Uganda is going to the next presidential, parliamentary and council elections, which the Uganda Electoral Commission plans to hold on January 25, 2026.  This will be the seventh General Election since 1996 when the president of Uganda, Tibuhaburwa Museveni, subjected himself to electoral politics after resisting the transition from single-party politics for 10 years since he captured the instruments of power in 1986.

The next elections will supposedly be multiparty elections, which has been the case since 2006 when President Tibuhaburwa Museveni opened up to multiparty politics. However, he has not hidden his distaste for multiparty politics because it gives the impression that he is challengeable. Indeed during his swearing in for his sixth term as President of Uganda, he committed the next five years (2016-2021) to erasing political parties from the political landscape of Uganda, leaving only his own personalised party – the National Resistance Movement (NRM).

Nevertheless, political parties continue to exist on the political landscape of the country, with the replacements rate of active parties being high while NRM spends a lot of time, energy and money to cast the parties as useless and unlikely to contribute significantly to the social, economic and political development, transformation and progress of Uganda. The persistent narrative is that only President Tibuhaburwa Museveni and NRM can rule Uganda to progress.

Currently, the narrative is that only President Tibuhaburwa Museveni can ensure peace and security of the country and ensure further development, transformation and progress of the country. Accordingly many political parties seem to have agreed to the narrative and struck alliances with the NRM, not realising that President Tibuhaburwa Museveni has never abandoned his determination to erase political parties from the socio-political landscape of the country.

There are claims that many parties are being sponsored for the 2026 elections by President Tibuhaburwa Museveni and/or his party, whose money is not easy to distinguish from the public funds. The claim is that President Tibuhaburwa Museveni has been able to align most of the alternative political parties against the National Political Platform (NUP), the largest opposition party, led by Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, alias Bobi Wine, to ensure his continued reign beyond 40 years…

It is clear that the main political forces heading to 2026 are NRM and NUP. They are working hard to outsmart each other in support appeal and crowd dynamics in order to prove to the electorate that they are the ones that deserve leading Uganda beyond 2025.

The following practices have tended to distort and reduce the value of crowds in electoral politics:

• The practice of including school children in crowds to swell crowd size has distorted and reduced the value of crowds in electoral politics.
• The practice of transporting people from one area to another has also reduced the value of crowds in electoral politics.
• The practice of paying people to attend political rallies has distorted and reduced the value of crowds in electoral politics.
• The use of the military and police to constrain people from attending particular political rallies distorts the truth about popularity of a party.
• Members of one party putting on the uniform of one party and attending the political rally of another party distorts and reduced the value of crowds in electoral politics.
• The practice of using Artificial Intelligence to swell numbers of people in crowds distorts and reduced the value of crowds in electoral politics

Therefore, as we head towards the 2026, we should not take crowds as an automatic indication of the support or popularity of a particular party. In any case, some people attend a political party because they expect money, food or T-shirts to wear when they go home while in their mind they endorse another party. Besides, many may not have registered themselves as voters or voter registers have been corrupted to render some or many voters unable to vote

Let me end this cautionary article with explaining how you can distinguish an AI generated crowd from a human constituted crowd. I had written this elsewhere but it fits here very well too.

It is absolutely important that we can tell an AI generated crowd from a human constituted crowd so that we can reject the corruption of the electoral process and demand our genuine right to vote and decide our leaders.

AI-generated crowds are distinguished by their lack of organic interactions (i.e. they lack nuances such as body language and tone of voice); they show uniform behaviour and responses, which can be a giveaway; they are inconsistent, meaning they contain inconsistencies; and they depict contradictions; they depict overly promotional language or buzzwords.

Human crowds on the other hand exhibit diverse opinions and perspectives; respond emotionally, with varying levels of engagement and enthusiasm; understand context, idioms and sarcasm, which AI struggles to replicate; and human crowds exhibit natural, spontaneous interactions, which AI struggles to replicate.

Therefore, to detect AI-generated, look for unnatural language patterns; repetitive behaviour; lack of personal touches or human error; and inconsistencies in messaging or behaviour. However, keep in mind that AI technology is rapidly evolving and distinguishing between AI-generated and human-constituted crowds may become increasingly challenging.

When we reach this stage, unscrupulous politicians will do anything to give the impression that they are more popular than others yet the opposite is true. One may even say AI is Satan’s tool of deception in modern times.

For God and my country.

• A Tell report / By Oweyegha-Afunaduula / Environmental Historian and Conservationist Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis (CCTAA), Seeta, Mukono, Uganda.

About the Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis (CCTAA)

The CCTAA was innovated by Hyuha Mukwanason, Oweyegha-Afunaduula and Mahir Balunywa in 2019 to the rising decline in the capacity of graduates in Uganda and beyond to engage in critical thinking and reason coherently besides excellence in academics and academic production. The three scholars were convinced that after academic achievement the world outside the ivory tower needed graduates that can think critically and reason coherently towards making society and the environment better for human gratification. They reasoned between themselves and reached the conclusion that disciplinary education did not only narrow the thinking and reasoning of those exposed to it but restricted the opportunity to excel in critical thinking and reasoning, which are the ultimate aim of education. They were dismayed by the truism that the products of disciplinary education find it difficult to tick outside the boundaries of their disciplines; that when they provide solutions to problems that do not recognise the artificial boundaries between knowledges, their solutions become the new problems. They decided that the answer was a new and different medium of learning and innovating, which they characterised as “The Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis” (CCTAA).