Politics has become increasingly personalised. Even in democracies leaders are taking on outsized influence relative to the parties that support (CNAS, 2024). The result is democratic backsliding.

“While many have pointed to populism or polarisation as the source of democratic decline, The Origins of Elected Strongmen takes a different approach, arguing that the real culprits are the modern political parties that have become personal fiefdoms (Anne Applebaum cited by CNAS, 2024).

Today’s democracies are being dismantled from within, typically at the hands of democratically-elected incumbents (Frantz, Kendall-Taylor and Wright, 2024). Unfortunately, most members of the personalist parties are unlikely to know what is actually going on as their interest is more the goodies, money and jobs that the strong leaders give them to stupefy them. Where and how the goodies and money are acquired is not their concern.

Eastern Africa is rapidly turning into a supply chain of personalist parties with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, Ethiopia’s Ahmed, South Sudan’s Salva Kiir, Eritrea’s Isaias Afwerki and Kenya’s William Ruto making the cut.

Personalist parties are those where the leader has more control over the party than other senior party political elites. Leaders backed by personalist parties are more likely than other leaders to undermine impartial state administration (Li and Wright, 2023). Political elites in these parties have careers closely tied to the leader, are unlikely to normatively value an impersonal bureaucracy, and lack collective action capacity independent from the leader. Therefore, personalist parties are less likely than other parties to restrain leaders from undermining impartial state administration (Li and Wright, 2023).

Party personalism has been defined as “parties that leaders create or control as vehicles to advance their personal political careers”. Personalism is conceptually distinct from party system institutionalisation. Personalism undermines party organisation, growth and development while putting the party squarely at the mercy of the leader.

Party personalism implies that leaders have more relative power within the party than other political elites. The leaders of highly personalist parties are not only more likely to have created them, but these leaders also tend to control party nominations and funding resources.

If some leaders have a preference for undermining democratic institutions, including the bureaucracy, to consolidate their own power, then, in expectation, some leaders will attempt to undermine an impartial state bureaucracy. We do not need to know ex ante which elected leaders have these (potentially idiosyncratic) preferences to undermine democracy, including the state bureaucracy, to observe some leaders undermining democratic institutions once in office ((Li and Wright, 2023). Democratic backsliding is a constant possibility.

Political parties tuned to promoting family hegemony of strong leaders have also been called Authoritarian Successor Parties (Loxton, 2016), which operate more as breeding grounds for hereditary politics to exclude other organised political entities from power. They end up excluding the majority of the citizens from effective leadership and governance of their countries, thereby being reduced to onlookers in their own countries. The leaders they elect end up serving the interests of the authoritarian personalist leader to enhance his personal power over everything – politics, economy, society, natural resources, the future of the country and even life and death of the citizens., The top leaders are the beginning and end of everything. They enhance their powers over the Executive, Parliament and Judiciary. The national budgetary processes put the interests of the leaders first before the citizens are considered. Through the policies the leaders prefer, they prescribe genocide; for example, through impoverishing policies and policies that devalue the health care of the citizens.

All investments in the countries of personalist leaders are in their hands. It will not be easy to know who the investors are. In many cases the investors are themselves members of their families, their kith and kin and those connected to their power. Usually this is the case because the powers that be work hard to reduce the stature of the state of elected officials to what is called Deep State – of unelected officials, many nominated by the powers that be – many in the military, many in powerful families. Members of the Deep State are insidious, unaccountable and non-transparent, although what they do is funded by taxpayers’ money at the expense of public social services.

This article seeks to use the National Resistance Movement (NRM) as a militarised personalist party that has been tuned by its supreme leader to enhance his personal power over Uganda, its resources and its institutions for personal actualisation and gratification, and by extension build a family hegemony, which makes nonsense of democratisation in the country.

NRM, for nearly 40 years since it captured the instruments of power using its armed wing, the National Resistance Army (NRA), has remained a militarised party because even if NRA was constituionalised in 1995 as the new army of Uganda and given a new name – Uganda Peoples Defence Forces (UPDF) it remained politically and militarily-intertwined with the NRM.

President Tibuhaburwa Museveni who was the political and military supremo of the NRM/A has, since the promulgation of the Uganda Constitution 1995 made by the NRM/A, commander in chief.

The Uganda Constitution 1995 sought to create a personalist leader when it invested all power and authority in the President, whom it also immunised from being tried in the Courts of Law for any criminality while in power. We now also know that the President has used his constitutional status, and now personalist power, to erode the constitutional independence of the Parliament of Uganda and the Judiciary of Uganda.

