle to block the road and started beating the boda boda riders very badly.

We were forced to open our car and ask the police not to beat them. To just tell them they don’t want them to continue. One of them came and hit our car. That’s when we knew we were in danger.”

On their way to Budadiri Town Council, police officers cornered the vehicle being driven by Dr. Lubulwa. They beat all the occupants, dragged Hamza out, and began kicking him repeatedly. Then one officer drew a pistol and shot him at close range.

Clad in NUP red, Dr. Lubulwa collapses unconscious. He is rushed into an NUP ambulance.

The cries of supporters rupture the air.

“We have been peaceful. Why are you killing us?” “Why are you killing us?”

“What have we done?”

“The state takes us as enemies.”

“We are just moving. We are campaigning. We are peaceful.”

Dr. Wetaaka stands nearby, the Uganda flag draped across his body now with Dr. Hamza’s blood. He is visibly traumatised. He demands answers from the police officers. He shouts, “We will remain strong,” but the strength sounds borrowed, distant, forced.

He tries — and fails — to stop the tears.

His comrades hold him back. They keep saying, “Calm down.” “Hold him.” And almost reflexively, as though they know that even grief might be construed as provocation, they keep adding, “He is just traumatised.”

As if pain itself has become a crime.

What follows scenes like Sironko is not investigation, accountability, or acknowledgment of harm. It is paperwork.

Within hours of the shooting, the Uganda Police Force issued an official account through the Regional Police Spokesperson, Rogers Taitika. The statement did not reference a shooting. It did not acknowledge the use of live ammunition. It did not identify any officer involved.

Taitika stated that Dr. Hamza’s injuries resulted from a struggle after resisting lawful arrest. According to police, he overtook the convoy at speed, ignored orders to stop, nearly collided with a security vehicle, and was intercepted. During the ensuing scuffle, police said, he sustained a head wound and was taken to hospital. The shooting, in this version, disappears entirely.

The language was familiar. Words that carry authority, but absorb responsibility. And this pattern, is not unique to Sironko. As with Sironko, the emphasis police accounts is not on the act of violence but on context management: crowd control, indiscipline, disorder, provocation. The violence itself is rendered incidental.

In Mbarara, a peaceful campaign rally descended into violence marked by arrests, beatings, and the disappearance of supporters and journalists. More than 100 people, including parliamentary candidates, foot soldiers, and media workers, were arrested and detained. Police later claimed the arrests targeted suspects linked to earlier campaign crime. What was described officially as “law enforcement” functioned, in practice, as intimidation and disruption of legitimate political activity.

Speaking on The Big Talk with Canary Mugume, the Defence and Military Spokesperson Felix Kulayigye asserted that the state does not abduct individuals but only carries out lawful arrests, adding that no one is arrested for belonging to a different political party.

For many opposition supporters and candidates, this claim rings hollow. The experience on the ground suggests patterns that fall squarely within the lived meaning of abduction and violence regardless of official terminology.

As election day approaches, threats have also extended to opposition leadership. Kyagulanyi publicly warned of a plot to arrest him before polling day, alleging that the aim would be to provoke unrest similar to November 2020, justify mass arrests, and enable widespread military deployment. He further alleged plans to provoke violence in eastern Uganda, including Mbale City, through senior police officers, and accused security agencies of infiltrating his party with civilians dressed in NUP colours to manufacture incidents.

The Uganda Police Force dismissed these allegations as baseless and inflammatory, insisting that all operations would be conducted within the law to ensure tranquil elections. The Uganda Peoples Defence Forces echoed this position, warning that it was monitoring what it described as opposition “machinations.”

Meanwhile, violence has not been confined to candidates and supporters. Journalists covering electoral events have faced assaults, arrests, and harassment by security agencies. On 27 March 2025, after two weeks of attacks by masked anti-terrorism operatives, police, and soldiers, three major media houses withdrew their reporters from by-election coverage in Kampala, citing safety concerns. The Committee to Protect Journalists described election coverage in Uganda as “alarmingly dangerous,” warning that the integrity of the January 2026 elections depends on ending impunity for attacks on the press.

