This is the script for my video posted on October 15, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
No Ugandan leader has ever lost power in an election since Uganda gained independence in 1962, and the military that decides who’s in charge has become so useful to Western partners that they rarely challenge what it does at home. So how did Uganda become so volatile and militarized, and what impact does it have on geopolitics?
Before the colonial era, modern Uganda was a collection of kingdoms. The Kingdom of Buganda, which sat on the northern shore of Lake Victoria around what is now Kampala, became the most centralized state because its kings, or kabakas, had systematically reduced the power of hereditary clan chiefs in favor of appointed chiefs loyal to the throne, giving the royalty greater control.
The favorable geography and fertile soil around Lake Victoria also created economic surplus and a robust agricultural sector built around bananas, which fed and funded a dense population and a permanent state apparatus and military.
Buganda’s strong central military, including war canoe fleets on Lake Victoria, allowed them to defeat rival states and expand.
But in the 1890s, after the Berlin Conference set the rules for the European conquest of Africa, the British moved into the region. Rather than fight them, Buganda’s most powerful chiefs allied with the British and helped them conquer neighboring kingdoms, including Buganda’s old rival, Bunyoro.
In 1894, Britain declared a protectorate over Buganda and later extended it over the rest of the territory, largely to secure the headwaters of the White Nile, which were vital to safeguard Egypt and the Suez Canal, and to prevent other powers from expanding there.
Britain imported laborers from South Asia to build the Uganda Railway, which actually ran almost entirely through what is now Kenya. Traders followed, and people from South Asia became a commercial middle class in the colony.
The 1900 Buganda Agreement defined the relationship between the Kingdom of Buganda and the British colonial administration within the larger Uganda Protectorate. The kabaka was recognized as the indigenous ruler conditional on being faithful to the British Crown.
And under the Mailo Land System, Buganda was divided, with roughly half of the land allocated as private estates for the kabaka and about a thousand influential chiefs, while most of the rest was designated as Crown land for the British administration.
Meanwhile, as a reward for its help, Britain gave Buganda a large part of the conquered Kingdom of Bunyoro, including Buyaga and Bugangaizi counties. This will be important shortly.
In that period, colonial policy concentrated education and the production of cash crops in the south while recruiting soldiers and police disproportionately from the north. This is one of the roots of the military politics that followed and persist to this day.
Amid Britain’s broader post-WWII global decolonization and rising nationalism in Uganda, the British slowly allowed local representation and self-governance, and in the early 1960s the kabaka and other powers negotiated a federal constitution, a power-sharing framework, and then independence.
A popular referendum overwhelmingly decided to return the former Buyaga and Bugangaizi counties to Bunyoro. But King Edward Mutesa II, who was also serving as president, refused to sign the legislation, forcing Prime Minister Milton Obote to do it instead. This deepened the political rift between Mutesa and Obote, which laid the groundwork for everything that followed.
The tension escalated further when a member of parliament accused Obote and the deputy commander of the army, a man named Idi Amin, of profiting from gold and ivory taken from rebels in the Congo.
Facing political opposition and what he claimed was a coup plot, Obote suspended the constitution in 1966 and declared himself executive president. He ordered the army under Idi Amin to storm the king’s palace, and Mutesa was forced to flee to the UK, where he died in 1969.
In 1967, Obote introduced a new constitution that centralized power, abolished all traditional kingdoms, including Buganda and Bunyoro, and declared Uganda a unitary republic.
But the concentration of military power under Idi Amin allowed him to seize control in 1971. The following year he issued a decree giving Uganda’s Asian residents 90 days to leave the country. He seized their businesses and the country’s economy collapsed.
Idi Amin was a volatile leader, and his own aggression eventually brought him down. In 1978 his forces invaded Tanzania’s Kagera salient, prompting a Tanzanian counter-invasion alongside Ugandan exiles, including Obote’s loyalists and the Front for National Salvation, a rebel group founded by a man named Yoweri Museveni. These forces ultimately toppled the regime in 1979.
