Why Uganda Must Negotiate National Unity with Museveni Now — Before the Next Chapter Begins
A Call for Strategic Maturity, Historical Honesty, and the Courage to Sit at the Table
In my earlier reflection, 40 Years of the NRM: Beyond Tribal Solidarity is the Only Hope for Uganda, I argued that the olive branch extended to Norbert Mao was a rare and precious opening, a chance to move beyond the fragile tribal coalitions that have repeatedly shattered our nation since 1952. I asked whether that branch would grow into a genuine olive grove or simply become another broken twig in our long history of failed unities.Today, that question has become even more urgent. Time is no longer a luxury. President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni is advanced in years. The succession question is no longer theoretical; it is unfolding in real time through the rising institutional and political weight of the Patriotic League of Uganda (PLU) under his son the General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Chief of Defence Forces. We have already sampled the leadership style, the tone, the priorities, and the method of the next generation of power. We have also taken a clear eyed inventory of the opposition, its courage, its fragmentation, its exhausted repertoires, and its current inability to exert decisive pressure.
The central question before us is therefore no longer abstract: Do we finish our unfinished political business with the father, while the constitutional contract still runs through him, or do we wait to begin all over again with the son?
In politics there are leaders who fatten so hard and break the law left, right and centre and cannot be dislodged by force unless God the life-giver ultimately gets hold of them. And by the politics, the law is made not vice versa.
For decades the opposition has struggled with President Museveni. Non violent resistance was tried with courage and sacrifice. Frontline activists were jailed, tortured, and in some cases permanently broken. In earlier years, many of those arrested for unlawful assembly, disobedience of lawful orders, or even incitement could still hope for bail or eventual release. By July 2026 the legal and security environment has hardened dramatically. What were once minor political offences are now treated with the severity once reserved for capital crimes. The space for street pressure, mass mobilisation, and confrontational activism has narrowed to a dangerous sliver.
When we honestly assess the combined strength of today’s opposition voices; the Senyonyis, the Lubongoyas, the Ssemujjus, the Lukwagos, the Kivumbis, the Bobi Wines, the Munyagwas, the Muntus, the Besigyes, the Matembes, the Bireetes and all the others, can we claim they currently possess the organised capacity to force a fundamental change of course on both Museveni and his son? My sober assessment is that they do not. Not because of lack of bravery or moral clarity, but because the opposition camps that Uganda once relied upon have scattered. They have lost their organisational cores. And, if we are honest, we the people helped scatter them through the way we have played opposition politics, through personality cults, perpetual fragmentation, and the inability to sustain disciplined, long-horizon strategy.
Force has been tried. It was met with superior force and superior institutional control. Continuing to invest primary energy in a strategy that has already been comprehensively defeated is not courage; it is nostalgia dressed as principle.
We have now sampled the leadership methodology of General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, even while his father still occupies State House. We have seen the style of communication, the approach to regional politics, the manner of building parallel political structures through the PLU, and the ease with which top government positions and parliamentary leadership are influenced or claimed. The Speaker of Parliament publicly encouraging Ugandans to join the PLU is not a small signal. It is a declaration of the new gravitational centre of power.
Here a legal and political analogy becomes illuminating. In law we speak of capacity to contract. Even a child can enter certain contracts, but only those of necessity. A rich man’s child who buys expensive luxuries and then refuses to pay may successfully plead that those items were not necessities for him. What a poor man’s child experiences as unimaginable luxury, a rich man’s child experiences as ordinary necessity, including, sometimes, the necessity of armed security and political insulation.
General Muhoozi is, in this narrative, the rich man’s son. He may never have played in the dirt of ordinary Ugandan struggle when he was young. He may be learning that dirt now, but from the elevated position of an office that carries national life-and-death responsibility. The risk is that he ends up playing with the lives of ordinary Ugandans while enjoying the residual immunity that still attaches to the father’s long shadow. The father may still overlook the child’s political misdemeanours. The nation cannot afford that luxury of parental indulgence.
Therefore the wiser course is clear: we should deal with the father with whom we already have a living constitutional contract as the Ugandan people. Completing the unfinished business of national reconciliation and power-sharing with Museveni himself is both more legitimate and more strategically sound than waiting to begin negotiations from zero with a successor who has not yet been tested by the full weight of the office and who has shown little evidence of understanding the daily bread-and-water desperation of the majority.
This brings us to the deepest and most honest question, a question that is both contemporary and historical: Does President Museveni believe in genuine negotiations?