Civil society actors have also been targeted. In Kampala, police arrested Sarah Bireete, a prominent human rights lawyer and director of the Centre for Constitutional Governance, after surrounding her home with security forces. Bireete, a vocal critic of the increasing militarisation of civic space ahead of the elections, was taken into custody without immediate disclosure of charges. She was later charged with disclosing personal data contrary to section 35(1) and (2) of the Data Protection and Privacy Act, Cap 97.

Alongside this physical and psychological violence runs a parallel administrative process that quietly achieves the same end. Opposition candidates are nominated, verified, and gazetted, only to be disqualified later on technical grounds including, but not limited to, alleged deficiencies in nominators. These disqualifications, occurring after campaigns have begun, strip candidates of participation without a single baton being raised, yet their effect is equally exclusionary.

Violence, as these practices reveal, is not confined to election day or measurable fatalities. It is embedded in threats, arrests, disappearances, forced withdrawals, media suppression, and administrative erasure. Official Police language reduces these acts to “isolated incidents” and “lawful operations,” but repetition normalises abuse, and denial renders it invisible.

Peace, in this context, is not the absence of violence. It is the success of a system that ensures violence does not appear in the final count.

For the forthcoming general elections, the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) adopted the campaign slogan “Protecting the Gains.”

For many Ugandans, however, the gains to be protected are not developmental achievements, nor democratic milestones. The gains, as this story reveals, are parliamentary seat gains. These are the gains being protected.

And it would be overzealous, if not naïve, to assume that these gains are being protected genuinely.

No. The “Independent” Electoral Commission of Uganda, as custodian of the electoral process, is protecting these gains on behalf of the ruling party. The NRM speaks, and the Commission does the dirty work.

The Problem

For the past few weeks, it has been raining heavily across Uganda. But it is not just rain in the literal sense. It has also been raining disqualifications and unopposed nominations in the parliamentary elections.

Candidates are removed from the ballot after successful nomination and just weeks before polling. Uganda is set to hold its general elections in January 2026, beginning with presidential and parliamentary polls on 15 January 2026.

For many opposition candidates and their supporters, there is no hope. And if they did have hope, it is that very hope that will kill them—or is already killing them.

In several constituencies, elections have already been won before polling. They have not been won through persuasion or popular support, but through administrative processes. Central among these is the systematic disqualification of opposition candidates by the Electoral Commission, which has left ruling party incumbents unopposed.

The Disqualifications

The pattern of disqualification has followed a disturbingly consistent plot.

First, candidates are duly nominated by returning officers in their respective constituencies. Campaigns begin, mobilisation starts.

Then, the Electoral Commission disqualifies them. The reasons include but not limited to alleged failure to submit the requisite minimum number of nominators, lack of the prescribed academic qualifications, or failure to attach proof of resignation from public service. The list is long, repetitive, and increasingly familiar, forming a pattern rather than isolated administrative errors. 

The list is long.

Arnold Ankunda, a People’s Front for Freedom (PFF) candidate and a strong challenger to incumbent Bright Rwamirama, the Minister of State for Animal Industry, was disqualified in Isingiro North.

In Buyanja County, Ategeka Christopher of the National Unity Platform (NUP), contesting against Finance Minister Matia Kasaija, was disqualified. NUP president Robert Kyagulanyi later stated on X that Ategeka had refused a UGX 300 million bribe to step down. When this happened, he posted, disqualification followed.

In Isingiro District, Resty Sarah Kyarimpa, NUP’s candidate for Woman Member of Parliament, was disqualified after the Commission claimed one supporter appeared twice on her nomination form, leaving her with nine instead of the required ten seconders. The party disputed this, noting that the Commission uses a computerised system that does not allow a voter to endorse the same candidate twice. The party further stated that Kyarimpa had also been offered money to withdraw, and refused. Disqualification, they argue, was retaliation.

