A Protest Vote Is An Illusion Coined By Bobi To Help Him Go Through The 2026 Elections

A protest vote basically means supporting a candidate in an election who has no legitimate chance of winning. The problem is mostly that what sounds good in theory seldom works in practice because not enough people vote for the party asking for a protest vote.

The first flaw in the protest vote thinking is that there’s no do-over. If your message is that you don’t like Museveni or NRM, you’re still stuck with NRM until the next election. It's pretty much impossible to get away from the main party setup and I would actually argue that the protest vote is a waste of time – it’s a language designed to make voters, particularly young people, feel good about themselves.

Another flaw is that unless you make a big enough and public enough stink about it, the NRM party officials are not going to know why the NUP candidate got a chunk of the vote; they’re only going to know that they did. If they lost by a small margin ( protest votes are seldom more than a few percent), then they will put it down to other factors, like violence usually in elections. Generally, the people who voted for Kyagulanyi/NUP, FDC, DP, e.t.c, are likely going to be the same people voting for them respectively in 2026.

Protest vote doesn’t actually work in dictatorships or developing countries because the election results are usually rigged – so, the opposition won't know exactly how many votes it got in such a system unless what is allocated to it by the Electoral commission. They wont even know the percentage of the protest votes, because the system is meant to favour the party in power.

Successful protest votes are followed by surges in voting. Ugandans have been involved in protest votes under FDC and Besigye as the main opposition, but voter turnout seems to be consistently low.

The main point of protest is to attract attention to an issue. Thus, to take a recent example, nearly everyone, including Bobi Wine, believes that Electoral Reforms (ER) are necessary. Mathias Mpuuga fronted Electoral proposals but you find Kyagulanyi aka Bobi Wine not making ER a major issue of a protest vote because it was fronted by someone he doesn’t like, and that’s already a problem itself. Therefore, the 2026 protest vote will be serving no purpose when you critically think about it.

The protest vote is supposed to draw attention to grievances, but it carries the danger that you actually get what you voted for. A great example of that is Brexit here in the UK. There were a few thousand young people in Britain who voted in favour of Brexit, not because they wanted to exit the EU, but because they wanted the vote to be closer than they thought it would be. So a protest vote from those people resulted in the economic chaos that Brexit has brought.

Similarly, Bobi is just taking advantage of the young people in Uganda. Young people all over the world complain, entirely justifiably, that they are often ignored by the political class and that relatively advantaged older people are pandered to, but this is entirely rational. Young people are a notoriously unreliable voting bloc while old, relatively advantaged people are a notoriously reliable voting bloc. If I was a professional political operative as opposed to someone who scribbles about politics on the internet, I would pander more to the elderly, too. It has been shown time and time again that if you ignore the elderly and advantaged and instead focus on the young and disadvantaged, you lose. And losing it is not what professional political operatives are in the business of doing.

The bank robber, Willie Sutton, was famously quoted, when asked why he robbed banks, “because that’s where the money is.” You don’t advance your cause by giving power to those who rabidly oppose it. You don’t advance your cause by joining a fringe group that has never wielded political power. This is partly why NUP will lose again in 2026.

In 2026, you will be simply helping Bobi and NUP to make some money in politics if you don’t vote for NRM or PFF, FDC or something else, and vote for a NUP candidate. The more MPs a party gets, the more money it gets through IPOD.

However, If you think that the NUP has a role in influencing policy and want it to continue to be around, then your “protest vote” will have a purpose if you send it that way. The reality is that the opposition has rarely influenced policy through elections. On a few occasions, the government copied some of the policies, like getting rid of the graduated tax, that were fronted by Besigye in the past elections. NUP, on the other hand, has never influenced any policy.

REFUSAL TO VOTE
Not voting usually indicates that you simply don’t care and that you feel all candidates are terrible; so it is basically protesting all candidates.

I am a great fan of the BBC TV show from the 1970’s called “The Goodies”. In one episode, just two people voted in a British election - the two candidates for the position. They demanded a recount for the two candidates which went “one” “one” in each of two piles.

Here is what I mean. Majority of Ugandans believe that the country is being run by a group of people either related to Museveni by blood or friends of the family. Now if I thought that was the case, I would be highly motivated to never participate in Uganda elections.

Museveni is, therefore, hoping that people who are opposed to him either vote for NUP or a third party candidate splits the votes for the opposition. He wouldn’t like Ugandans not to participate in elections, as advocated by Besigye, because it reflects so badly on the government, and it’s not something he can manipulate easily.

So, in conclusion, voting for Kyagulanyi or NUP as a protest vote is morally self-indulgent and improper piety. And in addition, it doesn’t send the message about illegitimacy, anyway, and it will basically change nothing. It might matter to you and make you feel good about it but the government will still be able to implement its programme.

Of course, none of these observations would apply if elections were free and fair. If you live in a developed democratic country, it would probably be rational to vote for a third party to satisfy your dissatisfaction with the two main candidates. Or, depending on how much pleasure you get from the act of voting (I get loads of pleasure from it because I am a weird political anorak), it might be rational to stay home and watch Bukedde TV instead.