UGANDA'S FLAWED ELECTIONS: M7 speaks out on 1980 elections

From Sowing the Mustard Seed
Any sane person who was neither greedy for power, nor politically and ideologically myopic, should have seen that the only viable option for Uganda at that time was a broad-based government in which all these factions could have attempted to work together. It would then have been easier to contain the adventurers in the various opportunistic groups.

We, who were advocating unity, were placed in a dilemma because, given their past history, we could not possibly have joined either the UPC or the DP.
We had two alternatives. One was to stay out of the elections altogether and consolidate our presence in the armed forces.

We could bide our time, knowing full well that the politicians would fail, and when our position was strong enough, we could use our military strength to get rid of the whole lot of them. The second option, as some of our people argued, was that we should present a third choice for the population.

Personally, I was in favour of keeping out of the factional fights altogether because I did not want to identify myself in any way with any of the parties. My own support had been for the UNLF, and since it had now disintegrated, I wanted to keep out of politics and stay in the army, waiting for the politicians to fail, as they were bound to do.

Some of my colleagues, however, argued very strongly in favour of a third party.
At one point I told them that they should go ahead without me, but they argued that the new party would not become viable if I was not involved, so I went along with my colleagues although I was not fully convinced. Following intense pressure from Bidandi-Ssali and Kategaya, I agreed to associate myself with the Uganda Patriotic Movement (UPM). My reluctance was prompted by my aversion to working for any divisive groups, even if it was not the expressed intention of any one of them.

In spite of our refusal to join the DP, we tried very hard to unite all the other parties, apart from the UPC. We had hoped to unite, under one umbrella, the UPM with the DP and all those who had not declared any partisan loyalty, so that the UPC would be isolated. This plan did not work, however, because the DP leaders were unrealistically hoping that, by some miracle, they would be allowed to take power. They seemed to be living in a kind of dream-world.

Those involved in the formation of the UPM included Jaberi Bidandi-Ssali, Chango Machyo, Joshua Mugyenyi, Father Okoth, Jeremiah Opira, Erisa Kironde, Rhoda Kalema and Sam and Gertrude Njuba.

Others wanted to join but did not do so because they did not win high enough positions in the party or they realised that since the UPM was a new party, they would face an uphill struggle in getting elected. It was not easy for many of them to swim against the current and stick to principles. It was easier to swim with the current, regardless of the terminal point of the river.

So we formed the Uganda Patriotic Movement in spite of knowing that it would have a poor chance at the elections since issues were already polarised along sectarian lines. Moreover, as election day was set for 10 December 1980, we did not have much time to make adequate preparations. However, the argument in favour of our new party was that the third option we had presented to the country would be a useful one later on.

We enjoyed quite a lot of support, but people said to us: 'Although we like your party, it is too new to defeat Obote on its own. We shall be splitting votes if we vote for you, so we shall concentrate our votes on the DP.' My argument remained that the political problems the country faced could not be answered merely by the exercise of holding an election. The general theme of the new party was to emphasise the need for the unity of the Ugandan people.

We did not see why a DP Catholic should be against a UPC Protestant just because they happened to belong to different religions.
THE RIGGED ELECTIONS OF 1980
As we had predicted, the elections were rigged. During the campaigning I had taken the chance to warn the UPC that they should be prepared to face the consequences of a rigged poll.

The elections were contested by four parties: the DP, UPC, UPM and CP. The DP had the majority of popular support in the areas of west, central and eastern Uganda and Arua. The Ugandan people had hoped to defeat Obote through the ballot box and formed a great anti-Obote coalition involving the original members of the DP, mostly Catholics, those who had belonged to Kabaka Yekka, those who had deserted the UPC, and those who had no political affiliation. All these various factions chose the DP as the easiest political defence against the threat of Obote's return to power.

Because the DP had never held power, however, it was an unknown quantity and could not act as a broad home for a more varied member- ship. Instead of acting as a resistance movement against Obote, factions soon sur- faced within the DP. Frightened by the new members, the old Catholic originals started talking of themselves as the only legitimate members of the party, banasangwaawo, and referring to the newcomers as upstarts.

