What Losing the YALI election by 73 Votes Taught Me About People, Power, and Politics

How I Saw It: The YALI Election

Politics is a brutal game. That much I knew. But I had never imagined its sheer cruelty until May 2025 when I offered myself to serve as President of the YALI RLC Alumni Chapter Uganda.

The level of vendetta, the flurry of insults, the backdoor maneuvering, the tactical whispers, and the full display of Machiavellian tactics that didn’t come gently. They came like a well-coordinated storm, with the military precision of people who had prepared for months to unleash it. I’d be dishonest if I said I wasn’t shocked. I was. My heart raced, my mind staggered, and my entire being stood in awe of the ugliness that electoral politics can sometimes unleash.

What in the h3ll had I walked into?

But first, a little context.

What is YALI?

I joined YALI in 2015 as part of one of the earliest cohorts. For those unfamiliar, YALI stands for the Young African Leaders Initiative, a leadership program launched by President Barack Obama to cultivate a new generation of African leaders.

YALI Regional Leadership Centers (RLCs) are spread across the continent, offering intensive training in business, civic leadership, and public management. And while many see it as just a course, to some of us, YALI became a compass and a place where ideas, purpose, and identity collided.

After the training, participants transition into the alumni network which is a community of dreamers, builders, believers. And as of today, Uganda alone boasts over 800 YALI-trained alumni. I, for one, went through the business and entrepreneurship track. It was after YALI that I launched Ugabus.com back in 2016. I owe a part of my entrepreneurial journey to that experience.

And so, when I chose to run for Chapter President in 2024, I did so not as an outsider or an opportunist. I did so as someone who had served. As someone who had watched this community grow, falter, then flicker struggling to keep the flame alive. By 2025, I had skin in the game.

I knew what we could become. But we were drifting.

Why Did I Contest?

The answer was simple: **to reset the soul of YALI Uganda **with structure, belonging, and radical unity, or so I thought.

I had a vision of building a chapter where no one felt like an outsider, where belonging wasn’t a privilege but a right. I wanted to build an alumni body where cohortz didn’t matter, regions didn’t divide, and status didn’t silence. A network that worked beyond tribe.

I studied the past leaderships from which I noted the gains, the gaps and the patterns. Then I built a manifesto rooted in three words: Belong. Become. Believe.

I was ready and so I outlined on this website https://hakiza4yali.com/

The Campaign: A Beautiful Wreckage

What followed was… exhausting, enlightening, entertaining and at times, deeply painful.

For a moment, I feel disappointed in myself for expecting otherwise. You see, I’ve run for leadership before, but nothing prepared me for the volcanic energy of this YALI election. One moment, I was debating ideas. The next, I was defending my name not from fair criticism but from manufactured propaganda, personal attacks, and backroom whisper campaigns.

I watched as some people launched tirades laced with bitterness. Some of it was laughable while most of it was deeply disturbing. I remember a particular young lady whose tactics angered and confused me. Lacking any moral compass or strategy, she went for the lowest hanging fruit: personal smears. Family. Character. Insults. The kind of pettiness that belongs in gossip columns, not leadership contests. I doubt I can forgive her.

There was also the classic “comrade” who tore into me with fire during the campaign, only to admit later, off record, that “ndugu, it’s just politics.” I laughed it off well knowing that rarely do humans ‘just talk’. We shall settle that over a drink.

And then came the foot soldiers of the other camp. Vocal. Venomous. Bare-knuckled. They hit hard and kept hitting. It’s them who made me realize I was actually a strong candidate because no one throws stones at a parked car.

At some point, we were blamed for everything, from hacked emails to being against past leadership. Laughable, considering I served on the very leadership they claimed I opposed. In 2018, I was Events and Networking Chair. Attacking previous EXCO would mean shooting self in the foot. But I digress.

The Loss

Finally, election day arrived, and the results were announced. We had been floored by a staggering margin of 73 votes. While some of my supporters raised concerns about the election process, it was only right, in the spirit of the great YALI chapter, that we accept the outcome, regroup, and move on to other pursuits beyond yali. It was imperative that we allow the winning team to lead, with the belief that democracy had spoken. We had to come to terms with the fact that our manifesto had been rejected, our ideas shelved, and our need to serve, cancelled.

Humans can be unpredictable. Throughout the campaign, we had been relentlessly attacked, sometimes viciously. But it would have been primitive of us to react by becoming what we were accused of. To try and save face by throwing back mud would only confirm the labels unfairly attached to us. That would be regressive. That would be weak. That’s not what Nelson Mandela would do. Leadership is restraint, clarity, and grace under fire.

It’s true: the campaign hardened me. But it also showed me who we are and who we could be. I saw humanity at its worst, but also at its best. I saw people who stood with me through chaos. I saw ideas that stirred people to care again.

And perhaps most importantly, I saw the soul of a network that still matters.

What’s Next?

I’m not bitter. I’m grateful. I walked through the fire and came out tempered, not burnt. Would I run again? Maybe. Maybe not.

Kati what next in regard to the chapter? Empower Transformation.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — -

Hakiza Ronald is an entrepreneur and currently building vestafi.co

He previously founded Ugabus.com which he sold to treepz.com .