Manufacturing Unopposed Seats

Minister of State for Energy Phiona Nyamutoro

In Nebbi District, Minister of State for Energy Phiona Nyamutoro was declared unopposed after the Commission nullified the nomination of NUP’s Mercy Rebecca Abedican, her only remaining challenger. The Commission held that two of Abedican’s seconders disowned their signatures. 

Yet in a leaked phone recording, Nyamutoro is heard plotting that Abedican should not be nominated, stating it would be “safer” and allow her to mobilise for President Yoweri Museveni.

In Bukedea, Speaker of Parliament Anita Annet Among was declared unopposed after her only challenger, Asio Florence (NUP), failed to appear for nomination. Asio later explained that she withdrew due to family pressure. She said that Among is her “mother”, and that her candidacy had been a last-minute decision unknown to her family.

Earlier still, the Electoral Commission upheld decisions of village tribunals that disqualified Susan Norma Otai (FDC), Hellen Odeke Akol, and Marion Mercy Alupo (NUP). All women that had sought to challenge Among. They were accused of not being registered voters in the relevant parishes, a decision widely criticised as politically motivated to clear the path for the Speaker.

In Buyende East, Among’s husband, Moses Magogo, was declared unopposed after the Commission disqualified Daniel Mulirire, a former police officer, for failing to attach proof of resignation from public service.

Academic Qualifications as a Political Weapon

In Busiro East, NUP candidate Walukaga Mathias, a renowned Kadongo Kamu singer, was disqualified on academic grounds. The Commission ruled that his Mature Age Certificate—issued by the Islamic University in Uganda on 12 June 2023—had expired by the time he presented it for nomination on 23 October 2025.

Walukaga argued that the same certificate had enabled his admission to university and that he possessed an NCHE equivalence letter. The Commission rejected this, holding that equivalence does not itself constitute a qualification.

Legally arguable, yes. But the selective timing is material, in this instance: qualifications are questioned after nomination, not before, which reinforces claims that technical compliance is being deployed retrospectively to eliminate political challengers rather than to uphold electoral integrity.

The Law

The procedure for the nomination of candidates for parliamentary elections is provided for under Section 28 of the Parliamentary Elections Act, Cap. 177.

Under Section 28(1)(c), a person seeking nomination as a candidate for election to Parliament is required to submit nomination papers containing the names and signatures of a minimum of ten persons who are registered voters in the constituency in which the person seeks nomination. Each of the persons endorsing the nomination must state, in the nomination paper, his or her village, occupation, and personal voter registration number.

Section 30 of the Act sets out the circumstances under which a nomination is rendered invalid. A person shall not be regarded as duly nominated for a constituency, and the nomination paper of any person shall be regarded as void, where the nomination paper was not signed and countersigned in accordance with Section 28(1); where the nomination fee referred to in Section 28(3) was not lodged together with the nomination paper; where the person seeking nomination was not qualified for election under Section 4; where the person seeking nomination has been duly nominated for election for another constituency for which the poll has not taken place; or where the person has not complied with the provisions of Section 4.

With respect to academic qualifications, Section 4 of the Parliamentary Elections Act provides for the qualifications and disqualifications of Members of Parliament. Under Section 4(1), a person is qualified to be a Member of Parliament if the person is a citizen of Uganda, is a registered voter, and has completed a minimum formal education of Advanced Level standard or its equivalent.

The Weaponisation of Technicalities

Nomination, I am convinced, is meant to be confirmation—not a trial phase.

If a single supporter can later deny a signature and automatically trigger disqualification, the nomination process becomes structurally vulnerable to manipulation. What should be a safeguard for electoral integrity is instead transformed into a post-nomination veto, exercisable by any individual willing or pressured to recant.