The party leadership, apart from relying too much on Catholic support, was also quite inept in its use of political tactics. Having belonged to the DP myself in the 1960s, I had quite a number of friends who wanted me to rejoin the DP. I did not agree to this, however, because I thought that uniting Ugandans was more important than electoral success. In this context, joining the old sectarian parties would have been the wrong move. Following the collapse of the UNLF under UPC and DP pressure, I believed that the correct thing to do in 1980 was to abstain from both those parties.

The UPC tried to pose as the major military force of the liberation struggle, having illegally recruited tribal militias from Acholi. They devoted much effort to confusing the Tanzanian officers who were based in Uganda, thinking that Tanzania's support for them would decide all. They even made it impossible for me to get an appointment to see Dr Nyerere, in spite of all the close contacts I had had before. Muwanga's people would bribe the Tanzanian officers in Uganda, who would pass on false information to Nyerere. The Tanzanian President would then act according to the information he was given.

Muwanga's government refused to amend the electoral law, hoping to use its loopholes to cheat through double voting, switching ballot boxes, false counting, gerrymandering constituencies, hooliganism and so on. My own constituency in Nyabushozi was gerrymandered. Taking advantage of the fact that voting was likely to be on a religious basis, the sub-counties of Nyakashashara, Sanga and Kashongi were removed from Nyabushozi and made part of another constituency.

These sub-counties were mainly Protestant, cattle-keeping areas, and they were exchanged for Ibanda county, which is occupied by Catholics. Both the UPC and DP were involved in these practices in my area as both parties had an interest in making it difficult for me to win. By the time the elections were held, it was clear that whatever the outcome, there could be no satisfactory result which would benefit the country. All the UPC wanted was the facade of an election in order to legitimise the coup they were to carry out.

It was tragic to see incapable reactionaries taking our country towards civil conflict while thinking they were being very smart. The UPC declared that they would take power whether people voted for them or not. The moment we came to the conclusion that the old political groups had not learnt any lesson from our past history, we decided to give them enough time to make fools of themselves and then we would discipline them from our own base. In effect, we were saying: 'OK.

Let this farce run its course. Then we shall play our own music, where there is no cheating, where there is only conviction. Manoeuvres are all very good for the air- conditioned room, but when it comes to mosquitoes, manoeuvres don't work very well.' If we had not allowed the farce to run its course, we would have been branded as troublemakers.

One complicating factor was the presence of Tanzanian forces. We did not want to fight the Tanzanians - unless of course we had to, as in the end we did.
But the UPC were using our reluctance to fight the Tanzanians, to push through their schemes. Without the Tanzanian presence, the UPC would not have been able to carry on their games.

The UPC had always been composed of shallow politicians who thought that intrigue was the art of politics - the 'dirty game', of which Obote was supposed to be the 'master tactician', where tactics meant intrigue and double-talk. Obote, for instance, gave the equally shallow and opportunistic Kabaka Yekka grouping the promise that they would be allowed to keep Buganda as their own, with the freedom to exploit the peasants, denying them a voice.

There would be no direct elections in Buganda, unlike in other parts of the country. Buganda would have its own High Court and its own police. There were to be Baganda 'ministers' at
Mengo, and so on. These arrangements held echoes of the intrigues and double- talk of 1962-6.

Obote wanted power at any price. He thought it was a small matter to promise the reactionary forces in Buganda all they wanted and, when the Tanzanians had departed, turn against the agreement, relying on the army which, thanks to Ojok, was again dominated by people from his area. Yet again, the unprincipled alliance between the UPC and KY proved tragic for our country and was a testimony to the UPC's treachery, political incompetence and ideological bankruptcy.

This, then, was the configuration of the political forces in Uganda immediately following the overthrow of Amin. If the fight had been left to Ugandans alone, without the Tanzanian presence, it would not have been possible for the UPC to split the UNLF. But now, with the elections rigged, as we had predicted, we had to start preparing to fulfil our pledge to go to the bush and fight the injustices that had been inflicted upon our country.