A look back at the crucial 1980s polls

The Ugandan general election is now only days away. As the date of February 18 draws closer, older Ugandans are starting to think and ask a question: Will this election be another 1980? This is a good time to re-visit the 1980 election and draw lessons from it since there is much evidence that the two elections are similar.

Similarities
Many political analysts and ordinary Ugandans view the forthcoming election as the most crucial in the country since the December 10, 1980 election. The 2011 election is as crucial as the 1980 election because of the amount of emotion and discussion that have gone into it. The 1980 campaign season was dominated by a fatalistic sense in political circles that the election was going to be rigged.

This is the same mood that has dominated the 2010 and 2011 campaign season. As it was in 1980, presidential candidates and candidates for parliamentary seats are going into the election with their minds made up that the election has already been rigged.

Looking back across time, it can now be seen that the significance of the 1980 election lies not in what happened on the date of the voting, but what was taking place in secret before and what happened publicly afterward. There is an opinion among political analysts that the real drama in Uganda will unfold after the February 18 election, just as it was with 1980.

Was the 1980 election rigged?
The 1970 was destroyed much of Uganda’s physical infrastructure and organisational capacity. Towns like Arua and Masaka have still not fully recovered from this devastation. As evidence of this, the results for the 1980 Primary Leaving Examinations sat in December 1980 were released in June 1981.

An argument is often made that the NRM has been rigging in those parts of Uganda where it enjoys majority support and that where it would have won 60 per cent, the votes are inflated to show 87 per cent or 93 per cent. If we were to go by that argument, it could then be speculated that if the UPC rigged in 1980, it rigged from a position of strength and not weakness.

One of the factors behind the outcry and bitterness over the 1980 elections was that a large cross-section of Baganda, DP party leaders and officials and others in society, simply could not bring themselves to imagine that Milton Obote was back in Uganda and might return to power.

This hysteria shaped the national mood and led to the conclusion that the UPC was going to rig the election. It was one of those strange developments in political history. The UPC was not the ruling party at the time, and yet it was being accused of planning to rig the election.

The fact that the UPC was suspected of planning to rig an election even when, like the CP, DP and UPM it did not control state power, points to the fact that this party was still strong nine years after its ouster from power by the Uganda Army. The only parties likely to have won the 1980 election were the UPC and the Democratic Party.

Right from the Moshi Unity Conference in Tanzania in March 1979, proceedings were dominated and often gridlocked by moves by many of the 22 exile groups to bloc the UPC from dominating the future UNLF government. There was the whispered claim that many of these 22 groups were actually UPC supporters who had formed as many factions as possible to help make it possible to increase their party’s chances of dominating the UNLF.

Tanzania’s President Julius Nyerere had to persuade Obote to stay away from the conference in order not to jeopardise the discussions. In some way, the Moshi conference, although convened to discuss a post-Amin Uganda and the way now underway, ended up being a conference on Obote.

If we view the 1980 election politically rather than morally, we see that the UPC was the party best placed to dominate the Ugandan landscape. The top commanders and military leaders of the new national army, the UNLA, were almost all Obote supporters except for Yoweri Museveni.

So even if the DP had won the election, DP president-general Paulo Ssemogerere would have led a DP government with an army dominated by Obote loyalists and a Parliament with a powerful UPC opposition that would have frustrated DP programmes. Uganda’s neighbouring heads of state like Rwanda’s Juvenal Habyarimana, Tanzania’s Nyerere, Sudan’s Jaffar Nimeri, and Kenya’s Daniel Arap Moi were all supporters of Obote.

Faced with this atmosphere in which Obote was still regarded as the default leader of Uganda whose rule had been interrupted in 1971 by Amin, the DP even if they had won the election (or as many believe, they won it but were robbed of victory) would have been like the various governments in Lebanon that hold shakily onto power with the militant group Hezbollah holding the real grassroots organisation and power. Also, it is not necessarily true to claim that a DP victory in 1980 was guaranteed. For example, The DP presidential candidate Ssemogerere held a rally in Entebbe town in August 1980.

At that rally, Ssemogerere spoke in Luganda rather than in the official language, English. This greatly angering the many non-Baganda who live in Entebbe and many others boycotted the rally and the DP for that. Entebbe town was the former capital of Uganda and had a larger portion of civil servants as a percentage of the population than any other town in the country. This boycott of Ssemogerere’s rally echoed the mood in many parts of Uganda. DP, even though it had an ethic diversity of leaders, was still viewed as primarily a Baganda party while the UPC was viewed as the nearest thing to a national party.

