At the beginning of every election season, it is amusing to see especially the media preparing the country for the election. It paints a picture that anticipates the possibility of a stiff and uncertain competition; full of tension and excitement. It ostensibly puts the incumbent President, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni at risk of losing his long-term grip on power. To lend gravitas to the election, the media forms all sorts of special desks, command centres, election coverage teams, and headlines or columns like ‘Decision time Uganda,’ or ‘Uganda decides,’ or ‘Your vote, your future,’ They arrange talk shows and interviews with experts of all walks of life analysing the election. NGOs come up with situation rooms focusing on the election. Opposition candidates are profiled and prominence is given to their strategies and intentions to ‘remove the dictator’ this time round.
They include voter mobilisation and vote protection measures. Yet in what appears like an anti-climax, at the end of the day and after all the mellifluous noise and drama, Museveni is announced winner by the Electoral Commission (EC.) The NRM party he heads takes the lion’s share of seats in parliament and the local councils, leaving the opposition crying fraud. This time round the situation will not be any different. Nothing much has changed in the context in which Ugandan general elections are held under the NRM, since the last election. The NRM is for all intents and purposes a state party. In many instances you can’t tell where the party ends and the state or the government begins. Many public servants are appointed because of their ethnicity and allegiance to the ruling party.
They behave like party officials shamelessly carrying out programmes intended to perpetuate the NRM in power and by extension, disadvantage the opposition. The election is merely a smoke screen whose outcome is predetermined. It is simply a ritual without spiritual connotations. It aims to portray the ruling party and president as democratic. It legitimises the government and its actions as representative of the people. For instance, an elected government, has the mandate to commit Uganda and its assets when borrowing from multilateral lending organisations like the World Bank. A military junta or unelected cabal is viewed as parochial without the power to speak and act for the majority.
The unfettered access to public finances, especially through corruption which noticeably increases towards an election, grants the NRM a war chest that makes the party competitively unassailable. It can even be used to buy off the opposition or create its own weak opposition parties to give the semblance of a competition. Then in many instances most government programmes financed by the taxpayer are portrayed as a favour from the NRM government. There is a concealed promise of more services if the people vote for the government and vice versa. The late John Nagenda once wrote that the people of northern Uganda did not deserve any government services because they did not vote for the NRM! Secondly, the EC which conducts the election is appointed by Museveni who is also a candidate in the election.
Even with all the aesthetics performed in long, black, branded gowns that give a magisterial look of people managing a free and fair process, the slant towards the incumbent and NRM is difficult to ignore. You have a legislature teeming with ruling party MPs. It’s speaker has made it abundantly clear that she serves for the pleasure and comfort of the president. She would never pass a Bill that disadvantages him. This coupled with opposition MPs who are held hostage to privileges like per diem means that you can hardly get meaningful laws from the legislature. Not even laws like electoral reforms that disadvantage the project to perpetuate the incumbent in power. The Judiciary is not very different. The appointments are by the President. He has made it clear at every opportunity that the best judicial officers are those who ‘understand’ the history of the country; the ones nicknamed ‘cadre judges.’
This history is crafted to show NRM as the best thing that has happened in this country since sliced bread. Museveni has always reacted angrily to judgements that don’t go the way he wishes. He has derogatorily advised that judges should concern themselves with matters of ‘who stole a chicken’ and not issues of management of the state. A lot of their actions suggest that they have understood him. The continued incarceration of very many opposition National Unity Platform (NUP) supporters abducted and jailed without charge. Many have appeared in courts visibly tortured. The baseless denial of bail to Dr Kizza Besigye, Obeid Lutale and others says a lot about the Judiciary. It makes it unimaginable to assume that this institution in its current state can rein in the ruling party if the opposition sought relief in case of a bad election.
Like NRM began as a military movement, so it has remained albeit with minor tweaks. As is with the proverbial duck, NRM walks, talks and quacks like a military organisation. The national army and increasingly militarised police force is firmly in NRM’s grip and behave like enforcement departments within the party. They view threats to the NRM as threats to the country and defending the NRM as defending the country and vice versa. When doing so, the opposition is the enemy to be crashed. We have already seen police officers angrily tearing posters belonging to the opposition and opening fire where the people resist this awful behaviour. They take shelter under all sorts of misinterpretations of the law, especially the Public Order Management Act, to block the opposition from campaigning and reaching out to the electorate. Meanwhile, the NRM is escorted during processions and campaigns freely. In such an environment to speak of holding a free and fair election is outlandish and irresponsible.