Kampala, Uganda – The government has tabled the Political Parties and Organisations (Amendment) Bill, 2025 a legislative bomb that could choke off state funding to opposition parties and hand the executive new powers over political organizations.
The bill, introduced on May 14, 2025, by Hon. Akello Nakut, is being branded by critics as the ‘Democracy Death Bill.’
“If you don’t join their party, you don’t get the party favors.”
At its core, the amendment proposes two seismic shifts including only political parties registered under the National Consultative Forum (NCF) will be eligible for government funding and access to public resources. For opposition, this feels like a political ambush forcing them to join the state-controlled Forum or starve.
The bill also creates two new bodies under the Forum including Inter-Party Organisation for Dialogue (IPOD) supposedly for dialogue among parties in Parliament and Forum for Non-Represented Political Parties for those without parliamentary seats.
The Minister in charge will wield unchecked power to prescribe governance structures, rules and membership procedures for these forums via statutory instruments without Parliament’s oversight.
“This is not dialogue, it’s dictatorship in Parliament,” said MP Jimmy James Akena the party president of Uganda People’s Congress (UPC), who blasted the bill as “diabolical and unconstitutional” during a heated plenary debate on Wednesday.
Many see the bill as NRM’s latest trick to suffocate dissent and trap opposition parties into a system where the key players are all government appointees.
“You don’t get to choose the rules of dialogue in a democracy. They want to trap political parties into a fake forum where they hold the control remote and when you refuse to play, they strangle your party financially.”
Uganda abandoned the one-party system in 2005, embracing a multi-party democracy. But critics argue this bill, much like the 2021 NGO Act, is dragging the country back to the bad old days where only regime-friendly parties could breathe.
Political analyst Nicholas Opiyo warns that such moves normalize authoritarianism.
“Dialogue is a beautiful thing when it’s voluntary. But what Museveni’s government is proposing is forced dialogue under their own terms. That’s not democracy; that’s theater.”
The bill has now landed before Uganda’s Parliament, where the NRM’s crushing supermajority makes its passage almost a foregone conclusion.
Opposition parties, legal minds and civil society groups have vowed to challenge it all the way to the Constitutional Court.
Meanwhile, Hon. Mathias Mpuuga has been granted leave of the House to introduce a Private Member’s Bill entitled The Political Parties and Organisations (Amendment) Bill, 2025.
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