Uganda does not simply have a problem of political representation. It has a deeper problem of how votes are translated into political power. And one of the most important questions we must ask is whether the country's electoral architecture has been used to protect the ruling establishment, weaken opposition strongholds and manufacture parliamentary dominance.
One of the greatest political advantages Yoweri Museveni has enjoyed during his four decades in power is the ability to operate within an electoral system where winning votes and winning parliamentary representation are two very different things.
This is where political gerrymandering, malapportionment and the manipulation of electoral geography become important.
Gerrymandering involves manipulating electoral boundaries to benefit a particular political party. Malapportionment occurs when constituencies have substantially unequal populations, meaning that one MP represents far more people than another.
These are not exactly the same thing, but they can produce a similar political outcome: some voters end up with considerably more parliamentary influence than others.
And when these disparities consistently benefit the ruling establishment, they deserve serious scrutiny.
1. The fundamental problem: Uganda's electoral system does not adequately translate votes into parliamentary power
Uganda primarily uses a constituency-based, first-past-the-post electoral system.
Under this arrangement, a candidate can win a constituency with a relatively small share of the national vote, while millions of people who support another political party may end up with no direct constituency representation in Parliament.
The problem is compounded by the country's additional parliamentary seats.
Under Article 78 of the Constitution, Parliament includes:
Directly elected constituency representatives.
One woman representative for every district.
Representatives of the army.
Youth representatives.
Workers' representatives.
Representatives of persons with disabilities.
Representatives of older persons.
The Vice President and ministers as ex-officio members, without voting rights where they are not already elected MPs.
This produces a Parliament whose composition is not determined by one straightforward national vote.
The current 12th Parliament has 553 members, according to Parliament's own composition figures. Of these, 353 are constituency representatives, while the remainder occupy district, city, special-interest and ex-officio positions.
The result is a complicated system in which parliamentary strength is determined by a combination of constituency victories, district representation and special-interest arrangements.
The question is whether this system adequately reflects the political preferences of the Ugandan electorate.
2. The geography of political representation
Consider the disparities in the population-versus-representation figures we have been examining.
Central Uganda has the largest population, yet the earlier regional comparison showed it with fewer constituency MPs than Eastern and Western Uganda.
Eastern Uganda, despite having a smaller population than Central, was shown with substantially more constituency representatives.
Western Uganda also appeared to enjoy a higher number of constituency seats relative to its population.
This raises an important question: why should a voter in one part of Uganda effectively have more parliamentary representation than a voter in another?
Imagine two constituencies:
Constituency A has 100,000 inhabitants and one MP.
Constituency B has 200,000 inhabitants and one MP.
Both MPs have exactly one vote in Parliament.
But one represents twice as many people as the other.
The voters in Constituency B therefore have half the constituency representation per person.
Now imagine that this imbalance is repeated across entire regions, and that the beneficiaries are predominantly located in areas politically favourable to the ruling party.
The result can be a parliamentary majority that does not accurately reflect the distribution of political preferences across the country.
That is the fundamental danger of malapportionment when combined with partisan electoral boundary manipulation.
A necessary qualification: the earlier regional seat figures should be independently verified against the Electoral Commission's constituency register and boundary maps before being presented as conclusive evidence of deliberate gerrymandering. Regional population comparisons alone do not establish political manipulation.
3. How this helps manufacture an NRM parliamentary majority
This is where the discussion becomes particularly important.
In a functioning representative democracy, parliamentary composition should provide a reasonably accurate reflection of the political choices made by voters.
But Uganda's constituency-based system allows a party to accumulate parliamentary seats in ways that can be disproportionate to its actual national popularity.
Look at the 2021 parliamentary elections.
According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union's election records:
NRM secured 336 seats.
National Unity Platform (NUP) secured 57 seats.
Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) secured 32 seats.
Democratic Party secured 9 seats.
Uganda People's Congress secured 9 seats.
Independents secured 74 seats.
NRM retained a commanding parliamentary majority, taking 336 of the 499 seats at stake in that election.
That is an extraordinary concentration of parliamentary power.
The critical question is whether that parliamentary dominance accurately reflected the political preferences of Ugandans or whether the electoral structure, constituency distribution and other institutional advantages helped exaggerate the ruling party's strength.
A party can win many constituencies by relatively narrow margins, while an opposition party can accumulate millions of votes across the country without converting those votes into a comparable number of MPs.
This is one of the fundamental weaknesses of first-past-the-post elections.
A party can receive substantial national support but remain severely underrepresented in Parliament.
Meanwhile, a ruling party with geographically concentrated support can win a disproportionately large number of seats.
The result is that the government can appear to enjoy overwhelming national support when what it actually possesses is an overwhelming advantage in parliamentary seat conversion.
