When Winners Become Losers, What Are We Teaching Our Children?

By Ivan Kimuli Kigozi

I was seated in my sitting room with the remote control in my hand, watching the evening news with my son. Every bulletin, on every station, carried the same images people fighting at polling stations, ballot boxes being grabbed, security forces pushing crowds back, angry voters shouting that their votes were being stolen. The scenes kept repeating, channel after channel!

Then my son turned to me and asked a simple question: “Taata, why are people fighting?” I told him people are voting, I went silent.

After a brief pause, he spoke again, almost confused: “But when we vote for prefects at school, we don’t fight.”

That sentence hit me harder. How do you explain to a child that adults leaders, institutions, and systems have failed to uphold the very values we teach in schools? How do you explain that those who clearly win at polling stations and tally centres can still end up declared losers? How do you explain ballot stuffing, altered figures, and an Electoral Commission that chooses silence when truth is under attack?

At this moment, I realised the problem was no longer just about politics. It was about the kind of Uganda we are building and the painful truth that our children’s simple sense of fairness now stands taller than our national systems.

Our children are watching. They see ballot boxes been broken, kicked left, right, up and down. They hear radio announcements that contradict what everyone at the polling station witnessed. They watch candidates celebrate victory at night only to wake up defeated in the morning. When they ask us, “Didn’t that person win?” what do we tell them?

Do we tell them that truth is temporary?

That honesty ends at the tally centre?

How do we explain ballot stuffing to a child who is taught in school that cheating is wrong? 

Are we teaching our children that voting is meaningless? That participation is a waste of time? That democracy is just a ritual, not a right?

If winners are decided not by voters but by manipulation, then why line up in the sun? Why preach patriotism? Why encourage young people to believe in leadership, service, and integrity?

What happens to a nation when its children grow up knowing that elections are staged, results are negotiated, and justice depends on who controls the system? What kind of leaders will they become when they learn that lying works better than truth?

Is this how those in charge want to be remembered by raising a generation that no longer believes in fairness, institutions, or the rule of law?

And if we remain silent today, just like the Electoral Commission, what moral authority will we have tomorrow when our children inherit a broken system and ask us why we allowed it to happen?

Many questions?