By Asuman Kiyingi
There have been more arrests and detentions by the army in the last week—or kidnappings, abductions, and hostage-taking, to use the precise terminology of the Uganda Law Society.
Concurrently, the Patriotic League of Uganda (PLU)—General Muhoozi Kainerugaba’s political outfit, which remains a private company limited by guarantee without shares—continues to assert a highly questionable authority to run state affairs. Fresh off enforcing a draconian regulatory blackout on major independent media houses including NTV, The Daily Monitor, KFM, and Dembe FM, the regime’s legislative architects have opened a new front. They are pushing a structural amendment to have the Leader of the Opposition (LOP) determined by all opposition parties in Parliament caucusing together with independents. This is a direct assault on the foundational architecture of Uganda’s constitutional democracy.
Just when civil society is reeling from the high-handed state hospitality extended to veteran activists like Miria Matembe, Sarah Bireete, and Erias Lukwago—who repeatedly find themselves in the crosshairs of a regime increasingly allergic to criticism—the legislative theatre has been re-engineered. Not content with simply clamping down on the free press, the engineers of our current dispensation are now coming for the institutional autonomy of Parliament itself.
The proposal currently on the table, moving under the enthusiastic sponsorship of Buyaga West MP Hon. Denis Namara, is a carefully disguised power grab. It seeks to strip the power to designate the Leader of the Opposition away from the largest opposition party—currently the National Unity Platform (NUP)—and hand it over to an omnibus parliamentary college where everyone, including a vast ocean of independent MPs, gets a vote. On paper, it sounds wonderfully inclusive, almost like an egalitarian village meeting where everyone gets a say. In practice, it is a mathematical trap designed to ensure the ruling party gets to choose its own opponent.
Any suggestion that this is a good-faith democratic reform is completely irreconcilable with the public record. General Muhoozi Kainerugaba has publicly declared that the current Leader of the Opposition, Hon. Joel Ssenyonyi, must be removed from office, openly announcing that certain legislators had been tasked with overseeing that specific objective. Against that backdrop of executive dictation, claims that this proposal is simply intended to “democratize” the opposition’s internal processes become considerably less persuasive. It is an open political vendetta masquerading as parliamentary reform.
To understand why this is a structural comedy of errors, one need only look at the stark arithmetic of the 12th Parliament. The official leading opposition party commands a modest 48 seats. In sharp contrast, the Independent bloc boasts an overwhelming 63 seats. Here is the critical kicker: the vast majority of those 63 independents have formally and publicly entered cooperation agreements with the National Resistance Movement (NRM) through explicit Memorandums of Understanding. They caucus with the ruling party, attend political retreats with the ruling party, and overwhelmingly vote to sustain the executive’s legislative agenda.
So let us do the math. If the choice of the Leader of the Opposition is subjected to a vote of all opposition and independent MPs, this massive bloc of 63 NRM-aligned independents will completely overwhelm the 48 legitimate members of the actual leading opposition. The structural result is inevitable: the ruling party, through its aligned proxies, gains the direct leverage to strategically engineer, select, or depose the very person constitutionally mandated to keep it in check. It is the political equivalent of a football team demanding the right to vote on who the opposing team’s goalkeeper should be.
This is not a new trick; it is an old script retrieved from the historical archives of executive co-option. In the 1960s, the Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) systematically eroded opposition cohesion through manufactured defections and institutional bullying under the guise of “crossing the floor” to manufacture a de facto one-party state by 1969. We saw it again in the 1980s, when state patronage networks were deployed to fracture opposition solidarity from within the precinct of Parliament. More recently, constitutional scholars have warned that this legislative push risks sliding Uganda back into the monolithic logic of the defunct “Movement System,” where the rhetoric of “individual merit” was deployed to dilute political party identity and suppress genuine partisan organization.
Constitutional Subversion and Legal Precedent
The constitutional subversion here is glaring. While Article 74 outlines the choices between political systems, Article 75 explicitly bars a monolithic regime by stating that Parliament shall have no power to enact a law establishing a one-party state. Concurrently, Article 82A constitutionally recognizes and protects the office of the Leader of the Opposition. A foundational, non-negotiable tenet of any multiparty democracy is that political parties must retain absolute autonomy to determine their own parliamentary leadership. As constitutional lawyer Wandera Ogalo observed in his immediate, public opposition to this specific Namara motion, attempting to alter that internal autonomy through external legislative manipulation amounts to “a rape of the law.”
Furthermore, this proposal suffers from acute legislative inconsistency. Parliament already rigorously examined and rejected this very principle when it considered the controversial Richard Lumu Bill in 2024. The House correctly concluded that altering the method of selecting the LOP was entirely incompatible with the established principles of the Westminster parliamentary system, under which the Official Opposition determines its own frontbench leadership. Reintroducing the same defeated policy under a different wrapper violates the parliamentary rule against res judicata and offends the core principle of consistency in legislative policy.
When one connects the dots between the arrests of civil society actors, the high-handed closure of independent media houses, and this sudden legislative enthusiasm for “democratizing” the internal affairs of the opposition, the overarching pattern becomes unmistakable. It is a synchronized campaign to create an opposition in name only—a pliant, house-trained shadow executive offering no meaningful resistance to the concentration of authoritarian power.
As the country navigates this latest wave of institutional turbulence, both citizens and legislators must stand firmly by the text of the Constitution and by the House’s own established precedents. Genuine democracy requires a viable, autonomous alternative, not a state-curated echo chamber. If we allow the State to choose the Opposition, we will have buried multiparty democracy while pretending to preserve it. The writer is a Senior Advocate and Former Minister. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