4. The parliamentary majority and the passage of controversial laws
Why does this matter?
Because Parliament is not simply a debating chamber. It is the institution through which laws are passed, constitutional amendments are considered, public expenditure is scrutinised and the executive is supposed to be held accountable.
When one political organisation enjoys an overwhelmingly dominant parliamentary majority, the ability of opposition MPs to challenge government legislation becomes severely limited.
Uganda has experienced this problem repeatedly.
Consider the 2017 constitutional amendment that removed the presidential age limit.
The amendment enabled Museveni to contest the 2021 presidential election despite having passed the previous constitutional age threshold.
The controversy surrounding that amendment was not simply about the age of a presidential candidate. It was about the removal of an important constitutional safeguard and the extension of political possibilities for an incumbent who had already been in power for decades.
The 2020 parliamentary expansion also deserves scrutiny. Five additional seats for older persons were introduced, adding another category of representation to an already expanding Parliament.
The broader issue is that when the ruling party dominates Parliament, constitutional changes and controversial legislation can become much easier to push through.
The opposition may raise objections, organise protests, challenge legislation in court and expose weaknesses in proposed bills. But if it does not have sufficient parliamentary numbers, it cannot reliably stop legislation through parliamentary voting.
This is how parliamentary dominance becomes an instrument of executive survival.
A government that controls Parliament can influence the rules under which it operates, including the constitutional framework governing elections, presidential eligibility and the institutions meant to provide checks and balances.
This does not mean every NRM-sponsored law is illegitimate, nor that every controversial bill was passed because of gerrymandering. Each piece of legislation must be examined individually.
But it does demonstrate why parliamentary representation is so important: when the legislature becomes overwhelmingly dominated by the governing party, the executive faces fewer effective institutional obstacles.
5. The Bobi Wine question: What does 3.6 million votes actually mean?
Now let us examine the most revealing example.
In the January 2021 presidential election, Robert Kyagulanyi, popularly known as Bobi Wine, received 3,631,437 votes, representing 35.08% of valid votes, according to the Electoral Commission's final results.
Museveni received 6,042,898 votes, representing 58.38%.
Bobi Wine therefore received more than 3.6 million votes.
That is not a small political constituency. It is a substantial national electoral constituency.
Yet when we examine the parliamentary results, NUP emerged with only 57 seats, against NRM's 336.
This is precisely where the weaknesses of Uganda's electoral system become visible.
Millions of voters can support an opposition presidential candidate, but that support does not automatically translate into equivalent parliamentary strength.
Of course, presidential votes and parliamentary party votes are not identical. A voter can support Bobi Wine for president and vote for an independent or another party for their MP. Therefore, we cannot simply convert presidential votes into actual NUP parliamentary seats.
But we can conduct an illustrative comparison.
Imagine Uganda adopted a proportional representation system similar to South Africa's National Assembly model.
If NUP's parliamentary vote share had been the same as Bobi Wine's 35.08% presidential vote share in 2021, the approximate seat allocation would look like this:
Illustrative proportional representation calculation
BASED ON THE 2021 PRESIDENTIAL VOTE SHARE
35.08%
Bobi Wine's share of valid presidential votes
140
400-seat Parliament
Equivalent proportional seats
186
529-seat Parliament
Equivalent proportional seats
These are illustrative calculations, not actual parliamentary election results. They assume the same party vote share and apply simple proportional allocation.
Think about the difference.
Under the 400-seat South African model, that level of support would translate into approximately 140 MPs, rather than the 57 NUP won in Uganda's 2021 parliamentary election.
That would be a much more substantial parliamentary opposition.
It would not automatically give NUP control of Parliament, but it would make it significantly harder for the ruling party to pass legislation without serious parliamentary scrutiny.
And that is the point.
A Parliament should not simply be a place where the ruling party arrives with enough numbers to rubber-stamp whatever the executive wants.
It should be a place where the political diversity of the electorate is reflected in the distribution of legislative power.
6. Why South Africa's electoral system provides an interesting alternative
South Africa offers an important comparison.
Since 1994, South Africa has used proportional representation for national and provincial elections.
The National Assembly has 400 seats, allocated broadly according to the proportion of votes received by political parties.
The current system is more accurately described as a proportional system with regional and compensatory seats. Following electoral reforms, independent candidates can also contest regional seats.
The 200 regional seats are allocated first, while the remaining 200 national seats help ensure overall proportionality.
Parliament of South Africa+2
The principle is relatively straightforward:
If a party receives 40% of the relevant national vote, it should receive approximately 40% of the seats.
If it receives 10%, it should receive approximately 10% of the seats.