The NRM Parliamentary Caucus has under the supremacy of President Tibuhaburwa Museveni’s leadership high-jacked the legislative processes of the parliament of Uganda. When the president wants anything of interest to him to go through Parliament, he routinely summons the NRM Caucus to State House in Entebbe or his Kyankwanzi Ideological School to panel-beat and fine-tune them to suit his interests.

Another way the personalist power of the president, constitutionally entrenched has undermined parliament and, for that matter, democracy, is to retain military representation of 10 people, who identify themselves with NRM and can never vote against what the president or the NRM government wants. In most cases the Military Members of Parliament never speak but wait to vote to boost NRM positions on different matters. It is as if they are in parliament to intimidate civilian MPs so that they legislate under fear.

With regard to the judiciary in Uganda, it is now known that the personalism of NRM, through its chairman, has direct control over the judiciary – its appointments and processes. We have heard of ‘orders from above’ (OFA) influencing what the judges do, thereby undermining justice and democratic justice administration. As if this is not long ago the president declared that he would appoint NRM cadres as judges. And he has done it.

I do not need to overemphasise the fact that executive processes have been completely consumated by the personalist choices of President Tibuhaburwa Museveni. For example, when the president wanted Uganda’s coffee and the construction of Lubowa hospital to be in the hands of an Arab-Italian woman, Enric Penete, Cabinet approved without question. When he wanted billions to be given to a Somali woman to erect Atiak Sugar, When he wanted obnoxious laws such as the Sectarianism Law, Anti-Terrorism law and Political and Other Organisations Law, to incapacitate the Opposition, and thereby control the democratic process, Cabinet approved. The Parliament of Uganda, dominated by the NRM Caucus had no option but to the needful.

Personalist NRM and personalist President Tibuhaburwa Museveni have undermined institutionalisms and weakened and de-professionalised institutions, thereby undermining development, transformation and progress of Uganda in the 21st Century. 

Currently, personalist NRM and personalist President Tibuhaburwa Museveni have strategised to change the Uganda constitution 1995 on the UPDF Act so that jointly they ensure that the military can go on trying civilians legally unlike when they did it illegally. Also, the two – the NRM and its chairman have for long strategised to make hereditary politics, where by heads of families holding big offices in government are, replaced by their children. This has been most pronounced in the parliament of Uganda.

There is strong collective belief that President Tibuhaburwa Museveni has strategised to ensure that his son, the Chief of Defense Forces (CDF) Muhoozi Kainerugaba replaces him as president of Uganda. A considerable section of the Uganda population believes that the president has already left some of his powers to be exercised by his son. However, belief is not necessarily the truth. Time, the best judge, will reveal the truth.

Let me hope that I have been able to demonstrate how the personalist NRM and the personalist President Uganda jointly pose a great threat to democratisation in Uganda.

This is a Center for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis.

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.

Further reading

CNAS 2023). Democracy under Threat: How the Personalization of Political Parties Undermines Democracy. CNAS, February 28 2023. https://www.cnas.org/press/press-release/democracy-under-threat-how-the-personalization-of-political-parties-undermines-democracy Visited on 17 March 2025 at 20:03 pm EAT

CNAS (2024). New Book The Origins of Elected Strongmen How Personalist Parties Destroy Democracy from Within. CNAS, June 17 2024 https://www.cnas.org/press/press-release/new-book-on-the-origins-of-elected-strongmen-how-personalist-parties-destroy-democracy-from-within Visited on 17 June 2025 at 20:13 pm EAT.

Eric Frantz, Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Joseph Wright (2024). The Origins of Elected Strongmen How Personalist Parties Destroy Democracy from Within. Oxford, https://www.psu.edu/news/liberal-arts/story/book-explores-how-elected-strongmen-weaken-democracy Visited on 17 March 2025 at 20:08 pm AT

James Loxton (2026). Authoritarian Successor Parties Worldwide: A Framework for Analysis. Working Paper 411 June 2016.  Kellog Institute for International Studies. Exploring Democracy and Human Development. https://kellogg.nd.edu/sites/default/files/old_files/documents/411.pdf  Visited on 17 March 2025 at 2035 pm EAT.

Li, J., & Wright, J. (2023). How Personalist Parties Undermine State Capacity  in Democracies. Comparative Political Studies, 56(13), 2030-2065. https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140231169014 (Original work published 2023)