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

Then these plus seats which Paulo Wangola, Robert Kitariko, Dr.Ssebuliba, the author and several other candidates had won but were just deprived of them and allocated to UPC, the DP would have won the election with a clear majority. The number in Parliament would not have been less than 72 MPs. After all the DP needed only 64 seats to win the election.

In light of the above facts, the COG’s conclusion above becomes ridiculous and betrays not only their biased tendencies but also exposes how they were misguided and unduly influenced by the UPC and some extraneous forces.

The Polling Exercise

The polling exercise was the most important part of the election process that its failure would deal a fatal blow to the whole thing. The exercise was the most messed up part of the election that we can logically conclude that ipso facto the election results became null and void.

In the first place, nearly all polling officials appointed were members or supporters of UPC. This is in addition to the Returning Officers who had all been appointed from among UPC supporters only. These played a big role in causing ballot boxes and papers to disappear on their way to polling stations in certain polling divisions such as in Bushenyi District. Where the DP was very strong, polling was deliberately delayed.

In many polling stations ballot boxes were supplied without padlocks and seals. This later enabled the polling officials, who were UPC supporters, to dip their hands in DP ballot boxes and transfer votes to UPC boxes. Some of the polling staff in some polling stations, where the DP was very strong, removed the party symbols from their boxes which were full of votes and exchanged them with the UPC ones.

All these malpractices during the polling could not be observed by the COG simply because they had no representative observers at each polling station. And yet in the memorandum of agreement between "the Government of Uganda and the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Group’s functions during and after polling were clearly spelled out in the following terms: “The Group will observe the conduct of the poll in all its aspects with right of access to all polling stations and supervising officers.

The Group will need to satisfy themselves about all relevant matters including the handling of ballot boxes, the counting of votes after polling, and the declaration of the result of the poll.”
The group was thinly deployed on the ground. A Group of about sixty people was expected to observe nearly three thousand polling stations, each one miles apart and most of them inaccessible by road.

What the COG staff did was to stay only certain places and "monitor complaints" from there. They all stayed in hotels at headquarters of artificially divided areas or regions.
A questionnaire to all our party agents at each polling station throughout the country showed that over 62% of the polling stations were not visited by any member of the COG team. The COG concentrated on Buganda and some parts of Busoga for two major reasons:

(a) The UPC had, through the Chairman of the Military Commission, and the Electroral Commission, convinced them that these were the controversial areas where the COG ought to concentrate;

(b) Most polling stations were inter-connnected by a network of passable roads (all weather roads as well as bulungi-bwansi roads).
Outside Busoga and Buganda the rigging was open and rampant. In the few polling stations where members of the group reached, they made the following report: “A large number of polling stations lacked either seals or padlocks for the ballot boxes, and, additionally, party labels for the boxes were often in short supply.... A number of polling stations we visited were ill-suited for the flow of people at the rate required. Some used the entrance doors also as an exit. Others had the ballot boxes in a separate room so that a person waiting to enter the room to vote had no idea how long he should wait or whether the person ahead of him had long since left the room. In one polling station voters had to use a window as their exit.”

If the group had reached most of the stations, especially in areas such as Bushcnyi, Rukungiri. Kabale. Tororo. Mbale, Gulu and Kitgum, where the UPC had planned to concentrate their rigging, they would have discovered worse malpractices.

The Group had the guts to report: “It was clear beyond doubt that the populace at large was voting in an atmosphere devoid of coercion and intimidation, and were doing so freely and in assured secrecy for candidates of their own choice."
If the group was not dishonest here, then it was grossly negligent in its duties.

The Counting of Votes and Announcement of Results

The history of elections in Uganda has shown that whenever elections took place, rigging took place at all stages, but counting of the votes became the worst stage. Boxes would be carried from polling stations to central counting places. Some of these boxes would disappear on the way, others would be broken into and votes stolen.