UGANDA'S FLAWED ELECTIONS: Bwengye spits fire at flawed poll and the Commonwealth report

The elections were so controversial that many politicians have continued to criticise the entire process. In our series yesterday, Dr Kawanga Ssemogerere lambasted the Military Commision for messing up the entire exercise. Today, Francis Bwengye gives his side of the story.

Francis Bwengye, The agony of Uganda, 1985

On the role of the Commonwealth Observer Group.
To anyone familiar with the history of elections and the power struggle in Uganda before and after independence, it was obvious that it would be useless to hold the election without some form of external supervision. Obote and his UPC cronies had worked very hard to undermine the first two UNLF governments in order to block the machinery and mechanics for a free and fair election.

They had seized power through the Military Commission which was composed of Obote's cronies, namely: Paulo Muwanga, who was the Chairman and head of the government; Brig. Oyite-Ojok, a cousin of Obote who was the Chief of Staff of the UNLA; Major General Tito Okello, an old man attached to Obote by ethnic considerations who was and still is the-Commander of the UNLA; Col. [Zed] Maruru, an indecisive man with the character of "move with the powers that be" and with strong past attachments to the UPC, the Secretary of the Commission.

The only man who was not an Oboteist of recent was the Commission's Vice-Chairman, Yoweri Museveni, who would naturally be outvoted on any matters before the Commission if he differed on the same. After all, his presence was never required to realise a quorum and he was often overlooked and neglected by other members of the Commission.

If the election was to be held under the auspices of such a government, most Ugandans felt the election would be terribly rigged to keep the UPC in power. Thus they craved for the presence of some neutral external authority during the whole election exercise.

The DP would have preferred external supervision but Nyerere, UPC and Yoweri Museveni, insisted that it was politically treacherous for the sovereign state of Uganda to allow foreigners to supervise the election. They counselled that if the DP insisted on having the presence of outsiders, it was advisable to have only observers but not supervisors of the election. Of course, it was not a matter of sovereignty alone, Nyerere and Obote knew that if international supervisors were invited, UPC would lose the election.

But if they could have an Electoral Commission appointed by a biased authority and an observer group they would influence, chances were there for UPC to rig and win the election. So a Commonwealth Observer Group, was preferred and agreed to. It was appointed on the 24th November 1980, to merely observe the election exercise.

On the Electoral Commission

The COG was unable to observe the appointment of the Electoral Commission and the protestations by DP, UPM and CP leaders against the appointment. Earlier on these political parties had given a list of names, agreed upon by the Inter-Party Committee, to the Military Commission from which the latter would have selected the Electoral Commission. At the eleventh hour the Military Commission, in collaboration with other UPC leaders, selected strange names outside the list previously agreed upon, and appointed the Commission from there.

The COG did report, per incurium, that “the six Members of the Commission and its Secretary were selected after consultation with the political parties.”
The COG was appointed on the 24th of November, 1980, barely a couple of weeks before the polling day. The Electoral Commission had a already carried out demarcation of constituencies, appointment of registration/ polling officers and supervised registration of voters, which exercises they had carried out in the most diabolical and appalling manner. They had exhibited blatant bias towards the UPC as the other political parties had previously predicted.

The Observers, therefore, could not have adequately observed the nomination exercise even when the Electoral Commission had come out openly to assist very many UPC candidates to pass unopposed in several parts of the country.

The Registration Exercise

For any election to be valid, an accurate register of voters is a conditio sine qua non.
By the time the COG arrived in the country, the registration exercise had been completed.

The law regarding exhibition of registers, lodging of objections, holding of all public enquiries into all claims and objections received, was not followed in nearly all the registration areas. The Registration Officials, most of who had been UPC supporters and/or agents, had made terrible forgeries, added fictitious names, removed or misspelled names of many people who did not support the UPC and so on.
There was plenty of primary evidence to show that in many districts registers had not been completed within the prescribed time.
In many of them, names had been either added or deleted after the registers had been closed.