Yoweri Museveni campaign posters during the 2011 Ugandan election. Source: Flickr user Gabriel White

Yesterday’s election exposed Africa’s leading coffee producer as a nation led by a regime with little respect for fundamental human rights, including freedom of association.

The Twitter hashtag #MuseveniDecides, is telling of how low people’s expectations are for real political change in Uganda. Even the president’s main opposition, Dr. Kizza Besigye of the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) party, admitted in a 2013 interview that participating in this year’s election would be “a ritual without any political significance.“ He was right.