On Tuesday evening, I had a crucial virtual meeting via Teams (the alternative to Zoom) with the head of the Africa programme at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of the United States of America.
FSI is a training arm of the State Department of the US government. For some years now, I have served as an outside, contracted instructor for FSI, whose remit is to provide refresher courses and advanced training for American diplomats and civil servants preparing to work on foreign affairs abroad and at home.
Shortly after this meeting ended, at about 6pm, I urgently needed to send an email, but the email account was not loading. I could not figure out why. After repeated failed attempts, I took a break, assuming I would return later in what turned out to be misplaced hope that whatever was wrong with the connection would be resolved soon. It was not to be.
As I write this column on Thursday afternoon, I’m effectively in an open ‘prison’, able to move around and eat my mother’s good food, but I cannot work or have a normal day of business. As I learnt later Tuesday evening, the Ugandan authorities had ordered the shutdown of Internet services. Mobile money services, sending and withdrawing, too, were disabled.
These drastic measures are not new as they are a replica of 2021, so we should have known they were coming. Yet, I was caught unawares two days to election day.
In today’s world, the Internet is a vital source. It is the lifeline of nearly everything we do, the singular act of shutting down Internet services, regardless of the damage to people’s lives and the unimaginable cost to businesses, is itself a mockery of what today, Thursday 15 January, is about: democracy.
No society can purport to be engaged in a democratic process, let alone claim to be a democracy, when authorities can summarily cut off channels of communication, particularly something as critical as the Internet.
Within the confines of my ‘prison’ in Bubulo, I just walked up to the polling station, less than half a kilometre from my house, to cast three ballots-one for president, another for a constituency Member of Parliament, and a third for a District Woman Member of Parliament.
I joined a not-so-long queue and patiently waited to reach the table of polling officials. They were organised and professional. Everything went well. I fulfilled my constitutional duty and exercised my fundamental right to vote.
But as I walked back home, I could not help but reflect on the sharp contradiction between, one the one hand, casting my vote for three candidates of my choice in word, at least at the face value, was a free and transparent process, and on the other, living under ‘prison-like’ conditions where I cannot communicate to the outside world, cannot access money through digital platforms, totally unable to attend to the many personal and professional tasks that necessarily require access to Internet services.
The stark irony here is that this ‘quasi-imprisonment’ is occasioned by the very process and activity of democracy, supposed to represent freedom and liberty. After two decades unable to cast a ballot, it was a sweet feeling exercising my franchise, yet I had to remind myself of the conditions of ‘capture’, as Dr Kizza Besigye has repeatedly underscored.
Voting again after 20 years, it’s jarring to realise that the conditions and circumstances of elections in Uganda today are arguably worse than when I last voted in 2006. I spoke to local compatriots here in the days and hours leading to the polls, and it was shocking to hear a rather dispiriting, common theme. That is, the extent to which people’s voting choices are heavily driven by monetary inducements.
The night before election day I had a heated argument with a cousin. He tersely and matter-of-factly told me that it is impossible to win an election here unless you can distribute money around. And as I walked to the polling station, I overheard a young woman say she would not go to vote because no one had given her money! This is what Uganda has been reduced to: a country where a citizen strongly believes their vote is for pay.
The ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) has a village structure of officials who, days to election day, were receiving small tokens of money, so openly and unabashedly. The crass and shameless distribution of cash for votes is only matched by the brazen and shocking deployment of the military in the service of the ruling party.
This denudation of the value of democracy through open bribery, I must hasten to add, is not the preserve of the ruling party and its candidates. Rather, it is a vice cutting across partisan lines and candidates of all hues and colours. The only difference is that the ruling party has access to the state treasury and all the coercive apparatus of government.
Those in Opposition are today doing on a small scale what they will most likely do on a grand scale, like the NRM, in the event they capture state power.