38 Years in Power: How Museveni Turned Uganda Into a Personal Fief

The man in the olive-green military uniform has ruled Uganda since most of his citizens were not yet born. Yoweri Museveni took Kampala on January 26, 1986, a bush fighter who promised democracy after five years of civil war. That promise expired in 1991. He is still here. His son now commands the military. His wife sits in parliament. The oil in Lake Albert flows to foreign companies that pay royalties to a government indistinguishable from the Museveni family.

In Kampala, outside the High Court, a woman named Stella Nyanzi waited with three dozen others on a Tuesday morning in March. She had come to hear the bail application for a young man arrested for wearing a red beret. The beret belongs to Bobi Wine's People Power movement. Wearing it, the police said, constituted treason. The court did not grant bail. It did not need to explain why. Nyanzi walked back into the heat, past soldiers with rifles, past posters of the president in military fatigues. "We have lived like this for thirty-eight years," she said. "It is all we know now."

The Guerrilla Who Stayed

Museveni came to power through the barrel of a gun, leading the National Resistance Army from the bush after the contested 1980 election that returned Milton Obote to power. The war that followed killed between 100,000 and 500,000 Ugandans, depending on whose count you believe. When Museveni marched into Kampala, he spoke of accountability, democracy, and African self-determination. Western governments, tired of Obote's brutality and Idi Amin's chaos before him, embraced the new president.

The promise was a transitional government. Five years, then elections. Instead, Museveni held a referendum in 2000 on whether Uganda should remain a "no-party democracy" — his euphemism for one-party rule. He won. When he finally allowed multiparty elections in 2005, the state security apparatus had twenty years of practice in suppressing opposition. Kizza Besigye, his main rival, was arrested multiple times. The pattern repeated in 2011, 2016, and 2021.

In 2017, Museveni's parliament removed the constitutional age limit that would have forced him from office at seventy-five. The debate was brief. Opposition members of parliament were physically removed from the chamber. Some were beaten. The bill passed. Museveni, born in 1944, can now rule until he dies.

The War That Never Ended

For twenty years, northern Uganda endured a war that Museveni could not win and would not negotiate. Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army emerged in 1987, a millenarian cult that mutilated children and burned villages. The LRA abducted an estimated 66,000 children between 1987 and 2006, according to UNICEF. Some became soldiers. Some became sex slaves. Some died in the bush.

The government's response displaced 1.8 million people into camps. Mortality rates in those camps, documented by the World Health Organization in 2005, exceeded those in Darfur. Over 1,000 people died every week from preventable diseases. The Acholi people, who bore the brunt of both LRA terror and government counterinsurgency, called it a genocide. Museveni called it a security operation.

The war served Museveni well. It justified military spending. It kept the north poor and dependent. It gave Western allies a reason to continue security assistance. The United States provided training, intelligence, and equipment, even as human rights groups documented abuses by the Ugandan military. When Kony finally fled into the Central African Republic in 2006, the camps remained. Some still exist.

The Oil No One Was Supposed to Find

In 2006, the same year the LRA fled, international companies confirmed what geologists had suspected for decades: Uganda's Albertine Graben holds an estimated 6.5 billion barrels of oil. About 1.4 billion barrels are commercially recoverable. TotalEnergies of France and China National Offshore Oil Corporation now control the extraction. First oil is scheduled for 2025, a timeline that has slipped repeatedly.

The deal was negotiated in secret. Revenue-sharing terms remain opaque. The East African Crude Oil Pipeline, a 1,443-kilometre line from Uganda's oilfields to Tanzania's coast, will cost $5 billion. TotalEnergies holds a 62% stake. CNOOC holds 8%. The Uganda National Oil Company holds 15%. The Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation holds 15%. Who profits, and by how much, is protected by confidentiality clauses that override Uganda's freedom of information laws.

Communities along the pipeline route have been displaced. Human Rights Watch documented forced evictions affecting over 100,000 people in 2021. Compensation, where it was paid, arrived years late and covered only a fraction of land value. Protests were met with arrests. In Hoima District, twelve land rights activists were detained in January 2023 and held without charge for six weeks.

The money, when it comes, will flow to Kampala. Museveni's government has already allocated future oil revenues to infrastructure projects awarded without competitive tender. His son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, now a four-star general and senior presidential advisor, has publicly stated he will run for president. The oil will fund that campaign.

Bobi Wine and the Illusion of Choice

Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, known as Bobi Wine, is a musician turned politician who represents everything Museveni is not: young, urban, and unconnected to the liberation struggle that legitimises the president's rule. In the 2021 election, Bobi Wine's National Unity Platform posed the most serious electoral challenge Museveni had faced in two decades.

The government's response was systematic suppression. Campaign rallies were banned under COVID-19 restrictions that did not apply to Museveni's events. Security forces shot live ammunition into crowds at Bobi Wine rallies in November 2020, killing at least fifty-four people, according to Uganda's own Human Rights Commission. Bobi Wine was arrested repeatedly, tear-gassed, and placed under de facto house arrest.

