Uganda’s President Museveni - and his frightening would-be successor

On January 15 Uganda has voted. President Museveni has been declared the winner with nearly 72 per cent of the vote, yet nobody knows the real result. The opposition candidate Bobi Wine went from his house arrest straight into hiding and the President’s son, who is the head of the military, has vowed to kill him. Unlike in the neighbouring Tanzania three months ago the disaffected youths of Uganda have not gone into the streets to protest the rigged election results only to be killed by security forces in the hundreds. There is an eery political quietness in Dar-es-Salaam and Kampala after two more East African countries have now moved from fake democracy to open autocracy. “Why do we bother to vote” not only the members of Generation Z are asking themselves in this East African neighbourhood, waiting for the cauldron of suppressed anger to explode. Somewhere. Some time. May be even soon. 

At the age of 81 President Yoweri Museveni is now entering his seventh term at the helm of Uganda, a landlocked East African nation of about 52 million citizens, 80% under the age of 40 whose lives have been wedded to his deeds and words. Yet the “old man’s” story stands for a lot that has gone wrong with the leaders and liberation movements of African states.  

Born in 1944 to a family of cattle keepers in Western Uganda Museveni got his theoretical grooming in exile at the University of Dar-es-Salaam where in the late 60s Africa’s tiny intellectual elite was searching for socialist solutions to the problems of the newly independent states. His view of Ugandan politics was shaped during 70s and 80s by experiencing the alternating violent rule of Idi Amin and Milton Obote, when war was politics and politics was war. Museveni helped to form the Front for National Salvation which ousted “the butcher” Idi Amin with Tanzania’s help. But he went back to the bush and launched a guerrilla war against the new government of Amin’s successor Milton Obote who had claimed victory in the rigged election of 1980. 

After a five-year-long and bloody civil war Museveni took power in 1986 as the head of a rebel army. After more than two decades of violence he promised to bring stability and unity to the country - and did so for quite a while. He also promised to leave power when it was time. But in the end, he broke all those promises. Today the country lacks stability and he still resides in State House. 

After 40 years in power this once promising liberation fighter has become the incarnation of the “Old Big Men”, the typical African autocrat never leaving office in time, a prototype about whom he had warned Ugandans in 1986 by famously saying that “the problem of Africa in general, and Uganda in particular, is … leaders who want to overstay in power”. 

The story of Yoweri Museveni and his “National Resistance Movement” (NRM) turned political party is emblematic for the failure of too many African leaders and liberation movements to adopt democratic rules and accept defeat at the ballot box; for their unwillingness to acknowledge the popularity of political opponents and to change the hierarchical and informal structures of a fighting force into those of a political party. 

Look at Paul Biya in Cameroon declared winner for another seven-year term at age 92; or Ivory Coast’s President Alassane Outtara winning his fourth term at age 83.  Look at Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe, SWAPO in Namibia, Frelimo in Mozambique, all former liberation movements turned into permanent ruling parties unable to shed their illiberal baggage that was once essential for their victories. 

As rebel leader and president Museveni has proven himself as wily as the late Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and as smart as Paul Kagame who rose from his side in the Ugandan rebel movement to the Presidency of neighbouring Ruanda. Yet this “new breed of reformers” - as they were celebrated by the West during the 80s or 90s - turned from the task of nation building to authoritarian rule once their power was being challenged by the opposition. Of this illustrious group of post-independence leaders only Tanzania’s founding president Julius Nyerere left power voluntarily. But Tanzania’s lively multi-party system introduced in 1992 was quickly neutered by hardliners of the ruling CCM-Party like current President Samia Suluhu Hassan who had thousands of protestors killed after the rigged election of October 2025.  

In the case of Yoweri Kaguta Museveni the initially slow authoritarian drift took off in 2005 when he had term limits removed, and it accelerated in 2017 when he bribed parliamentarians to remove the age limit for the presidency. Uganda’s elections in 2006 and 2011 where neither free nor fair, but those since then have been a complete travesty of democracy. 

In his new book “Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State” the renowned Ugandan intellectual Mahmood Mamdani compares Museveni’s style of continuing the techniques of divide-and-rule by the British colonizers to the brutal attempt by Idi Amin to create a Black Ugandan nation by expelling the Indian minority in 1972. Where Amin racialized the nation, Museveni tribalized it. “Continuous fragmentation of the subject population, an ongoing and seemingly endless process, reinforced by official violence and institutionalized corruption – that is, different ways of disciplining resisters and rewarding collaborators, is what I call ‘slow poison’ writes Mahmood Mamdani. The father of New York City’s new mayor believes that “the Museveni era has corroded the morals of an entire generation” and that it will take another generation for the country to come out of the “all-pervasive corruption and cynicism that cloud the country like a fog”. 

But even under this cloud of cynicism the most popular opposition candidate Bobi Wine has run another impressive election campaign. The 43-year-old rock-star turned politician, whose real name is Robert Kyagulanyi, drew large crowds all over the country which belied his meagre election results of 24% of the votes. Dressed in his signatory war gear with helmet and bullet-proved vest Bobi Wine was stopped and harassed many times, had members of his team arrested, some activists of his “National Unity Platform” (NUP) even killed and his supporters teargassed in the streets where his convoy passed.  And Kizza Besigye, the other long-time rival of Museveni who has challenged him in four elections has been held in prison with trumped up charges for more than a year, now even being denied adequate medical care. 

