Museveni's Machine Ran an Army of Fake Voices Through Uganda's 2026 Election

Ask yourself what a democracy looks like when the people cannot see the contest. In Uganda, a country where three-quarters of citizens are under 35, a generation was asked to choose its future while the government controlled what that choice looked like. Fewer than half of Ugandans own a smartphone, so for most people the internet is not a marketplace of ideas. It is a window, and someone was holding the curtain.

We should be clear about what happened. A study commissioned by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, drawing on data, open-source investigations and field research inside Uganda, mapped the networks that manufactured and spread political content before the January 2026 vote. Its finding is damning. The election was not a fair contest with some bad actors on the edges. It was a tilted field, with state control of information at its core, and the opposition was forced to fight with one hand tied behind its back.

Start with the blackout. Days before polling, the government imposed a week-long internet shutdown, justified as a national security measure. Whatever the official language, the practical effect was to limit the ability of media and civil society to observe the polling process. Ordinary citizens could not verify what was happening at their own polling stations. Yet some outlets were not shut out at all. NBS TV, owned by Next Media and run by former presidential adviser Kin Kariisa, reportedly secured privileged access. Its managers agreed to let their reporters be subject to state surveillance in exchange for "whitelisting." Think about what that bargain means. A journalist who must submit to surveillance to keep working is no longer a journalist. He is an informant with a press card.

Now the machinery. The Government Citizen Interaction Centre, a citizen liaison portal that reports to State House, was already a tool of the ruling party by 2021, when its staff were paid to create fake accounts to counter the youth vote of the National Unity Platform. One employee admitted to running more than 40 sock puppet accounts that favoured NRM narratives. This was not a rogue operation. It was public money, meant to serve citizens, spent manufacturing the appearance of citizens who did not exist. Under Marcella Karekye, a close friend of Museveni's daughter, the centre's methods did not disappear. They spread.

The 2026 operation went further. State-aligned influencers captured a popular entertainment YouTube channel and repositioned it as a party for young Ugandans, promoting the slogan #ProtectingTheGains. Pro-government rallies were streamed, cut into election explainers and handed to influencers on the ruling party's payroll, who passed them off as neutral reporting across multiple platforms. A network of at least nine nodes ran a campaign branded "The Longest Online Rally," repackaging footage and amplifying deepfakes and clips stripped of context. A separate programme, "Jazz with Jajja," invited ordinary Ugandans to put questions to Museveni, but the audience was packed with paid influencers posing as ordinary citizens. Imagine asking a question of a president and discovering the crowd was on his payroll.

The opposition did not sit quietly. Both the NRM and the NUP used inauthentic buzzer accounts, which the report describes as human-operated sock puppets whose controllers are often paid to push a viewpoint. We will not pretend the NUP's hands were clean. But the scale and the state resources behind the ruling party's network are not symmetrical. When one side controls the broadcast, the internet, the surveillance apparatus and the public purse, a grassroots counter-campaign is not a duel. It is a David fighting a state with the entire Ministry of Information on its side.

Consider the cost of the NUP's resilience. Its online presence survived through coordinated reposting and diaspora mobilisation, the only tools left when the state cuts the lines. Bobi Wine remains in exile after receiving death threats following the polls. A candidate who campaigned to represent Ugandan youth now cannot safely live in Uganda. That is what electoral manipulation looks like in human terms: not just a rigged number, but a leader driven out of his own country.

The hostility did not end at the ballot box. A cyberattack on a national media platform days before polling took down email access and parts of its archive. No one has been held to account for it. Months later, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the armed forces chief and leader of the Patriotic League of Uganda, a faction within the NRM, temporarily shut down Nation Media Group over what he called "critical reporting." The Nation Media Group is not an enemy of Uganda. It is one of the few institutions holding power to account, which is precisely why power wants it silenced.

Let us be honest about the wider picture. The report also documented limited foreign online activity, including Russia-aligned and MAGA-aligned accounts that used the election to push unrelated narratives about the US-Iran, Israel-Palestine and Russia-Ukraine conflicts. Some of these actors hijacked election hashtags and used AI-generated imagery to spread neo-colonial and anti-Western messaging. False stories about African soldiers being drafted into foreign wars circulated after the vote. Some of these claims were grounded in real cases of Kenyans and South Africans being deceptively recruited and trafficked into the Russia-Ukraine war. Others reused images of dead soldiers. The researchers were clear that the foreign role was marginal and did not amount to a concerted attempt to swing the result. That is the honest verdict, and we will not inflate it. The rot in Uganda's election is homegrown. The foreign noise is a distraction from the domestic theft.

So why does this matter beyond Kampala? Because the playbook is spreading. The report notes that similar buzzer activity was observed in South Africa's 2024 general election, and South Africans are voting in local government elections today. Covert influence campaigns violate the spirit of the United Nations Global Principles for Information Integrity, which call for transparency about who is speaking and who is paying. These operations thrive in the dark, and every dark corner we leave unlit becomes a template for the next autocrat.

There is a solution, and it is not complicated. Africa has proof that competitive, honest politics works. Botswana has held regular, peaceful elections for decades and built an economy on transparent institutions and the rule of law. Mauritius alternates power through elections that the world rarely questions, and it has grown into one of the continent's most prosperous economies. In 2024, Senegal's citizens and courts forced President Macky Sall to back down from an attempt to postpone the presidential election, and the country then carried out a peaceful transfer of power. Those are the standards we should demand everywhere, not as favours from our rulers but as the minimum a self-respecting people deserves.

What should Uganda's citizens demand? Lift the internet shutdowns and make them illegal outside of genuine, court-reviewed emergencies. Require full public disclosure of any person paid by the state or a political party to post online, the same way we require disclosure of paid political advertising on television. Repeal or enforce against the surveillance arrangements that turn journalists into informants. Restore Nation Media Group's broadcasting rights and investigate the cyberattack that crippled it. Demand an independent Electoral Commission with real autonomy from State House, and ask the African Union and the East African Community to deploy observers who examine the digital battlefield, not just the polling stations. Platforms like YouTube must also be held accountable. When a channel is captured to deliver political messaging without disclosure, the company's guidelines must mean something, and regulators should test whether they do.

We cannot accept the lie that Africa's youth are too apathetic to care about politics. Three-quarters of Ugandans under 35 are not apathetic. They are being managed. The regime's bet is that a young population with patchy internet access can be fed an endless stream of manufactured enthusiasm and kept from noticing the empty chairs in the room. Prove them wrong. Share what you can verify. Demand the disclosure of who is paying for your feed. Refuse to be a sock puppet for anyone's agenda, whether it sits in State House, a foreign capital or a content farm across the world.

Uganda's voters deserve an election they can see, a press that can report it and an opposition that can survive it. Until those things are guaranteed, every result announced from Kampala carries an asterisk the government itself wrote. We are not asking for a miracle. We are asking for the basic honesty that democracy requires. Demand it, loudly, today.

Based on reporting by ISS