Uganda’s latest election result delivering Yoweri Museveni yet another term does not feel like news so much as the continuation of a long grinding sentence. Nearly four decades into his rule the announcement lands with the dull certainty of a verdict everyone in the courtroom already knew. Ballots were cast, numbers were tallied, speeches were made and the outcome was declared. The ritual of democracy was performed. Its substance, however, remains conspicuously absent.
Museveni once spoke the language of liberation. He arrived in power in the 1980s promising stability, national renewal and an end to the brutal cycles of dictatorship that had torn Uganda apart. For a time, many believed him. But revolutions that linger too long tend to harden into what they once opposed. Today, the vocabulary of freedom has been replaced by the machinery of control, riot police instead of rallies, prison cells instead of debates and digital darkness instead of public scrutiny.
An election conducted alongside an internet blackout is not merely a technical irregularity; it is a political confession. It admits fear. It declares that the state no longer trusts its own citizens to speak to one another. In modern societies, cutting the internet is akin to cutting the oxygen supply in a crowded room. Voices suffocate, witnesses vanish, and abuses learn to move in silence. What remains is an official story, delivered from above, polished and unchallengeable.
The opposition crackdown that accompanied this vote was not an unfortunate side effect. It was the campaign strategy. Opposition figures were arrested, supporters beaten, meetings banned, and neighborhoods flooded with security forces. The message was clear long before election day, participation is allowed, but only if it poses no danger to the outcome. This is not competition; it is choreography.
Supporters of Museveni argue that stability justifies the methods. They warn of chaos, of ethnic conflict, of regional insecurity. Uganda, they say, cannot afford experiments. But stability purchased through fear is not stability at all. It is paralysis. It is a society held in place not by consent, but by exhaustion. Over time, such systems do not prevent explosions; they delay them, compressing anger into tighter and more dangerous forms.
Corruption thrives in this atmosphere like mould in a sealed room. When leaders stop worrying about being voted out, they begin planning how to extract more before the walls finally collapse. Public offices become private investments. Courts become tools. Police become personal guards for the powerful. Ordinary citizens learn that justice is not blind, merely selective.
Then there is the quieter damage, harder to photograph but easier to feel: discrimination normalized, torture whispered about as routine, imprisonment used as punctuation in political arguments. A generation of Ugandans has grown up knowing only one president. For many of them, authority is not something questioned; it is something survived. Their political education has been conducted through curfews, tear gas, and court dates.
The tragedy is not only what is done to opponents, but what is done to possibility. Every stolen election teaches young people that engagement is pointless. Every silenced journalist teaches writers to choose safer subjects. Every beaten protester teaches neighbours to stay indoors. A country does not lose its freedom in one dramatic night; it misplaces it gradually, like loose change slipping from a torn pocket.
Abroad, disapproval will be theatrical, cautious, and buried under strategic interests.
But inside Uganda, the cost is paid in smaller, heavier currencies: in years lost behind bars, in families waiting outside police stations, in students learning to lower their voices, in entrepreneurs calculating bribes as a standard business expense. Authoritarianism is not only a political system; it is a daily climate, shaping how people walk, speak, and dream.
Museveni’s seventh term is not simply another chapter. It is a warning about what happens when power becomes a habit. Habits do not ask permission. They do not apologize. They repeat themselves until interrupted.
Uganda is more than one man, one party, or one army uniform. It is farmers, teachers, musicians, engineers, street vendors, and children who deserve a future that is not negotiated through batons and blackout switches. Whether that future arrives peacefully or violently will depend largely on how long the present is allowed to pretend it is permanent.
For now, the long night continues. The lights are off, the doors are guarded, and the same voice speaks from the same balcony. Elections are held, results are announced, and the country is told, once again, to call it democracy.
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