This vulnerability acquires sharper meaning in an environment where coercive power is asymmetrically distributed. Opposition parties do not command the instruments of the state. They cannot summon police, intelligence agencies, or local administrative structures to enforce compliance. Government actors, by contrast, possess both the means and the proximity to make threats credible. When a supporter retracts an endorsement under such circumstances, the act cannot be understood in isolation from the power relations within which it occurs.

The weaponisation lies not only in the denial itself, but in the conditions under which denial is produced. Withdrawal of consent, once induced by intimidation, threat, or inducement, ceases to be a free act. Yet the Electoral Commission treats it as conclusive, without inquiry into how or why it occurred.

This raises a key question: why is due diligence deferred until after nomination? Returning officers are mandated to receive, verify, and confirm nomination papers. If a nomination is accepted, gazetted, and campaigns permitted to proceed, on what basis is the same nomination later re-opened without evidence of fraud established through investigation or judicial process?

There is also the question of plausibility. In constituencies with tens or hundreds of thousands of registered voters, is it genuinely credible that a candidate cannot lawfully secure ten qualified seconders? Or does the repeated invocation of this technical requirement, across multiple constituencies and disproportionately against opposition candidates, suggest a mechanism designed less to enforce compliance than to filter out challengers?

At minimum, methinks, a denied signature should trigger an investigation, including verification of circumstances, timelines, and potential inducement or intimidation. At most, it should require a judicial finding of forgery or fraud. Automatic disqualification, based solely on post-hoc denial, collapses the distinction between allegation and proof.

Under the leadership of Electoral Commission chairperson Simon Byabakama, the Commission continues to make decisions that many view as illegal, partisan, and openly contemptuous of public scrutiny.

Even when Ugandans see it. Even when they know that Ugandans know it.

Protecting the Gains

Where power fears competition, competition is not allowed to stand.

Political battles are being won before voting begins. The system no longer pretends to be non-partisan. It is proudly partisan.

The gains are being protected.
But democracy is paying the price.

Uganda has recently been caught in a noisy, emotional, and at times bitter debate about Members of Parliament and the kind of Parliament the country deserves. The spark was the National Unity Platform primaries process, where several long-serving, well established MP figures now referred to as ‘Abateketeke’ in Luganda dialect to mean the groomed, prepared, and elite were denied the party flag. These included Medard Segona of Busiro County East, Joyce Bagala, Woman MP Mityana District, and Allan Sewanyana of Makindye West. In response, the political space split almost instantly into two hostile camps. One side accused the party of abandoning quality and expertise, warning that Parliament would be reduced to a chaotic gathering of amateurs. The other side fired back with equal anger, arguing that the so-called elite MPs had done little for the people, had grown comfortable, compromised, and in some cases openly entangled in corruption and patronage networks.

The language became sharp. The old guard were labelled out of touch elites. The new entrants were dismissed as unpolished, unrefined, and unprepared. This revealed something much deeper: a national crisis of confidence in Parliament itself and in the kind of leadership Uganda has been producing for decades.

There is an uncomfortable truth that must be faced honestly. Much of Uganda’s political elite has been profoundly unproductive. President Museveni himself has, on several occasions, mocked sections of the elite for having nothing to show beyond good English and impressive titles. While the President’s motivations for saying this may be questioned, the observation resonates with many citizens. Across sectors, politics, academia, and civil service, we have cultivated a class of people who are fluent in language but poor in results, confident in theory but weak in delivery. In Parliament, this elite often shines in debate, committee rooms, and television appearances, yet struggles to translate that sophistication into laws, oversight, and policies that materially improve people’s lives.

This failure is precisely why many Ugandans feel little sympathy when long-serving MPs are dropped. To the ordinary citizen, especially those at the margins, these leaders appear distant, protected, and increasingly indistinguishable from the system they once claimed to oppose. The frequent references to figures implicated in corruption scandals, such as MPs who served as parliamentary commissioners or even Leaders of the opposition, like Mathias Mpuuga, have reinforced the perception that experience has not necessarily produced integrity or courage. In this light, the anger directed at the elite is not irrational; it stems from disappointment. 