Museveni won with 58.6% of the vote. Bobi Wine received 34.8%. Independent analysts, including the African Centre for Strategic Studies, documented systematic irregularities: ballot boxes arriving pre-stuffed, opposition agents barred from polling stations, vote tallies altered during transmission. The courts rejected all challenges. They always do.

Since the election, over 3,000 National Unity Platform members have been arrested, according to the party's own documentation. Many are held in military detention facilities, outside civilian court jurisdiction. Some have been tortured. The most prominent, including NUP spokesperson Joel Ssenyonyi, face charges of inciting violence or terrorism. The evidence is rarely disclosed before trial.

The American Ally Who Beats Dissidents

Uganda remains one of the United States' closest security partners in East Africa. The relationship survived the Lord's Resistance Army war, the oil contracts, the constitutional amendments, and the 2021 election. It survives because Museveni provides what Washington needs: troops for the African Union Mission in Somalia, intelligence cooperation against Al-Shabaab, and a bulwark against instability in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The CIA has maintained a relationship with Uganda's security services since the 1990s. That relationship includes intelligence sharing, training, and logistical support. It also includes looking away. When Ugandan troops invaded the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1998, ostensibly to fight the LRA and Rwandan Hutu militias, they stayed for three years, looting minerals and propping up rebel groups. A 2002 UN Panel of Experts documented systematic plunder by Ugandan officers, including members of Museveni's inner circle. No one was prosecuted.

Uganda contributed over 6,000 troops to the African Union Mission in Somalia at its peak. Those troops were funded largely by the United States and trained by American special forces. They fought Al-Shabaab in Mogadishu while their own government jailed opposition politicians in Kampala. The contradiction was noted but never resolved. Museveni delivers stability where Washington needs it, even if that stability does not extend to his own citizens.

The Proxy War in Congo

Eastern Congo remains a theatre of Ugandan and Rwandan ambition. The relationship between Museveni and Paul Kagame, once allies who trained together in Tanzania in the 1970s, has fractured over mineral wealth and regional dominance. Both countries back armed groups in the Kivus. Both deny it. The evidence, documented by UN investigators for over two decades, says otherwise.

Uganda's involvement in Congo began in 1998 and never truly ended. The Uganda People's Defence Force officially withdrew in 2003, but military officers continued to support proxy militias, including the Allied Democratic Forces, an Islamist group now aligned with the Islamic State. A 2021 report by the Kivu Security Tracker documented over 1,200 civilians killed by ADF attacks in North Kivu and Ituri provinces between 2019 and 2021. Uganda launched a formal military operation against the ADF in November 2021, coordinated with Congolese forces. It is ongoing. No end date has been announced.

The conflict with Rwanda, meanwhile, plays out through M23, a Tutsi-led rebel group that captured swathes of North Kivu in 2022 and 2023. Uganda and Rwanda officially cooperate in regional forums. Privately, their intelligence services fund opposing factions. Congo is the battlefield. Civilians are the casualties. Over 6 million people are displaced in eastern Congo as of March 2026, according to UNHCR. The war has no resolution in sight.

What the Dynasty Looks Like Now

Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Museveni's only son, commands the Uganda People's Defence Force. He was promoted to full general in 2021 at age forty-seven, despite no battlefield command experience. In 2022, he was elevated to four-star general and appointed senior presidential advisor on special operations. He tweets prolifically, often threatening to invade neighbouring countries. His father has never reprimanded him publicly.

Janet Museveni, the president's wife, serves as Minister of Education and Science. She has held cabinet positions since 2006. Their daughter, Diana Museveni Kamunt, works in the diplomatic service. Their son-in-law holds a senior position in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The state and the family are indistinguishable.

Opposition to the dynasty is met with violence. In 2020, novelist Kakwenza Rukirabashaija was arrested and tortured for a novel that satirised Museveni and his son. He was held for weeks, beaten with metal rods, and charged with offensive communication. He fled to Germany in February 2022. He is one of dozens of writers, journalists, and activists who now live in exile.

What Happens Next

Museveni is eighty-one years old. He shows no sign of leaving. The 2026 election will proceed as all the others have: opposition candidates will campaign under restrictions, rallies will be banned or disrupted, the army will ensure order, and the result will be declared in Museveni's favour. If he wins, he will be ninety by the time the next election is due in 2031. By then, most Ugandans will have known only one president.

The transition, when it comes, will not be democratic. Muhoozi has made clear his intention to succeed his father. The military will decide, not the electorate. Oil revenue will provide the resources to sustain the system. Western governments will issue statements of concern and continue security assistance. The pattern will hold.

In Kampala, outside the High Court, Stella Nyanzi walked back into the heat. She had waited three hours for a bail hearing that lasted seven minutes. The young man in the red beret remained in custody. She will return next week, and the week after, because this is what opposition looks like now: small acts of presence in a system designed to erase you. She knows it will not change the outcome. She comes anyway. Thirty-eight years have taught her that waiting is all that remains.