Guerrilla plans in 1980
In 1980, before the election, political leaders went about their campaigns and tours of the country. The UPM leader Museveni was already preparing for a guerrilla war to follow the elections, as testimonies by his supporters since then have revealed.

What is not commonly known is that the first people to prepare for a post-election guerrilla war were not the Museveni group but the Democratic Party. According to political and military researcher Ssemwanga Kisolo of Super FM, in a March 14, 2008 programme “Emboozi Teba Nkadde” on the radio, the first group in Uganda to start planning for a guerrilla war against the UPC government was the DP.

According to Kisolo, on February 6, 1981 as Museveni’s guerrillas were attacking Kabamba Army Barracks near Mubende, the UFM’s leader, Andrew Kayiira, was at the home of the late Emmanuel Cardinal Nsubuga, head of the Roman Catholic Church in Uganda, where Kayiira spent the night. Cardinal Nsubuga had called Kayiira for a meeting to plan the forthcoming guerrilla war. UFM commanders on February 6 were meeting at the Rubaga home of a man named John Dibya to plan their guerrilla war.

In August 1980, according to Kisolo, DP leaders Boniface Byanyima and Sam Kutesa and a young mobiliser called Specioza Naigaga (the future Ugandan Vice President Specioza Kazibwe), among others, flew to Europe for meetings to plan the guerrilla war and raise money. The DP is usually regarded as a pacifist, somewhat naive political party that bases its politics on moral idealism and universal brotherhood rather than hard, practical politics.

As this history shows, this is not necessarily true of the DP. In 1982, the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi got in contact with the DP and started supplying powerful weapons to Kayiira’s UFM fighting force. Gaddafi is still in power today and the Wikileaks website late in 2010 revealed the strained relationship between President Museveni and Gaddafi.

This post-election unknown is potentially the most important factor in this election. Many sources are starting to feel that the voting next week might not settle Uganda’s political question. Nobody knows for certain what will happen after the election and that is what is unsettling many nerves ahead of February 18.

What the NRM believes about the 1980 election

When the NRM came to power in 1986, it made no effort to re-dress history and hand this power over to the Democratic Party which, according to many accounts, had won the election just over five years earlier. The positions that were given to DP leaders like Paulo Ssemogerere, Robert Kitariko, Joseph Mulenga, Ponciano Mulema and others in the new broad-based NRM government, did not suggest that the NRM believed that DP had the majority support in Uganda.

The new head of state, Yoweri Museveni, and his core NRA leaders did not refer to the DP as a strong party that had won the 1980 elections and with a wide national power base, but instead spent much of the first year in power blaming Uganda’s traditional parties the DP and UPC for causing Uganda’s political problems.

In fact by October 1986, the NRA’s intelligence had started arresting prominent DP leaders like Andrew Kayiira, Evaristo Nyanzi, Dr. David Lwanga and others after announcing that they had been part of a coup plot against the NRM government. The DP-affiliated newspaper, The Citizen, a few months after the NRM takeover, published a front-page editorial in its edition of June 27, 1986 reacting in shock to a recent and revealing statement by a senior NRM/NRA commander and political cadre about the 1980 election:

“The Director of training in the Political School of the National Resistance Movement, Commander Roland Kakooza, has raised a number of disturbing questions regarding the future of democracy and human rights in Uganda. On numerous occasions commander’s utterances have brought into question the commitment of the NRM government to these fundamental factors.

Mr Kakooza early this week in a startling about-turn claimed that the NRA/NRM did not go to the bush because elections had been rigged but rather because some people realised that Uganda needed sacrifices. Many observers have expressed the fears that the implications of this statement could be that the NRM does not think that elections are a fundamental issue in the returning of Uganda to decency. And many fighters from the bush have expressed shock that a high ranking official could dismiss so lightly the very reason which had ‘forced’ them to sacrifice everything and join the protracted war.”

The NRM government did not distance itself from Major Kakooza Mutale’s statements, indicating further that the claims by the NRM about a rigged 1980 election were largely an excuse to launch the guerrilla war that they had been planning for since 1979, a few months after the fall of Idi Amin’s government.

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The 1980 elections followed the overthrow of Idi Amin the previous year and were the first since the pre-independence elections in 1962. The result was a victory for the Uganda People's Congress of President Milton Obote, which won 74 of the 126 seats. The UPC was the only party to contest all 126 seats, and its candidates were returned unopposed in 17 constituencies. The opposition claimed that the UPC had only won through widespread fraud.