This does not mean the party with the most votes automatically gets a majority. It means parliamentary power is distributed more closely in accordance with electoral support.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this system.
The major advantage is that millions of voters cannot easily be rendered politically insignificant simply because their support is spread across different geographical constituencies.
A party with 20% national support has a much better chance of obtaining approximately 20% of parliamentary representation.
It also means that smaller political parties can enter Parliament without having to win individual constituencies.
The disadvantage is that voters may have a weaker direct relationship with individual MPs, because many representatives enter Parliament through party lists. There is also a risk that party leaderships exercise excessive control over which candidates receive parliamentary positions.
South Africa has attempted to balance some of these concerns through its regional and national allocation structure.
For Uganda, the important lesson is not necessarily to copy South Africa wholesale. It is to examine how proportional representation could prevent millions of voters from being underrepresented.
7. The creation of districts: administrative decentralisation or political arithmetic?
Another issue that deserves serious investigation is Uganda's continuous creation of new districts.
Uganda has experienced a substantial expansion of its administrative units over the years. Every new district potentially creates additional political and administrative positions, including a district woman representative in Parliament.
Under Article 78 of the Constitution, every district is entitled to a woman representative.
This means that creating new districts has direct consequences for the size and composition of Parliament.
There may be legitimate reasons for creating districts. Some communities are geographically isolated, have poor access to public services or require closer administrative supervision.
However, district creation also has political consequences.
It creates additional parliamentary seats, increases the number of political officeholders and potentially changes the balance of representation in the legislature.
The critical question is whether these decisions are being made primarily to improve public administration or whether political calculations also influence them.
When administrative boundaries are repeatedly altered under a dominant ruling party, it is reasonable to demand transparency about the criteria being used.
Are new districts created according to population, service-delivery needs and economic viability? Or are political considerations influencing where administrative boundaries are drawn?
These questions become particularly important when district creation benefits a ruling party's parliamentary arithmetic.
The creation of districts should never become a political reward system.
8. What does the Ugandan Constitution actually say about constituency boundaries?
Interestingly, Uganda's Constitution already contains provisions intended to prevent gross inequalities in constituency representation.
Article 63(3) requires constituency boundaries to be drawn so that the number of inhabitants in each constituency is, as nearly as possible, equal to the population quota.
However, Article 63(4) permits variations to account for:
Article 63(5) also provides for constituency reviews following the publication of census results.
These provisions are important.
They mean that Uganda's Constitution does not simply permit unlimited differences in constituency populations.
But they also leave room for discretion.
The question is whether that discretion is being exercised transparently, consistently and independently.
For example, if two constituencies have vastly different populations, the Electoral Commission should be able to explain why the difference is necessary and which constitutional considerations justify it.
If a densely populated urban constituency has twice the population of a rural constituency but both receive one MP, the public deserves a clear explanation.
And if the same pattern repeatedly disadvantages particular political regions, an independent review becomes even more necessary.
There is also a crucial institutional issue: Article 60 provides for the Electoral Commission to be appointed by the President with parliamentary approval, while Article 62 declares its independence.
Formal constitutional independence is important, but institutional credibility also depends on public confidence in appointments, transparency and the Commission's willingness to make decisions without political pressure.
The electoral map should belong to the citizens, not to the party in government.
9. How this system can keep Museveni in power without winning the same level of public support everywhere
There is a broader political consequence to all this.
A dominant ruling party does not need to win every region. It needs to maintain enough strategically distributed support to win constituencies and retain a parliamentary majority.
When the electoral system is constituency-based, geographically concentrated support can be translated into a disproportionately large number of seats.
Opposition support, particularly when concentrated in urban centres or spread across multiple regions, may be converted less efficiently into parliamentary representation.
This is a structural advantage that an incumbent can benefit from over many election cycles.
It also affects the psychology of politics.
When the ruling party controls an overwhelming majority of Parliament, it becomes easier to present itself as the natural and permanent political authority.
The public sees a Parliament dominated by NRM MPs. The government can claim overwhelming legislative support. Political appointments, committee leadership and parliamentary business are largely controlled by the governing establishment.
The opposition, meanwhile, can have millions of supporters but appear institutionally insignificant.
That creates a dangerous gap between electoral popularity and political power.
A party may have considerable support among citizens but very limited ability to influence the legislative agenda.
And this is one of the reasons why electoral reform is not merely a technical debate about constituency boundaries. It is a debate about whether political competition in Uganda is genuinely capable of producing a change in the balance of power.
10. What Uganda should consider changing
If Uganda genuinely wants a representative Parliament, it should consider fundamental electoral reforms.
I would propose five changes.
A. Introduce proportional representation for a substantial share of parliamentary seats.
Uganda should consider a system where political parties receive parliamentary seats in proportion to the votes they obtain nationally.
