Why do Ugandans criticise Museveni but keep supporting him?

Something doesn’t add up. It is hard to explain. Why do people who feel that President Museveni and the party he leads are not doing enough say in opinion polls that they will vote him and his party back into power?

Successive surveys, even those that came before the 2011 elections, showed that the voters had different points of dissatisfaction with the NRM party and President Museveni.

Nevertheless, in all cases, most of the respondents say they would still vote for Mr Museveni and his party if elections were held the following day.

Dr Fredrick Golooba-Mutebi, the lead investigator for the recent round of Afrobarometer poll in Uganda, admits to the confusion entailed in the finding that most voters say they are dissatisfied with Mr Museveni’s government but then turn around and say they would vote it back into power anyway.
Dr Golooba-Mutebi, however, says it is not new for him to encounter such results. He says it happened to him shortly after the 2011 elections during a separate study.

“People would go on at length to condemn President Museveni and the ruling party,” he said, “and in the end when you asked them who they voted for, they would turn around and say, ‘well, I voted for Museveni’.”
Dr Golooba-Mutebi said for opinion poll surveys like they just did, it is hard to ask the respondents why they would vote for the candidates or parties they say would vote for because the studies would then be very big and the results very difficult to process.

He said, however, that different studies have been done on why many Ugandans continue to vote for Mr Museveni despite many of them saying they are dissatisfied with his leadership.

Mr Francis Kibirige, the managing director of Hatchile Consult, which is the Afrobarometer partner in Uganda and the coordinator of the current round of Afrobarometer surveys in Uganda, promised that Afrobarometer would at some point release some synthesised studies of Ugandans continuous backing of a president whose performance they do not rate very high on some aspects.

Some answers
From the current survey itself, Dr Golooba-Mutebi says there are some indications as to why the respondents would favour the ruling party over the Opposition parties.

One such indication, he says, is that the respondents seem to think that the Opposition concentrates too much on criticising the government when the people would like to see the Opposition cooperate with the government on some aspects.

A question was put to the respondents: “Which of the following statements is closest to your view? Choose Statement 1 or Statement 2. Statement 1: After losing an election, Opposition parties should monitor and criticise the government in order to hold it accountable. Statement 2: Once an election is over, Opposition parties and politicians should accept defeat and cooperate with government to help it develop the country.”

More than half of the respondents (52 per cent) “agree very strongly” that the Opposition should cooperate with the government instead of criticising it, and another 24 per cent “agree” that the Opposition should cooperate with the government.

In short, 76 per cent of the respondents “agree” or “agree very strongly” that the Opposition, once the election is over, should cooperate with the government and not necessarily criticise it.

On the other hand, only 23 per cent “agree very strongly” or “agree” that the Opposition should put government programmes and actions to stern test.

Also, the survey results suggest that many people doubt the Opposition’s vision for the country.

The following question was put to the respondents: “Please tell me whether you agree or disagree with the following statement: The political Opposition in Uganda presents a viable alternative vision and plan for the country.”

More respondents (41 per cent) either “strongly disagree” or “disagree” with the view that the Opposition presents a viable alternative for the country, while 32 per cent either “strongly agree” or “agree” that the Opposition presents a viable alternative to the country.

Perhaps more worrying for the Opposition, the respondents who feel that it presents a credible vision for the country declined to the current 32 per cent from 41 per cent in 2011.

Majority of the respondents (55 per cent) also said competition between parties “often” or “always” leads to violent conflict, suggesting a possibility of them choosing to stay with the ruling party to stave off the perceived conflict.
Dr Golooba-Mutebi, speaking at the release of the second of what is planned to be a four-part set of results on Tuesday, said in searching for an explanation as to why Ugandan voters behave that way, there are a number of earlier studies to look at.

Appearing keen to avoid delving further into the details, Dr Golooba-Mutebi said: “For now, it appears that Ugandans are stuck with NRM and Museveni.”

The puzzle for Opposition
In the same study, whose data was collected in May, most respondents said the Opposition is “almost effectively prevented from campaigning”.
In a related question, the respondents were asked: “In your opinion, how often, in this country are Opposition parties or their supporters silenced by the government?”
A significant number (36 per cent) of the respondents said the Opposition is “often” or “always” silenced by the government, while another 24 per cent said the Opposition is “rarely” silenced by the government. Only 27 per cent said the government never silences the Opposition.
The results also show that NRM is Uganda’s most popular political party (65 per cent support), with all the combined Opposition parties coming far behind at just 15 per cent support.

Another question was put to the respondents: “How much do you trust each of the following, or haven’t you heard enough about them to say? (a) The ruling party, you know the National Resistance Movement (NRM); (b) Opposition political parties?”
Almost half of the respondents (48 per cent) said they trust NRM “a lot”, as opposed to only 11 per cent who said they trust the Opposition “a lot”.