This unequal contestation between the octogenarian for stability and the music star for change has been taking place in a country with 6 % economic growth (2025) but youth unemployment at officially 43%; a country that since independence has received 60 billion US-Dollars in development assistance, but whose health-aid- dependent population is suffering terribly from the recent demolition of USAID by Donald Trump. This unfair contest has been fought in the second youngest country in the world with a median age of 17 years, where half of the population is not old enough to vote; a place where according to Afrobarometer’s polling more than 90% of Ugandans reject one-party rule, but where only half of the 21 million eligible voters turned up at the ballot box.

 Some observers accuse Bobi Wine’s NUP of having no economic program or transition strategy. But what can an opposition leader with little expertise and few technocrats in his party offer and do under such a repressive regime, other than hoping for protests of Generation Z in the streets toppling the regime? 

The bitter irony is that Bobi Wine and his followers come from the ghetto which is the real legacy of Museveni’s 40-year-long reign: from “a class of hustlers”, as the journalist Liam Taylor describes it, rather a “lumpen” than “industrial proletariat”. This class of gifted wheeler dealers, motor taxi drivers and other informal workers who fete famous boxers and musicians like Bobi Wine - living an urban ghetto life of great improvisation and precarious living - has emerged over the years after Museveni’s World-Bank enforced adoption of structural adjustment policies and neoliberal reforms failed because it was ill-applied and undermined by patrimonial politics. The promised transformation never came. 

Uganda’s arrested development has been the price for Museveni’s choice of dealmaking over the institutionalization of power over four decades. He dealt with ethnic conflicts by tribalization, with the problems of local administration by informal arrangements, and with the international community by offering the service of his military in Somalia, Sudan and elsewhere against the acceptance of his autocratic behaviour at home by foreign donors. His rule has always meandered between collaboration and coercion, between buying off his opponents and punishing those who resist.  

Against this entrenched regime with the power to bribe and all the means of repression political parties or other opposing voices have no chance. The most outspoken and effective civil society organisations like Chapter 4 have been suspended few days before the election. The internet had been switched off on January 13 for five days. 

And by 2026 the country’s media have become a shadow of their once lively self. The mainstream media have largely remained silent about the election violence and kidnapping of opposition politicians after having received letters of caution. Leading columnist preferred to tame their voices. Given the personal price political activists and some brave reporters on the campaign trail of 2021 and 2026 have had to pay this is more than understandable.  

Initially, there was little international outcry about the pre-election violence and intimidation. The observer mission of the African Union has voiced some careful criticism of the voting process, but many of its leaders congratulated Museveni on his convincing victory. Instead of castigating one of their kind East African leaders prefer to support each other by sending their security services to assist with the repression next door or by forcefully returning politicians or activists who have fled their own country.  

Western diplomacy still seems to be stuck in the believe that the stability of an authoritarian regime is preferable to some untested opposition with street credibility. Better Museveni as the devil you know with whom one hopes to return to development business as usual. And nobody is asking the question if the mere holding of elections should remain a condition or a ranking criterion for receiving development aid. 

With the election over the fight for succession is on. Observers like Kristof Titeca have repeatedly described the extreme personalization of power, the growing militarization and ethnic patronage under Museveni. “Uganda’s transition”, he argues, “will likely be shaped by the first family, the army, ethnic dynamics, and regional powers with significant risk of instability”. 

Within ten days of the election this prediction turned out to be correct when General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Museveni’s son and head of the military - and already famous for his outrageous social media posts - entered the political arena proper. After having vowed to kill Bobi Wine, he erased his initial series of violent tweets; only to announce a few days later that his forces had arrested 2000 NUP “terrorists”, killed 30 of them, and that the fugitive Bobi Wine will be caught “dead or alive”.  

Meanwhile the goons of the Special Forces Command (SFC), which Muhoozi had formed before he took over the leadership of the military, were terrorising Bobi Wine’s wife and children at their home. It was only then that the Diplomatic Service of the European Union, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and members of the US-Senate criticized the pre- and post-election violence and pondered sanctions for the maverick general. Sending videos from his hiding places via facebook Bobi Wine has asked the international community to seek guarantees for his security. 

Rumours of a so-called “Muhoozi Project”, the enthronization of the first son as Museveni’s successor, have been around Kampala for more than a decade. His rapid rise from his training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst through the ranks to become head of the SFC, then the army, and 2024 the entire military, speaks to this scenario. At times Museveni himself seemed to have his doubts about his maverick son when he temporarily demoted him more, but to no avail. 

Yet despite of his questionable character the rambunctious and crazy son has systematically been building his political career. With the Patriotic League of Uganda, he launched a cross between a fan club and a political party. With the MK Movement the 51-year-old claimed the mantle of Generation Z. With his racist diatribes against the ethnic Buganda inhabiting the central region around Kampala - where Bobi Wine and the NUP are clearly more popular - Muhoozi is weaponizing the ethnic faultlines below the superficial stability of the Museveni’s Uganda. 

But most of all, he successively sidelined the so called historicals, the reputed soldiers who had fought with his father in the bush and had become professional generals with a conscience. For years many Ugandans, and even opposition supporters, had been hoping that one or a group of those generals could take over before the Museveni regime was going to disintegrate. 

But the violent ways in which Muhoozi can now tweet and have his soldiers act without reprimand from State House suggests that the president has lost control over his unhinged sibling - and the future governance of the country. For now, the president is enjoying his seventh term in what he defines as peace and stability. Yet with every day of his silence, it becomes more likely that Museveni’s Uganda is heading for a succession that will end with a ruler combining the erratic narcissism of Donald Trump with the murderous ruthlessness of Idi Amin. This scenario also shows what Gen Z is up against in a militarized country in the grip of the ruling family like Uganda.