By Kampala Post.
Political campaigns for Uganda’s upcoming 2026 general elections for presidential and parliamentary candidates are now well underway. The presidential race is officially into its fourth week after the successful nomination of 8 candidates, including the popular incumbent Yoweri Kaguta Museveni of the National Resistance Movement (NRM).
The presidential campaigns have thus far been praised for being calm and peaceful, with most candidates abiding by the country’s Independent Electoral Commission and police guidelines.
However, in a damning statement yesterday, the Uganda Police strongly cautioned Mr. Kyagulanyi Ssentamu of the National Unity Platform (NUP) to cease his confrontational and provocative attitude towards law enforcement officers on duty, warning that such belligerent behaviour would not be tolerated going forward.
This development could yet prove to be an ominous sign of what lies ahead in the event that the opposition candidate does not change course, as increasingly demanded by the police authorities.
This publication has now exclusively learnt that there might be more than meets the eye as the country’s security services work in overdrive to secure the integrity of the upcoming elections, a yet another significant milestone in the nation’s fledgling democracy.
It has come to the fore that Uganda’s intelligence services recently uncovered and contained a high-level covert destabilisation operation allegedly led by one Tassilo von Droste, a German national described by security insiders as a trained intelligence asset posing under the cover of civil society programming.
Tassilo is said to have entered Uganda in 2023 and embedded himself within political civil society circles. Intelligence dossiers revealed by security agencies indicate that, under the guise of running the Civil Society in Uganda Support Programme (CUSP), he has coordinated a shadow financing network channeling resources to radical opposition formations and anti-state actors.
The funding, intelligence sources confirm, was designed not for ordinary civic engagement but to incubate regime-change infrastructure, coordinate extremist messaging, and engineer pre-election disruption ahead of the 2026 general polls.
Ugandan intelligence has now fully profiled a list of beneficiary NGOs and individuals reportedly handpicked by Tassilo. These entities, disguised as human-rights and governance actors have been under direct counter-intelligence surveillance after evidence emerged of linkages to foreign-funded digital propaganda cells, protest vote-action mobilisers, and election chaos architects.
Attempted Resurrection of the DGF
Classified intelligence shows that Tassilo is the strategic architect behind the highly controversial Advancing Governance and Accountability (AGA) programme, another covert political mobilisation pipeline structured as a rebirth of the previously banned Democratic Governance Facility (DGF). The DGF was permanently shut down by President Yoweri Museveni in 2021 after being exposed for funding parallel political operations, irregularly influencing domestic power dynamics and sponsoring election riots ahead of the 2021 general elections.
Security sources confirm that AGA and CUSP are in fact a DGF 2.0, redesigned with greater secrecy and directly coordinated by Tassilo in partnership with operatives from at least one other European embassy. Their mission is to reconstruct an external command infrastructure capable of influencing Uganda’s political trajectory from outside constitutional provisions.
Operation Neutralisation Successful
Despite the sophistication of the operation, Uganda’s elite intelligence and counter-espionage network is reported to have quietly contained the threat, neutralising the funding corridors and restricting Tassilo’s capacity to activate destabilisation networks.
This active containment, kept deliberately low-profile until now, is being credited by insiders as one of the major reasons Uganda has so far enjoyed an unusually calm and stable pre-election environment this season. Security analysts are describing this as a decisive intelligence victory, comparable to landmark counter-interference operations executed by global powers to shield sovereignty from foreign hybrid warfare.
Ugandan agencies remain on heightened alert, with surveillance reportedly now expanded to all profiled and reactivated civil society and individuals’ pipelines attempting to tactically shape electoral outcomes illegally from the shadows.
