Museveni takes vote hunt to Lamwo, Gulu

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President Yoweri Museveni on Wednesday (October 22) takes his vote hunt to Lamwo district and Gulu city as he seeks his seventh consecutive term in office early next year.

Museveni, the cowboy hat-wearing leader, is standing on the National Resistance Movement (NRM) party ticket in the election scheduled for January 15, 2026.

In the 2021 general election, Museveni garnered 19,322 (57.10%) votes in Lamwo, while his main rival, Robert Kyagulanyi of the National Unity Platform (NUP) obtained 8,621 (25.48%).

In Gulu, Museveni got 9,997 (50.39%) votes while Kyagulanyi collected 3,023 (15.24%).

Both Lamwo and Gulu are located in the Acholi sub-region, which bore the brunt of the Lord’s Resistance Army’s (LRA) brutal insurgency.

The insurgency started in Acholi in 1987 under the command of Joseph Kony and spilt over into Teso in June 2003, bringing death and destruction to many areas. 

The LRA relied heavily on the abduction of children for use as soldiers, and atrocities against the civilian population were commonplace.

During the conflict, cattle rustling led to increased poverty in the area and some of the area’s young people grew up in camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs), which led to interrupted transitions to adulthood.

After the conflict, many communities had reduced access to education and health services, owing to the absence of qualified staff.  Infrastructure, such as roads and transport links, were devastated too.

Insecurity was a campaign bait for the opposition in the region during the 1996 and 2001 general elections. However, the return of peace in 2006 turned out to be President Museveni and his NRM’s masterpiece in the region.

Since 2011, the NRM Government has been executing war recovery programmes, through the Northern Uganda Social Action Fund, (NUSAF) II and the Peace, Recovery and Development Plan (PRDP II).

NUSAF and PRDP are affirmative action programmes meant to rehabilitate northern Uganda. Under these programmes, the government built tarmac roads, constructed classrooms and teachers’ houses as well as supplying desks and sinking boreholes so that people have water.

It also distributed heifers, bulls and oxen as well as facilitating the return of IDPs to their ancestral homes. In addition, the government also provided a resettlement package to some returnees.

These recovery programmes helped President Museveni win massively for the first time in the entire northern region.

Of the total 5,851,037 votes that the President garnered across the country as the NRM candidate, 1,164,550 were from northern Uganda, making up 67.95% of the total votes garnered from the region by all the 11 presidential candidates.