Good politics, mature politics, almost always contains a large element of negotiation. Even after catastrophic violence, adversaries eventually sit down. America and Iran, despite the taking out of key figures, the grief, the pain, and the enormous cost on both sides, still found their way back to the table and exchanged prisoners. In Lebanon, Israel and Palestine, missiles can fly while negotiators still keep a channel open. In Kenya, the famous “handshake” between President Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga dramatically lowered the temperature after a dangerously polarised election. History is full of leaders who appeared immovable until the calculus of power, legacy, and national survival made negotiation the rational choice.
Museveni has, at various points in his long career, shown both an extraordinary capacity for hard power and an occasional willingness to co-opt, absorb, or negotiate with former adversaries. The 1986 broad-based government, the integration of various fighting groups, the later inclusion of figures like Norbert Mao, these are not pure illusions. They are evidence that the man understands the language of political inclusion when he judges it necessary for regime survival or for legacy.
The opposition’s task, therefore, is not to keep shouting from outside the walls, but to force the question of negotiation onto the agenda with seriousness, unity of purpose, and a clear, limited, achievable set of demands. The goal is not to humiliate the President or to demand immediate surrender of all power. The goal is to salvage what can still be salvaged: meaningful constitutional and electoral reforms, credible guarantees of political space, a genuine government of national unity that goes beyond cosmetic appointments, and a dignified, managed transition that does not leave the country at the mercy of unrestrained succession politics.
The cooperation with Norbert Mao remains symbolically important. It was the first serious crack in the wall of exclusive solidarity. But symbolism without substance becomes cynicism. A genuine negotiation process would need to include the major opposition currents, not as conquered subordinates, but as recognised political forces with legitimate constituencies and legitimate grievances.
It would require the opposition, on its part, to abandon the politics of permanent maximalism and the fantasy of sudden total victory. It would require the NRM and the emerging PLU centres of power to abandon the politics of permanent exclusion and the fantasy that power can be held indefinitely by force and patronage alone. Both sides would have to accept that the only sustainable equilibrium for Uganda after forty years of one dominant project is a new social contract; one that finally achieves the broad, sustainable political unity that has eluded us since the Uganda National Congress of 1952.
This is not surrender. It is strategic maturity. It is the recognition that politics, at its highest, is the art of the possible and that the possible, right now, is a negotiated settlement with the incumbent rather than an open-ended struggle with his successor.
Let the opposition leadership; across NUP, FDC remnants, DP elements still outside government, ANT, and independent voices, publicly and jointly table a clear, time-bound negotiation agenda with President Museveni. Let the demands be concrete: electoral reform with real independence of the Electoral Commission; release of political prisoners and end to criminalisation of peaceful dissent; a structured national dialogue leading to a government of national unity with real power-sharing; and a transparent, constitutional roadmap for succession that is not simply the coronation of one family line. Let mediators of high standing; religious leaders, elders, regional statesmen, be invited. And let the process be public enough that the nation can hold both sides accountable.
If we wait until the son fully enters the office, we will be negotiating with a leader who has already tasted the intoxicating combination of military command, parallel political organisation, and the rich man’s insulation from ordinary consequence. The habits of power will have hardened. The sense of entitlement will have deepened. The window for a soft landing will have narrowed still further.
Worse, the opposition itself may by then be even more fragmented, more exhausted, and more demoralised. The young Ugandans who still believe that politics can be a vehicle for dignity rather than a theatre of permanent defeat will have drifted further into cynicism or exile.
That is a future we still have the power to avoid, but only if we act with clarity while the father still holds the pen that can rewrite the terms of the national contract.
Beyond tribal solidarity remains the only durable hope for a peaceful and prosperous Uganda. The olive branch extended to Norbert Mao was a start. The question I posed then still stands, but it has now acquired sharper urgency: will it lead to a genuine olive grove, or just another fragile branch in a long history of broken ones?
The answer depends less on Museveni’s goodwill alone and more on whether the opposition can finally summon the strategic maturity to stop wasting time on strategies that have already failed, and instead put a solid, united, realistic set of demands on the table for negotiation. Good politics is largely about negotiations. Even bitter enemies eventually discover this truth when the alternative is endless polarisation and national decay.
Let us finish our commission with the man who has held power for forty years. Let us not bequeath to the next generation the same unfinished, unhealed, unnegotiated conflict, only now under a new and possibly less experienced hand.
“The time to sit at the table is now.
“The time to grow the olive grove is now.”
I welcome robust, good-faith responses from all sides of the Ugandan political spectrum.
Read more about the author: Philip Kakungulu
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