After a series of short-lived interim governments, Obote returned to power in the disputed 1980 election. But Museveni rejected the results and launched a rebellion, and in 1981 his fighters merged with another rebel group to form the National Resistance Movement and its armed wing, the National Resistance Army.
Museveni and the NRA began an insurgency called the Ugandan Bush War and used guerrilla tactics against the military. But the conflict was devastating for the country. Counter-insurgency operations by the government resulted in severe human rights abuses, mass displacements, and heavy civilian casualties, and the NRA itself recruited child soldiers. An estimated 100k to 300k people died due to starvation, disease, and systematic massacres.
And in the end, Obote was overthrown by his own generals in 1985, and six months later the NRA took Kampala. Museveni suspended party politics, arguing that they caused ethnic division, but in 1993 he restored traditional kingdoms as cultural and ceremonial institutions. Under a 2005 referendum, multiparty politics eventually returned, though the same year the Ugandan Parliament removed presidential term limits. In 2017 it scrapped the presidential age limit of 75 as well, clearing the way for Museveni to keep running.
Meanwhile, from the late 1980s onward, the north of the country grew more and more unstable as Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, abducted children. The government responded by forcing civilians into camps, and at the conflict’s peak over 1.8m people were living in hundreds of them.
In the same period, Uganda intervened in the DRC, initially alongside Rwanda, whose new rulers, led by Paul Kagame, had come out of Museveni’s own rebel army. Uganda’s stated goal was to stop rebel groups from attacking its territory. But a UN panel of experts found that Ugandan officers used the war as cover for the massive, systematic plundering of Congo’s gold, diamonds, timber, and other resources, and it named senior officers and relatives of Museveni. In 2005 the International Court of Justice found Uganda responsible for its unlawful intervention and its soldiers’ looting, and in 2022 it ordered Uganda to pay $325m in reparations.
Today Uganda’s military in many ways defines it as a country. Decades of conflict produced a large, battle-hardened army, and the government has capitalized on it. It has deployed troops in support of the African Union mission in Somalia, against the Islamic State-linked ADF in the DRC, this time as their partner, and on offensives backing South Sudan’s president.
Those same forces now run domestic politics in plain sight. The chief of Uganda’s defense forces, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, is Museveni’s son and is often considered his likely successor, in part because his control of the military makes him by far the most influential person in the government after Museveni himself. Muhoozi has repeatedly made threats and ultimatums against Bobi Wine, the politician and activist who opposes Museveni via the National Unity Platform, or NUP. After the 2026 election, he boasted online that his forces had killed 30 “terrorists” from the NUP.
Meanwhile, Uganda is facing serious economic issues, with Western aid shrinking and the funding behind its Somalia deployment drying up. The country is betting heavily on crude oil because it has significant untapped reserves. It aims to produce about 230k barrels per day at peak, most of it exported via the nearly finished East African Crude Oil Pipeline. It also brings in billions of dollars exporting refined gold that UN investigators say comes largely from the DRC, the same country Ugandan soldiers were found to have looted.
But the reality is that Museveni won yet another term in January 2026 at the age of 81, in an election that African Union observers criticized over intimidation and an internet blackout. He clearly has no intention to step down, and it’s unclear if he actually views Muhoozi as his successor. Bobi Wine went into hiding and then left the country, and veteran opposition leader Kizza Besigye is on trial for treason. Muhoozi holds the country under the thumb on his father’s behalf.
Realistically, Uganda’s succession is far more likely to be settled by guns than by elections. For decades, Western partners have tolerated repression at home in return for the military’s support in very difficult parts of the world. But that bargain is fraying as the money for Somalia dries up, while oil and gold give Kampala income that doesn’t depend on Western approval. And the less Kampala needs the West, the fewer limits there are on how far Museveni and Muhoozi will go to stay in power.
Keep reading
- Why isn’t Eswatini part of South Africa?
- Why is Madagascar so unstable?
- What makes Eritrea the North Korea of Africa?
I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.