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BY RICHARD DRASIMAKU
ARUA:SUNDAY, JANUARY 18, 2026
The 63 person per village model employed by the National Resistance Movement was what worked the magic to propel President Yoweri Museveni to win the seventh elective term, Vincent Anguzu, an NRM youth winger and mobiliser has disclosed.
Speaking in an interview, Anguzu said unlike the previous election, the Presidential team this time fully involved the party structure and allowed the strength of the broad based ruling party to impact the elections.
“Those 63 mobilisers were well facilitated to explain the presidents’ manifesto to the last person in the villages,” he asserted.
He said for instance according to the announcement by Osman Ezale, the Arua City returning officer, Museveni got 58,591, Robert Kyagulanyi came second with 19,015 votes.
Anguzu told losers of the election to calm down and prepare a better strategy for the 2031 elections, adding that most of the people who were shouting anti-Museveni slogans were some non-voting youths.
“Look at Arua city, the president did not do so well in the Central Division but the two Divisions of Ayivu delivered a massive support resulting in a 72% overall performance while the main opposition candidate Robert Kyagulanyi of the National Unity Platform got 23%,” said Anguzu.
Anguzu argued that whereas the opposers accuse Museveni of overstaying in power, the majority citizens are happy because of the prevailing peace and political stability.
“To keep a country peaceful for 40 years is no small feat. Look at the Democratic Republic of Congo, look at Darfur and Sudan where people are being butchered,” he said, alluding to instability and lawlessness in most parts of the Great Lakes Region of Africa.
Anguzu insist that it is not how long President Museveni has been sitting on that hot seat that is important because in the four decades of his presidency, there has been a matching improvement and increment in health service infrastructure, education infrastructure and other critical areas matching the demographic increase.
“People are in business in all sectors and the massacres that happened especially in our region (West Nile) in Ombaci and other places were halted by this government. Therefore, Ugandans had a lot more reason to give President Museveni another term than deny him votes,” he said.
Anguzu acknowledged that corruption in the ministries, departments and agencies as well as in local governments is disheartening but the president has demonstrated willingness to fight corruption on several occasions with creation of specialized entities whose sole assignment is to rid government of corruption.
Commenting on the turn-up on voting days, Anguzu said voting is a voluntary exercise of a person’s civic right, however whether someone chooses to exercise that right or forego it is individual choice.
In his observation from the polls, he attributed poor turn up to among others conflict of interest by some voters which reared its head by some voters ticking two candidates on the same ballot paper which increased the number of invalid votes.
Anguzu deduced from that observation that some other people with conflict of interest could have simply chosen to abstain from the voting process altogether.
He also contented that whereas the electoral commission has accredited civil society organizations to conduct civic education, many of them do advocacy instead and there is the factor of candidates’ failure to convince people to vote for them which leads to poor turn up.
But some commentators have blamed the non-functionality of the expensively acquired biometric voter verification kits for discouraging many people from participating in voting, on simple assumption albeit without evidence that the kits were disabled to allow rigging to take place.
