By Wilfred Arinda Nshekantebirwe
“What shall it profit a nation if it holds regular elections, yet loses the very soul of democracy to the tyranny of money?” This is the question Uganda must face without flinching. The recent NRM primaries and the Central Executive Committee (CEC) elections revealed, yet again, that our politics has become an auction house where power goes to the highest bidder.
Elections are no longer arenas of vision and policy; they have degenerated into marketplaces of envelopes. Instead of leaders, money chooses its own custodians, and the nation is left in the hands of those who treat power as an investment to be recouped.
Ugandans have been conditioned to normalize the corruption of money politics. During the NRM primaries, it was not uncommon to hear of candidates openly distributing 5,000- and 10,000-shilling notes, some moving with sacks of cash through villages. A 2021 Transparency International survey reported that more than half of Ugandans had either been offered money for their vote or witnessed such acts firsthand.
In the 2021 general elections, the European Union Observer Mission concluded that the “pervasive use of money” not only skewed the level playing field but also undermined public confidence in the electoral process. The ballot has been hijacked by currency, and what remains is a hollow ritual of voting without genuine choice.
The NRM, being the ruling party, epitomizes this decay. Primaries that should be contests of loyalty and policy ideas have instead become carnivals of bribery. Nearly every district recorded petitions following the last primaries, with the NRM tribunal drowning in over 800 disputes in 2020 alone.
And this year, the story repeated itself, tribunals overwhelmed, petitions ignored, justice choked. It is telling that petitioning has become more normalized than voting. Even at the highest levels, the CEC elections could not silence the whispers of money. If the supreme organ of the ruling party cannot resist the seduction of envelopes, what chance does a poor villager at a dusty polling station stand?
The consequences are devastating. A candidate who spends 900 million shillings to secure a flag or a seat does not enter office to serve; he enters to recover his money. This is the economic logic of corruption. Every inflated procurement, every ghost project, every siphoned public shilling is tied to the “investment” made in campaigns. It is no wonder that Uganda loses an estimated 10 trillion shillings annually to corruption, according to the Inspectorate of Government. Elections have become venture capital projects, with citizens as collateral damage.
History has warned us of this path. Kenya’s KANU, once a mighty independence party, collapsed under the suffocating weight of money-driven patronage. Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF, once a liberation icon, is now a hollow shell of corruption and elite capture. South Africa’s ANC, celebrated across the world for defeating apartheid, today faces existential decline, its moral authority shredded by scandals of money politics. The lesson is simple: parties that allow money to colonize their politics eventually collapse under their own rot.
Uganda cannot afford to keep walking this road. We need a Vote Integrity Act, a law that criminalizes the use of money in campaigns, making it not just immoral but illegal. Such an Act must outlaw both direct and indirect vote-buying: cash handouts, bribing registrars, rewarding community leaders, or funding intimidation.
It must place hard ceilings on campaign spending, audited by an independent body with teeth. It must disqualify any candidate who deploys state resources in campaigns. It must establish citizen watchdog platforms where voters can report bribery with guaranteed protection. And most importantly, it must carry heavy penalties: fines, disqualification, even imprisonment for persistent offenders.
According to the Alliance for Campaign Finance Monitoring (ACFIM), the 2021 general elections saw an astonishing UGX 3.9 trillion, roughly USD 1 billion, poured into electioneering by political parties and candidates across presidential, parliamentary, and local government contests. This staggering infusion of cash shows that money dictated power, and influence could be bought rather than earned.
As we look toward 2026, all signs already suggest that this torrent of cash will swell even further, potentially tripling, as candidates prepare to outspend one another in a relentless race to purchase loyalty.
The higher the expenditure on elections, the greater the opportunity for corruption, because political investors, having spent vast sums to secure power, seek to recover their money through inflated salaries, embezzlement, and other forms of graft. This is how these actors systematically siphon from the public coffers. With every shilling poured into this cycle of excess, the nation sinks deeper into mismanagement, inefficiency, and disorder, teetering ever closer to chaos, until, perhaps, a moment of clarity or collective conscience intervenes to restore a measure of sanity.
As John Stuart Mill, whose wisdom still outlives the centuries, once declared: “Genuine democracy is not the mere form of institutions, but their spirit.” Uganda has stubbornly kept the form—ballot boxes neatly lined in dusty schoolrooms, registers on paper, rallies, slogans that echo promise. Yet the spirit, the breath that gives democracy life, has been strangled by money.
What we parade as elections are empty shells, rituals without meaning, ceremonies without conviction. A register means nothing if names can be bought or erased. A rally is hollow when its crowds are rented for coins. A ballot box becomes a coffin of democracy when what goes into it is not the people’s will, but the currency of the powerful.
Countries that command our admiration today, those with thriving economies, working institutions, and respected democracies, did not rise by auctioning leadership to the highest bidder. Their leaders did not bribe their way into history; they wrote it with integrity and sacrifice. Uganda will never develop if politics remains a marketplace where ideas are silenced by money. People who sell their future for 5,000 shillings do not merely cheat themselves; they condemn their children to poverty. If we truly desire to stand among the nations we admire, then we must reject the curse of money politics and demand leadership that is earned, not bought.
The writer is the LC5 Male Youth Councillor for Rubanda District.
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