This is not an insult to those who lack formal education or elite exposure; it is a recognition of how power is structured. The system is not neutral. It rewards those who can navigate complexity and punishes those who cannot. A representative may live the struggles of the people daily, understand hunger, unemployment, and broken services intimately, yet still fail to convert that understanding into effective parliamentary action. Lived experience without institutional competence can quickly become frustration, silence, or tokenism.

It would be dishonest and dangerous to pretend that simply replacing the elite with anyone who is closer to the people is a sufficient solution. Parliament is a highly technical institution governed by rules of procedure, complex budgeting processes, procurement laws, constitutional interpretation, committee systems, and international obligations. Legislation is often buried in dense legal language. Oversight requires a deep understanding of public finance, contracts, and bureaucratic systems designed sometimes deliberately to confuse and exhaust. A legislator who cannot read, analyze, question, and strategically engage with these systems is easily outmaneuvered, manipulated, or rendered irrelevant. It is no wonder that in the current parliament, about 90 MPs have not spoken more than three times on the floor. 

And so, Uganda finds itself trapped between two unsatisfying options: an elite that knows the system but often lacks the moral courage or public accountability to challenge it, and community-rooted leaders who know the pain on the ground but may lack the tools to confront the system effectively. Treating this as a binary choice is a mistake. The real question is not elite versus non-elite, but performance versus failure, integrity versus compromise, and service versus self-preservation. 

The language we use matters. Describing some candidates as “non-elite” automatically frames them as deficient. A better term might be “community-rooted leaders,” people whose legitimacy comes from lived reality rather than pedigree. But being community-rooted should not exempt anyone from the responsibility to be capable. Likewise, being elite should not excuse incompetence, corruption, or detachment from citizens’ lives.

Uganda does not need a blind purge of elites, nor does it need a romantic elevation of raw authenticity. It needs a new political standard. A Parliament made up of leaders who are intellectually equipped to deal with legislation and oversight, ethically grounded enough to resist corruption, and socially connected enough to remain accountable to the people who sent them there. These qualities are not mutually exclusive, but they are rarely demanded together.

This debate also forces us to confront an uncomfortable reality about Parliament itself. Even the most competent and ethical MP operates within a system that often discourages boldness and rewards compliance. Committee positions, allowances, and access can all become tools of control. This is why competence must be paired with courage, and experience must be anchored in principle. Without that combination, Parliament becomes what many Ugandans already believe it is: a place of speeches without consequences and oversight without teeth.

Voting capable leaders, therefore, is not a magic solution, but it is a necessary starting point. It is how citizens signal that performance matters, that integrity matters, and that connection to real life must go hand in hand with institutional skill. Over time, this pressure can reshape political incentives, encourage parties to invest in serious candidate preparation, and slowly rebuild Parliament’s credibility as an institution that serves the public interest.

The argument over elites and non-elites should not distract us from the deeper task at hand. Uganda’s crisis is not merely one of representation, but of leadership quality. Until citizens’ demand leaders who can think, act, and remain accountable at the same time, Parliament will continue to disappoint, no matter who occupies its seats. The choice before Ugandans is not between polish and authenticity, but between failure and competence, between compromise and courage. 

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This article was born out of unease. Unease triggered by a statement from my friend Samwyri, popularly known as “Chaos Theory”, a veteran activist whose efforts I respect, but whose recent reflection on X left me troubled. He said, and I quote, ‘the lumpen proletariat should have never been given space to keep rising and determining our politics’. It was a statement made, perhaps, in frustration at the quality of politics we see around us. But it is also a statement that reveals how dangerously detached our political analysis can become from lived reality.

I have been thinking about that assertion alongside a deeply personal and sobering story, that of Atuheirwe Patience, whom I recently hosted on the NUP podcast. Her life is not exceptional in the sense of rarity; it is exceptional only in how honestly it reflects the silent suffering of thousands of Ugandan women and young people.

