After three decades of waiting, Uganda has finally put its weight behind the man it once might have backed when his moment was at its brightest
COVERY STORY | RONALD MUSOKE | On Saturday, Aug. 8, Olara Otunnu boarded a plane to the United States, headed for New York and the corridors of power he has known for nearly half a century. The journey itself carried a touch of irony.
Uganda’s candidate for United Nations Secretary-General was arriving late to a race already well underway and days after the first Security Council straw poll in which the other candidates had already spent months introducing themselves to the diplomats who will ultimately determine their fate.
Now, at 76, Otunnu was finally heading to New York to do what his rivals have been doing for much of the past year: make the rounds, knock on diplomatic doors, explain his vision and persuade governments that the veteran Ugandan diplomat who once helped shape the machinery of the UN is still the man to lead it.
Uganda’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Amb. Adonia Ayebare, announced on Aug. 8 via his X handle that Otunnu, accompanied by former Prime Minister Ruhakana Rugunda, was en route to New York for meetings with delegations and planned engagements with the General Assembly and Security Council on Aug. 19-20. The journey followed days of uncertainty over the campaign team’s ability to travel to the United States.
It is an unlikely second act for a man who has already spent much of his professional life at the centre of international diplomacy. And perhaps nowhere is the irony greater than in the machinery that will now judge his candidature.
In December 1981, when Otunnu was Uganda’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations and president of the Security Council, he introduced an informal straw-balloting procedure for selecting the Secretary-General. The procedure later became known as the “Otunnu Formula” and has since been used in successive Secretary-General selections. Four-and-a-half decades later, the Ugandan diplomat is entering that same machinery as a candidate and trying to persuade it not to dismiss him as too late.
That is the paradox of Uganda’s gamble. Is Kampala finally coming to the rescue of a diplomat whose moment arrived three decades ago? Or has it calculated that precisely because the UN is confronting a world of wars, geopolitical rivalry, institutional paralysis and technological disruption, the experience accumulated by an old hand may now be more valuable than the freshness of a younger candidate? The answer may determine whether Otunnu’s candidature becomes one of Uganda’s most audacious diplomatic campaigns — or an extraordinary exercise in political nostalgia.
The race Otunnu joined late
Uganda formally nominated Otunnu on July 24, 2026. By then, the field was already crowded with heavyweight names: Rafael Grossi of Argentina, the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency; former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet; Costa Rica’s former vice president Rebeca Grynspan; former Ecuadorian foreign and defence minister María Fernanda Espinosa; former Guyanese foreign minister Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett; and former Senegalese President Macky Sall. Otunnu became the seventh candidate.
Several of those candidates had been campaigning and engaging UN member states for months. The procedural disadvantage was immediately obvious. Except for Otunnu, the candidates had already participated in interactive dialogues with the General Assembly and informal dialogues with Security Council members. Otunnu’s nomination arrived just before the first straw poll, and he was included in that poll even though he had not yet gone through the same engagement process as the other contenders.
The President of the General Assembly, Annalena Baerbock, had warned that timely nominations mattered because member states needed an opportunity to hear the candidates before the Security Council began its selection process. She later reiterated that candidates should ideally be heard by the General Assembly before being considered in the Council’s straw polls.
That controversy matters because it makes the word “late” more than a newspaper description. Otunnu really was late to this particular process. His defenders, however, insist that late does not necessarily mean doomed. At the Uganda Media Centre on Aug. 5, Otunnu argued that his poor showing in the first straw poll was largely a consequence of having had no time to canvass support. “We have not been able to engage the electors,” he said, contrasting his campaign with rivals who had been campaigning “for a year and a half”.
Amb. Ayebare made the same argument, pointing to outgoing UN Secretary General, António Guterres, as a precedent for a late entrant. “It’s actually not late,” he said, noting that Guterres had been the last candidate to enter the previous race. There is therefore a genuine strategic argument behind Uganda’s decision: the first straw poll may not be a verdict on Otunnu’s prospects because he had barely begun campaigning.
But the numbers still matter. A candidate who arrives late has less time to recover from a weak first impression. And the first poll gave Otunnu only two votes. His campaign now has to convert the diplomatic goodwill attached to his résumé into something much harder: votes.
A 30-year-old missed opportunity
This is where the Ugandan story becomes more complicated than the UN race itself. Otunnu’s candidature carries a history that stretches back far beyond July 2026. In the early 1980s he was already operating at the highest levels of international diplomacy. He served as Uganda’s Permanent Representative to the UN from 1980 to 1985 and became president of the Security Council in December 1981. He later served as Uganda’s Foreign Affairs Minister and went on to become president of the International Peace Academy, now the International Peace Institute.
Then came his defining international assignment. On August 19, 1997, UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, appointed Otunnu as the UN’s first Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict. From 1997 to 2005, he served as a UN Under-Secretary-General, campaigning internationally for children affected by war.
His work helped transform what had been a relatively peripheral concern into an established international peace-and-security agenda. Child protection was placed on the Security Council’s agenda. A system was developed for identifying and monitoring grave violations against children. Parties that recruited and used child soldiers could be publicly listed. And in 2005, Security Council Resolution 1612 established a comprehensive monitoring and reporting mechanism.
Uganda’s nomination letter argues that Otunnu helped design the compliance and monitoring regime that remains in operation today. This is not merely an impressive résumé. It is a claim to having left institutional footprints inside the UN. And yet, according to the material surrounding his current campaign, there was another moment when Otunnu’s international stature could have been converted into a bid for the UN’s top office. That moment was around 1996.
Kenyan public intellectual and law professor PLO Lumumba has been particularly blunt about it. He argues that Otunnu should have been Uganda’s candidate when former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s tenure was truncated. Lumumba describes Otunnu as intelligent and highly accomplished but believes the nomination has come at the wrong time. At 76, he asks why Uganda should not be putting forward younger leaders.
This is the background to the “30-year-late” argument. It is not simply that Otunnu is old. It is that Uganda may have possessed a younger, highly influential diplomat at precisely the moment when his international capital was at its strongest — and did not turn that capital into a serious national bid for the world’s top diplomatic job. Thirty years later, Uganda is trying again. But this time its candidate is 76.
The man who once opposed the man now backing him
If the timing of the nomination is remarkable, the politics behind it may be even more so. For years, Otunnu was one of President Yoweri Museveni’s most prominent political critics. He returned to Uganda after his international career, became president of the Uganda People’s Congress in 2010 and contested the presidency in 2011. His campaign emphasised constitutionalism, reconciliation, good governance and economic transformation.
The relationship with Museveni became deeply antagonistic. The Ugandan government once refused to renew his passport, leaving him stateless for several years. In a recent interview, he said he eventually became a citizen of Côte d’Ivoire in 2005. And yet, in 2026, the same government that he says mistreated him is campaigning for him.