Governing the Vote or Governing the City? Kampala’s Test of Urban Governance

By Amiri Wabusimba

Across the world, cities are increasingly shaped not by plans, but by polls. Urban order is negotiated against electoral survival, and the result is a dangerous illusion: that disorder can be governed, postponed, or selectively tolerated without long-term consequence. Kampala’s recent experience offers a sharp lesson in what happens when politics consistently outpaces planning.

For years, Kampala pursued an uneven but deliberate attempt at urban order. Public space was regulated. Markets were centralized. Street vending, while economically essential, was treated as a transitional condition rather than a permanent planning outcome. Enforcement was often heavy-handed and socially disruptive, but it rested on a governing principle shared by functioning global cities: a city cannot operate if public space is endlessly negotiable.

That consensus collapsed not under the weight of evidence, but under the weight of elections. Urban enforcement became politically radioactive. Regulation was reframed as exclusion, and order was recast as hostility toward the poor. Informality, once understood as a policy challenge requiring integration, gradually became an electoral constituency to be protected rather than an urban system to be governed. Rules remained on paper, but their application became conditional, seasonal, and increasingly symbolic.

This dynamic was publicly acknowledged at the highest political level by President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, who initially praised former KCCA Executive Director Jennifer Musisi for restoring administrative discipline, curbing corruption, improving sanitation, and delivering visible infrastructure—at one point describing her leadership as a “drug” necessary to treat Kampala’s chronic mismanagement. Over time, however, he expressed regret over the political cost of her approach, later attributing the ruling party’s declining urban electoral performance to what he described as aggressive and inconsiderate enforcement.

The episode revealed a deeper institutional dilemma: when technical urban management succeeds but electoral outcomes suffer, political systems tend to retreat from order rather than reform its delivery.

As the 2026 electoral competition intensified, enforcement weakened. Street vending re-emerged in road reserves, transport corridors, green spaces, and recently beautified areas—zones previously protected through significant public investment. This was not an organic failure of compliance. It was a rational response to political signaling. When rules appear negotiable during campaigns, compliance collapses across all sectors. Informality stops being temporary and becomes structural.

This pattern is not unique to Kampala. From Lagos to Nairobi, from Delhi to parts of Latin America, cities have learned that when enforcement is suspended for political convenience, public space is rarely reclaimed through administrative means alone. The most damaging outcome is not aesthetic decline, but institutional erosion. Planning authorities lose credibility. Investors recalibrate risk. Residents adapt their behavior to unpredictability. Informal workers are locked into permanent precarity, mobilized as voters rather than integrated as economic actors.

The debate is often framed as a moral standoff between livelihoods and order. This framing is intellectually lazy and policy-poor. Globally successful cities have demonstrated that informal economies can be integrated without sacrificing spatial logic. What they do not do is suspend the rule of urban law every five years. Predictability, not permissiveness, is what protects the urban poor. Inconsistent enforcement benefits political actors and intermediaries, while the costs are paid through congestion, insecurity, environmental degradation, public health risks, and lost economic opportunity.

Kampala therefore poses a question that resonates far beyond Uganda’s borders: if a disorganized city delivers electoral victories while an organized one incurs political losses, is democracy rewarding the city citizens genuinely want, or the city politics has trained them to accept?

History offers a blunt answer. Cities that trade coherence for votes eventually lose both. Urban competitiveness, climate resilience, public health, and social mobility all depend on one unglamorous principle: rules that outlive election cycles.

For Parliament and the Kampala Capital City Authority, the challenge ahead is not one of new policy design, but of governance clarity. Kampala’s current condition is not the result of planning failure; it is the result of governance inconsistency driven by electoral pressures. Urban management has oscillated between enforcement and tolerance not in response to socioeconomic data, but in response to political calendars. This has weakened institutional authority and blurred the boundary between policy and populism.

The city has invested heavily in roads, drainage, lighting, markets, and green spaces, yet these investments are repeatedly undermined when enforcement is relaxed during political seasons. When public authority appears discretionary, trust erodes. When laws exist but are unevenly applied, legitimacy suffers. And when informal workers are courted as voters rather than supported as economic participants, integration stalls.

International experience is clear. Sustainable urban management requires insulating technical enforcement from electoral competition while politically owning its social consequences. Cities that succeed do not criminalize informality, nor do they romanticize it. They govern it consistently, transparently, and across administrations.

Reasserting urban authority does not require punitive spectacle. It requires a publicly articulated urban compact in which informal trade is recognized, spatially planned, relocated where necessary, and regulated predictably across political cycles. It requires statutory and operational safeguards that prevent enforcement agencies from becoming collateral damage in electoral contests. It requires political leadership that accepts short-term discomfort in service of long-term governability.

The choice before policymakers is not whether order is politically costly, but whether disorder is institutionally survivable. Cities that postpone enforcement to win elections inherit urban conditions that become progressively impossible to govern. Reasserting order is not a retreat from democracy; it is a prerequisite for a city that works for all its residents, including those whose livelihoods depend on it.

Elections are episodic. Cities are permanent. Any leadership that forgets this governs not a capital, but a campaign.

The writer is a communication specialist and diplomatic scholar.