A party receiving 35% of the vote should not end up with only a small fraction of parliamentary representation simply because its support is geographically distributed.
B. Establish an independent constituency-boundary commission.
The demarcation of constituencies should be handled through a transparent process, with independently verifiable population data and public hearings.
The commission should publish:
Population figures for every constituency.
The population quota.
The reasons for deviations from the quota.
The historical changes to constituency boundaries.
The political and demographic consequences of proposed changes.
C. Review the relationship between population and parliamentary seats.
There must be a defensible standard for how many people each MP represents.
Geography and accessibility matter, but they should not become excuses for permanent and unexplained disparities.
D. Reform the district representation system.
The creation of new districts should be based on administrative and developmental considerations, not political convenience.
Uganda should also review whether the automatic addition of parliamentary representation for every new district produces an unnecessarily expanding legislature.
E. Strengthen parliamentary independence.
Parliament must be able to scrutinise the executive, investigate public expenditure and reject legislation without MPs being reduced to political loyalists.
The opposition must have meaningful representation in parliamentary committees, oversight institutions and legislative processes.
11. The real question: Who does Parliament represent?
Let us return to Bobi Wine's 3.63 million votes.
Those millions of Ugandans did not disappear after the presidential election.
They did not suddenly become less important because their preferred presidential candidate did not win.
They remain citizens. They pay taxes, contribute to the economy and have the same constitutional right to political representation as supporters of the ruling party.
Yet a system that converts votes into seats disproportionately can make millions of citizens feel as though their political choices have little influence over the country's legislative direction.
That is fundamentally unhealthy for democracy.
A Parliament should not be judged by how many seats the ruling party controls. It should be judged by how accurately it reflects the political choices of the people.
And this is why Uganda needs to rethink its electoral architecture.
It is not enough to have elections every five years if the mechanisms translating votes into parliamentary representation produce persistent and unjustifiable inequalities.
It is not enough to have opposition MPs if their numbers are so limited that they cannot meaningfully challenge the executive.
And it is certainly not enough to claim that a government enjoys overwhelming parliamentary legitimacy when the electoral system itself may be amplifying the ruling party's strength.
12. The ultimate danger: A Parliament that protects the presidency instead of the people
For 40 years, Museveni has presided over a political system in which the executive has enjoyed enormous influence over the country's institutions.
A dominant parliamentary majority makes that arrangement easier to sustain.
It can facilitate constitutional amendments, reduce legislative resistance, weaken parliamentary oversight and create an environment in which controversial government proposals face fewer obstacles.
The 2017 removal of the presidential age limit remains an important example of how parliamentary numbers can fundamentally alter the constitutional rules governing presidential eligibility.
The question is not whether NRM has a legitimate right to win elections. It absolutely does.
The question is whether every Ugandan's vote carries a reasonably equal weight when parliamentary representation is calculated.
And whether the boundaries, constituencies and additional parliamentary seats are being administered in a manner that is genuinely impartial.
Democracy is not simply about counting votes. It is about ensuring that those votes translate into fair political representation.
Museveni does not necessarily need every Ugandan to support him. But if the electoral architecture consistently converts his political strongholds into disproportionate parliamentary power, while leaving millions of opposition voters with limited legislative influence, the ruling establishment enjoys a structural advantage that goes beyond ordinary electoral campaigning.
That is why I believe political gerrymandering and malapportionment deserve far more attention in Uganda's political debate.
The real battle is not only about who wins the presidency.
It is about who controls Parliament, who writes the laws, who changes the Constitution and who determines the rules under which the next election will be conducted.
A country can hold elections and still have a deeply unrepresentative Parliament. It can have hundreds of MPs and still fail to give millions of its citizens an equal political voice.
And perhaps the most important question Ugandans should be asking is this:
If every Ugandan's vote carried a more proportional weight in Parliament, would the NRM still enjoy the overwhelming legislative dominance it has maintained for decades?
That is a question worth confronting.
Sources and important statistical qualifications
The analysis above draws on the following primary and institutional sources:
Uganda Electoral Commission: Official 2021 presidential election results. Bobi Wine received 3,631,437 votes (35.08%). Read the official election results.
Inter-Parliamentary Union: 2021 parliamentary results, including NRM's 336 seats and NUP's 57 seats. Read the parliamentary election analysis.
Uganda Constitution: Articles 60, 62, 63 and 78, covering the Electoral Commission, constituencies and parliamentary composition. Read the Constitution.
South African Parliament: Explanation of proportional representation and the 400-member National Assembly. Read Parliament's explanation.
South African Electoral Commission: 2024 National and Provincial Elections report and seat allocation. Read the election report.
.webp)
.webp)
.webp)
