How Ugandans misunderstood the Supreme Court decision on petition

Following the conclusion of the hearing of the presidential election petition between Amama Mbabazi against Yoweri Kaguta Museveni and the Electoral Commission in March, journalists asked me to comment on how the Supreme Court was deliberating on the proceedings, pleadings, evidence and submissions it had received. I declined to do so for judicious and ethical reasons.

The court decision was expected on Thursday, March 31. I believed that it would be a split decision. As events unfolded on that day, I was dead wrong. The grounds of my wrong prediction of the Supreme Court’s verdict were quite reasonable. This particular petition dealt with more serious allegations of electoral malpractices than those discovered in the 2001 and 2006 petitions. In each of those petitions, the majority was by an opinion of one justice.

In the Daily Monitor of March 28, Ofwono Opondo, the spokesperson of the NRM, embarrassingly revealed that despite their great efforts and expenditure (most likely hundreds of billions of shillings) to entice electors to vote for candidate Museveni, the NRM only managed to add a paltry 500,000 votes to the highest number of votes he previously obtained in other presidential elections.

Mr Opondo conceded that on the other hand, candidate Kizza Besigye, without the same facilitation and political muscles of the NRM, managed to garner 1.5 million more votes than he previously attracted.

On this Opondo’s analysis alone, Besigye and his supporters should grieve loudly because the Supreme Court opined that their findings “after due” and “diligent enquiry” into the petition did not show that the final results showing Museveni as the winner was affected in a substantial manner.

Shockingly, the decision of the learned justices of the Supreme Court was unanimous. It will forever puzzle jurists and intellectuals. It is not only Mr Opondo’s analysis which puts the Electoral Commission into the realms of fiction but there are other grounds, weightier and more credible than those of the NRM spokesperson.

Senior church leaders and civil society organisations have doubted the correctness of the election results. They have called for the unconditional release from detention of Besigye, which is perceived by many Ugandans and others as illegal.
That explains why one Ugandan bishop had strongly recommended that Besigye should be made vice president.

The other ground is that before the announcement of the presidential results, on the night of February 19, candidate Museveni had gone down from 60 per cent to 50 per cent while Besigye had climbed from 40 to 46 per cent of the provisional results and then within seconds the system was mysteriously reversed with Museveni shown to have more than 60 per cent and Besigye 32 per cent. How come everyone participating in the enquiry got blinkered on this crucial statistical data?

Following the publication in the Sunday Monitor of February 21 of this column that after 2016 elections, Uganda will never be the same, the leaders of the observer groups of the elections, some of whom had already had discussions with presidential candidates, visited me at my residence at different times and discussed the implications of the occurrences in the elections.

They included Dr Livingstone Ssewanyana, the leader of the Uganda Coalition of Observer Groups, Justice Sophia Akuffo, and leader of the African Union Observer Group, former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, the leader of the Commonwealth Observer Group, former Zambian president Rupiah Banda, leader of the COMESA Observer Group and Dr Shaka Ssali of the Voice of Africa.

After the visit, they all called for an immediate dialogue between President Museveni of the NRM and Dr Besigye of FDC, amongst other parties.
The chorus which was shared by many religious leaders and civil society organisations of Africa, the USA and the European Union was for reconciliation with and immediate release of Besigye from house detention.

Lastly, there was the televised scene where Besigye identified a certain house in Naguru, a Kampala suburb, from where he claimed vote rigging was actually in progress.
Instead of welcoming him as a good citizen reporting a crime, he was forced into a police vehicle and driven to his Kasangati residence, never to be released or allowed to petition against what he and millions of Ugandans believed was his prize snatched from the jaws of victory.

Prof Kanyeihamba is a retired Supreme Court judge. [email protected]