More respondents (33 per cent), however, said they do “not at all” trust the ruling party, while the corresponding figure for the Opposition is just 12 per cent.

However, not all the 33 per cent who say they do “not at all” trust the ruling party say they trust the Opposition “a lot”. This implies that lack of trust in the ruling party does not directly translate into trust for the Opposition; that the ruling party losing support doesn’t necessarily mean that the Opposition gets it.

To demonstrate this further, Mr Museveni was re-elected in 2011 by 68 per cent of only 59 per cent of the registered voters, meaning that he is actually a President elected by less than half of all the registered voters.

It could be that the vast majority of those who stayed home on voting day were dissatisfied with the ruling party but did not want to vote for the alternative candidates.

If the Opposition had managed to get the 41 per cent of the voters who stayed home on voting day and they had voted for them in addition to those who actually voted against President Museveni, the election would have gone against Mr Museveni.

There appears to be something fundamental regarding the voters’ psyche that the Opposition groups still have to understand.

Maj Gen Mugisha Muntu seemed to touch on this issue in an interview with Sunday Monitor in the early days of his FDC presidency.

“My campaign strategy was that we target areas where the Movement has its strongholds,” Gen Muntu told this reporter in an interview published on December 16, 2012, “we should target the groups that have been straddling the centre.”

He noted that a big percentage of the registered voters had not participated in the 2011 presidential elections, saying he would take interest in those voters.

“We are carrying out surveys to find out who are those 42 [actually 41] per cent? Why did they not vote? What are their interests? We want to segment them and then lay strategies on how to win them over,” Gen Muntu said.

Of particular interest, he said, were those voters who support the ruling party. “We want to find out who are their (NRM) supporters? What are their interests? How many are frustrated? What is their hope? What direction do they think the country should go? Then we will know how to target them,” Gen Muntu said.

He said the same of the middle class, arguing that politics is a science and that unless one understands what drives voters and what they would want to see a government do for them, attracting their attention would be very difficult.

During his close to three years as FDC president, did Gen Muntu and his colleagues do enough to assure the voters that they have what it takes to wrest power from President Museveni and manage the country better? Opinion poll results show he hasn’t.

‘Polling is mere time-wasting’
If Gen Muntu did not do enough to court the disaffected NRM supporters and those who do not care, it is possibly because he couldn’t do much about it, if you ask Mr Moses Khisa, a political scientist and commentator.

Mr Khisa says there is a problem with the “fundamentals” and that therefore not much can go right. “Opinion polls cannot be held anywhere and everywhere in the world,” Mr Khisa says, arguing that the context in Uganda is such that it is nearly impossible to get poll results that accurately reflect what the people feel.

“When 65 per cent of the respondents tell you that they support NRM, have they told you what they think NRM is?” Mr Khisa queries. He argues that most Ugandans cannot make a distinction between the ruling party and the State, making them incapable of effectively dealing with poll questions.

Mr Khisa says NRM has co-opted the intelligence infrastructure from the sub-county (Giso) to the district level (Diso and RDC) to the national level, in addition to the lower local governments, the police, army and other State institutions.

“State House acts as the party’s headquarters because that is where the key party meetings take place, and the National Leadership Institute (Kyankwanzi) is thought of as a party entity when it actually belongs to the State,” Mr Khisa says.

So when many Ugandans are called upon to compare NRM and the other parties, he says, “These people will imagine that the other parties lack such infrastructure whereas NRM has it, not actually realising that it belongs to the State.”

Mr Khisa says under such circumstances, “people should not be wasting resources on opinion polls.”
“But then how shall we gauge public opinion without such polls,” we ask Mr Khisa.

“Of what use would be the results of such results then,” he retorts, “gauging public opinion is done in the hope that the government will listen to the voices of the people and act accordingly, which doesn’t happen in Uganda.”

Mr Khisa points at another finding by the Afrobarometer poll – that 89 per cent of those interviewed wanted at least one aspect of the electoral system to be reformed in some way – to press his point.

“The government knew that most people actually wanted reforms in the electoral system, but did this prevent it from shutting down discussion on the suggested reforms?”

Mr Khisa is part of what looks to be a growing number of pessimists not only against electoral reforms, but also the entire political setting. Mr Timothy Kalyegira, a columnist with Sunday Monitor and commentator, recently expressed similar views about opinion polls in Uganda.

This adds to a growing trend of criticism of opinion polls which reached fever-pitch in the lead-up to the 2011 elections. Afrobarometer released a poll then indicating that Mr Museveni would win 66 per cent of the vote, and indeed he went on to win with 68 per cent.

But the poll was widely criticised, with some suggesting that it was meant to set the stage for rigging in the election by “preparing the minds of the people”.