By Praise Aloikin Opoloje
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.
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.
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