Uganda: The Dying Throes of a Demented Regime

Ray Hartley and Greg Mills

The Ugandan opposition leader, Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, popularly known as Bobi Wine, has warned that Uganda’s election planned for January 2026 is in danger of becoming a bloodbath like that in Tanzania in October, where thousands are believed to have been killed by security forces.

“We have reliable information that the regime in Uganda is planning a massacre. They are planning to provoke people into an uprising so they can get the opportunity to massacre people in cold blood in order to send a chill across the country,” he said in an interview.

“The regime in Uganda seems to be playing into the usual dictator's playbook: arrest, torture, violence.” 

He appealed to the international community to “take an interest in this massacre before it happens”.

“If the defenders of democracy across the world rose to the occasion and raised their voices, maybe the people of Uganda would have their shot at democracy.”

Until now, aside from a handful of NGOs, the international community has been largely reactive to the plight of African democrats. If the recent Tanzanian election is anything to go by, instead of proactively addressing clear signs of violence and telegraphing the isolation of the regime, multinational organisations respond after the tragic loss of life at the hands of vote-rigging regimes. In the case of the Commonwealth, the one extra-African body which ties together much of East Africa, the response is limp, sending emissaries after the fact to Dar es Salaam.

Business is often worse, intent on making money regardless of regime type, staying schtum and pursuing profit, whatever the human rights cost. And some are directly complicit, responsible for turning the internet on and off faster than you can say ‘dividend’. They avoid direct censure by keeping their heads down, with Western governments also aware that Museveni now has options with Russian, Chinese and Middle Eastern actors.

For outsiders to make a difference, it needs to be clear what they are up against. As Kristof Titeca has eloquently written, we are in the midst of the usual staple of Ugandan election violence in line with the use of state power to constrain opposition mobilisation but with a distinct twist: the politics of succession within the ruling political order. “Electoral violence, the securitisation of civic space, fragmentation within the ruling party, and the proliferation of regime-adjacent campaign ‘movements’ all point less to electoral uncertainty,” Kristof writes, “than to intensified manoeuvring around life after Yoweri Museveni. Elections thus function less as moments of democratic choice than as arenas in which actors — within the ruling apparatus, the security sector, and adjacent political networks — signal loyalty, relevance, and usefulness in anticipation of an uncertain post-Museveni future.”

Wine said there was clear evidence that the government of Museveni, who has been in power for 40 years, was violently undermining his campaign and denying him the ability to freely contest the election. Term limits on the presidency were abolished in 2005. Amidst regularly teargassing, intimidation and interference, more recently the violence went up a notch this weekend with beatings of Wine’s supporters in Gulu who were attempting to shield their candidate with their bodies. 

“The regime has once again unleashed brute force,” says Wine. “They follow us everywhere, and they keep teargassing us along the way. They have confiscated all the sound systems. They've arrested more than 400 people of my campaign team. Largely 90% of my campaign team is in prison right now.”

He said live ammunition had been used against his supporters.

Other measures that undermined the electoral process included the scrapping of statutory funding from Parliament “to ensure that we go into this election bankrupt. And indeed, we have gone into this election without posters and without uh campaign material. 

“I'm not allowed to use the radio stations. But lately, even in the assembled rallies, the political rally, the police launch teargas canisters into the rallies, dispersing them. Of course, these are heavily armed police officers and military officers who keep following us.”

Wine has been travelling across Uganda, drawing huge crowds of followers, suggesting that he is serious competition for the ageing Museveni.

“There are those that are missing that we've never known where they went. For example, we have 18 families of our missing comrades, but those are the ones that have the confidence to come and report, he said.

Museveni has ruled Uganda for 40 years since taking power in 1986, and democracy has been steadily eroded as he has sought to stay in power. The run-up to the January 2021 election saw the killing of more than 50 people in a process that, unsurprisingly, was widely believed to have been rigged.

Ahead of that poll, Wine was arrested for allegedly violating COVID-19 protocols and released, only to be arrested again on 30 December at a rally on Kalangala Island, where police broke up a rally he was addressing. In an eerie repeat of the fate of Dr Kizza Besigye, the veteran opposition leader who stood against Museveni in 2001, 2006, 2011 and 2016, every occasion being marked by fraud and violence, following the contentious 2021 poll, Wine was placed under house arrest and his home surrounded during the counting process.

The campaign for the 2021 election was also marred by arrests and the killing of more than 100 supporters and 2000 arrests as Museveni clung onto power. This time expect worse as Museveni’s son, also a General, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, stamps his particularly brutal brand on the proceedings. Known for his tweetstorms, including his threats to behead Bobi Wine or hang Dr Kiiza Besigye who has been imprisoned on treason charges for over a year, members of his Patriotic League of Uganda are manoeuvring into positions of power. 

With few exceptions, external actors have become markedly less outspoken on governance and human rights violations in Africa than at any time since the end of the Cold War. This highlights geopolitical shifts, and rivalries. Caught in the middle are African people. More than 90% of Ugandans reject one-party rule according to Afrobarometer’s polling, while 81% prefer democracy over other forms of government. Only 55% see the last election in 2021 as free and fair, and just 54% believe they are living in a democracy, albeit with problems. 

For all of the familiarity of violence, patronage and interference, the “succession theatre” makes this election different. Internal fragmentation of the ruling party in the ongoing shakedown between winners and losers, coupled with a lack of governing legitimacy springing from a pre-cooked election process, may make Western actors wish they had spoken up sooner rather than too late.

Ray Hartley and Greg Mills are with the Platform for African Democrats