Amid military pageantry, a continent’s worth of dignitaries and a contested election result, Africa’s fourth longest-serving leader extended a rule that began before many of his citizens were born. Whether that continuity represents stability or stagnation depends entirely on who in Uganda you ask.
By Richard Olwenyi | Global Echos | May 12, 2026
KAMPALA. The yellow flags were everywhere. Thousands of National Resistance Movement supporters packed the Kololo Ceremonial Grounds on Tuesday morning, blowing whistles, chanting party slogans and waving the colour that has come to define four decades of Ugandan political life, as Yoweri Kaguta Museveni was sworn in for a seventh term as president of Uganda. Military helicopters and fighter aircraft from the Ugandan Air Force swept overhead throughout the ceremony in formations that officials described as a display of national defence readiness and regional military cooperation. The imagery was deliberate: power, endurance and the state as a single, indivisible institution.
Museveni, who first took office in 1986 after leading a five-year guerrilla campaign that toppled the governments preceding him, is now approaching four decades of uninterrupted rule. If he completes this term, he will govern Uganda into the 2030s. He is already one of the longest-serving heads of state on the continent and among the longest-serving leaders anywhere in the world.
The president arrived at Kololo shortly after 11:15 a.m. local time in a heavily guarded motorcade. Dressed in his trademark wide-brimmed hat, he inspected a military parade before the formal lowering of the presidential standard flag, symbolising the expiration of the 2021 to 2026 administration and the constitutional opening of the new term.
Simon Byabakama, chairperson of Uganda’s Electoral Commission, formally declared Museveni the winner of the 2026 presidential election before administering the oath of office.
“I, Yoweri Kaguta Tibuhaburwa Museveni, swear in the name of the Almighty God that I shall faithfully exercise the functions of the President of the Republic of Uganda and protect and defend the Constitution,” Museveni said, as the crowd erupted around him.
The attendance of several African heads of state lent the ceremony a regional significance that the government was evidently keen to project. Among those present were Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan, Mozambique’s Daniel Francisco Chapo, Togo’s Faure Essozimna Gnassingbé, Gabon’s transitional leader Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema, Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and South Sudan’s Salva Kiir Mayardit. The gathering reflected Uganda’s considerable diplomatic standing across East and Central Africa, built over decades of military engagement, regional mediation and bilateral partnership.
According to official results released by the Electoral Commission, Museveni secured 7,944,772 votes, representing 71.65 percent of valid ballots cast. Opposition leader Robert Kyagulanyi, known widely as Bobi Wine, finished second with 2,741,238 votes, or 24.72 percent. Nathan Nandala Mafabi of the Forum for Democratic Change came third with 209,039 votes, representing 1.88 percent.
Those numbers, however, tell only part of the story. Kyagulanyi rejected the results outright, alleging widespread electoral fraud, voter intimidation, arrests of opposition supporters and systematic military interference during both the campaign period and the voting process. He subsequently left Uganda, citing fears of arrest and political persecution. His departure follows a pattern that has characterised Ugandan electoral politics across multiple cycles: a credible opposition performance, a disputed result, and an aftermath defined more by suppression than by reconciliation.
The opposition’s claims are not new, and they have not been made in a vacuum. Independent election observers, human rights organisations and several Western governments have consistently raised concerns about the conditions under which Ugandan elections take place. The NRM’s control over state institutions, its access to resources unavailable to opposition parties, and the documented history of violence against opposition supporters and campaign gatherings have made it structurally difficult to contest the ruling party on equal terms.
In his inaugural address, Museveni struck several familiar notes while calibrating his message for the domestic and regional audiences assembled before him.
On the opposition, he was direct and combative. He accused Kyagulanyi’s National Unity Platform and elements within the FDC of attempting to influence the election through violence and voter intimidation. “These two elements tried to use violence in the community to influence the election outcome by intimidating Ugandan voters, but they failed,” he said.
He also referenced, without apology, the ongoing detention of Kizza Besigye, the veteran opposition politician and founder of the People’s Front for Freedom who remains in Luzira Prison on charges linked to alleged plotting against the state. Opposition supporters have consistently dismissed those allegations as politically motivated. Besigye’s imprisonment, which drew sharp international criticism after his controversial detention in Nairobi in late 2024, remains among the most contested aspects of Museveni’s domestic political record.
On the economy, Museveni was notably expansive. He said Uganda had moved closer to middle-income status and pointed to projected economic growth of between 7.5 and 8 percent in 2026, figures that, if realised, would represent a strong performance by regional standards. He drew a pointed historical contrast with 1986, when Uganda was emerging from years of civil conflict, economic collapse and inflation estimated at more than 200 percent. The comparison, used frequently, is one the NRM relies on to frame every subsequent criticism of its governance as ingratitude for the stability it delivered.
Turning to regional leaders, Museveni urged neighbouring countries, including Burundi and South Sudan, to study and adopt Uganda’s economic model and to prioritise stability and regional cooperation. “I urged countries like Burundi and South Sudan to emulate Uganda,” he said. It was a characteristic Museveni formulation: generous in tone, instructive in substance, and not without a degree of self-congratulation that his critics find difficult to separate from the substantive policy arguments beneath it.
Museveni’s seventh inauguration does more than extend a political career. It deepens a set of questions about Uganda that have been accumulating for decades and that a single electoral cycle will not resolve.
Supporters point to genuine achievements: the restoration of order after the catastrophic years of Idi Amin and Milton Obote, sustained economic growth, an expanding national infrastructure and a regional security role that has given Uganda influence and international partnerships that most of its neighbours cannot match. These are not invented accomplishments, and dismissing them would be historically dishonest.
Critics point with equal validity to the costs. A political system in which opposition is tolerated in form but suppressed in practice. A public debt estimated at between $34 billion and $35 billion. A generation of Ugandans who have never voted in an election they believe was free and fair. A constitution amended in 2017 to remove presidential age limits, an act that converted what had been a legal ceiling on Museveni’s rule into a formality he could simply set aside.
Praised by supporters for restoring stability and economic growth while criticised by opponents and rights groups over democratic backsliding and the repression of dissent, Museveni represents both faces of the post-liberation African leader: the man who ended the chaos and the man who, in ending it, built a system designed primarily to perpetuate his own position within it.
Analysts watching Tuesday’s ceremony broadly expect continuity to define what follows. The NRM’s campaign slogan, “protect the gains,” was not a promise of transformation. It was a declaration of intent to hold the line, to consolidate what has been built and to resist the pressures, internal and external, that might unsettle it.
What that means in practice is likely to include a continued military posture across East and Central Africa, ongoing suppression of organised political opposition, sustained engagement with Western and regional security partners, and the management of an economy that is growing but whose benefits remain unevenly distributed.
The seventh term also raises, more insistently than any of its predecessors, the question of succession. Museveni is 81 years old. His son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, commands the Ugandan army and has made no secret of his political ambitions. Whether the transition, when it eventually comes, is managed constitutionally or otherwise is among the most consequential unknowns in East African politics.
For now, the flags are still yellow, the helicopters have returned to their hangars, and Uganda is governed as it has been governed since 1986. What changes, and what does not, in the years ahead will determine whether the seventh term is remembered as consolidation or as the beginning of something else entirely.