Patience dreamed of becoming a lawyer. Like many Ugandan girls, she believed education would be her ladder out of poverty and vulnerability. That dream collapsed, not because of laziness or lack of intelligence, but because Uganda is a country where ambition is routinely punished by circumstance. After Senior Six, with limited options and no safety net, she did what many are quietly forced to do: she went to the Middle East to work. There, she encountered what countless Ugandan migrant workers know too well: low pay, long hours, abuse, illness, mental strain, and a profound sense of disposability. She returned home carrying scars that will never appear on a CV.

And yet, instead of retreating into bitterness or silence, Atuheirwe Patience made a choice that is as dangerous as it is courageous: she decided to run for Woman Member of Parliament in Kamwenge. In Uganda, such a decision does not merely invite criticism; it invites surveillance, intimidation, and social risk. It is not a rational move if one’s only goal is comfort. It is a political act born of pain, conviction, and the belief that the country must change.

Her story immediately reminded me of Olivia Lutaaya, an illiterate woman whose only crime was supporting the National Unity Platform. She has suffered endless imprisonment, suffering at the hands of the state, not because she wielded power, but because she dared to believe she mattered politically. Olivia does not speak the language of political theory. She does not quote Marx or Fanon. But her body has absorbed the consequences of a system that treats certain citizens as expendable.

These women are not anomalies. They are representatives of a generation that has been failed systematically. Young people whose education was interrupted, women whose labour is exported and abused, and citizens whose health and dignity are treated as collateral damage in the maintenance of power. To describe them casually as the “lumpen proletariat,” and then to suggest that their participation in political leadership is the problem, is not just analytically lazy; it is morally troubling.

The term lumpen proletariat comes from Marxist theory, often used to describe a class detached from productive labour and therefore politically unreliable or reactionary. But applying this label wholesale to Uganda’s poor, unemployed, undereducated, and dispossessed youth misunderstands both Marx and Uganda. Our so-called lumpen are not outside the system; they are its most brutalised product. They are not politically apathetic by nature; they are politically conscious through suffering.

What is truly dangerous is not the political participation of the wounded, but the monopoly of politics by those who have never felt the system’s sharpest edges. Uganda has, for decades, been governed by a narrow elite that is well-spoken, credentialed, and comfortable and yet spectacularly incapable of delivering justice, equity, or opportunity. This elite has presided over mass youth unemployment, the feminisation of poverty, the export of labour under degrading conditions, and the criminalisation of dissent. If political competence were guaranteed by polish, fluency, or elite pedigree, Uganda would be a very different country by now.

The discomfort some feel when people like Atuheirwe Patience enter politics is revealing. It is not about competence alone; it is about class anxiety. It is the fear that politics is being reclaimed by people who speak a different language, whose pain cannot be managed by procedure, and whose demands are not polite. But history teaches us something uncomfortable: transformative politics has never been led by the comfortable. It has always been driven by those for whom the status quo is unbearable.

This does not mean that suffering automatically produces good leadership. Romanticising pain is as dangerous as dismissing it. Parliament is complex. Governance requires skill, learning, and discipline. But the answer to this is not exclusion; it is preparation, collective leadership, and institutional support. The solution is not to tell the poor to stay out of politics, but to demand that political movements invest in political education, mentorship, and accountability forexample the attempt by NUP under the school of leadership, especially for those coming from marginalised backgrounds.

What Samwyri’s assertion misses is that Uganda’s current political crisis is not caused by the entry of the “lumpen,” but by the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of an elite that has failed to imagine a future beyond itself. The emergence of women like Atuheirwe Patience and Olivia Lutaaya is not a degeneration of politics; it is a symptom of a society reaching its breaking point. These are not people seeking chaos. They are people seeking dignity.

If the choice is between politics that protects comfort and one that confronts suffering, Uganda’s future lies with the latter. Not because the “lumpen” are perfect, but because they are real. And in a country where reality has been ignored for too long, real people, especially wounded women and young people, may be exactly where political renewal must begin.