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.

One wonders why the COG concluded that (the way it did).

It is not clear to us as to why the COG concluded that if the legal provisions of displaying the voters' registers were not complied with no problem was poised. It is also perplexing to note that the COG could afford to overlook the heavy registration malpractices in the South-Western districts and in the West Nile Province which could, and indeed did, adversely affect the outcome of the election. These areas counted for over forty seats which were nearly one-third of all the seats contested.

Another aspect of the registration that had a negative effect on the election and the results thereof, was the high-handed dismissal of the 14 District Commissioners by the Military Commission. These officers were dismissed from public service because they did not come out to support the UPC, work for its interests during the registration exercise, and suppress the DP and UPM.

The DCs dismissed were men of distinguished civil service career. Some had reached positions of Under-Secretaries.
One wonders what the COG was up to when they said that in their view that may not have affected the ultimate results.

The Nomination Fiasco

The nomination exercise was a very big mess. The UPC had laid strategies to mess up the exercise and come out with at least twenty unopposed candidates. After the administrative tricks, intimidation and harrassment of the DP and UPM candidates were resorted to. The most outstanding cases were in Arua, Kasese, Moyo, Apac and Lira. Lamentably the Electoral Commission compounded these malpractices of the UPC. The Obversvers’ report on these incidents reveals the Commission's guilt by saying:

“When asked by the Group what action the Electoral Commission proposed to take regarding these allegations, the Chairman replied that the Commission was awaiting the reports of the Returning Officers concerned and would let the group know as soon as they were received. Nothing further was heard from the Commission about them.
In case of Kasese where the DP candidates were properly nominated, the Commission decided to take Obote's orders and cancel the nominations and then declare the UPC unopposed just a few days before the polling day.

Putting all the facts together the COG comes to a logical and, indeed, the right conclusion: “When we view the way in which some Returning Officers acted when processing nomination papers of other parties (DP and UPM), and the part played by the Electoral Commission itself in respect of Kasese and Masaka North, a finding of partiality cannot be resisted.

The COG went on to report:

The effect of the unopposed returns on the arithmetic of the outcome is difficult to assess. Some of the seats in question (such as in Apac, Lira and Soroti - FAWB) would almost certainly have fallen to the UPC had polling taken place, but equally in some others (such as in Kasese, Arua, Moyo, and Moroto - FAWB) the DP would have stood a good chance of victory.

That the DP would have won in Kasese, Arua Moyo and Moroto was a foregone conclusion. The UPC was extremely weak in these areas. And these areas contained nine seats which the DP was pretty sure to win with overwhelming majority. What is surprising is to see that after the COG had made the above conclusion they then jumped to some other conclusion too which does not tally with the first one. On comparing the two paragraphs, one wonders whether it was the same Group making the same conclusions.

They said: “We have expressed at some length our reservations regarding nominations and a number of unopposed returns: without questions, this is the area most open to criticism.

We would, however, add that about half the seats involved are likely to have been captured by the UPC in any event, so that despite their effect on the arithmetic, they are not likely to have affected the outcome.”

Besides the absurdity and dispartiy in both conclusions, one wonders on what basis the COG could conclude the "half the seats involved are likely to have been captured by the UPC.”

In Kasese the UP would have captured the three seats. Traditionally "Kasese is a DP controlled zone". So were Kumi and Moroto. The DP would also have won all the five seats in West Nile. If these seats added to the 52 the DP had in Parliament after the election, that would have added to 62 seats.

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.

Cogent evidence showed that some unscrupulous polling stall would interchange the labels from the boxes or open the boxes and steal some votes from one box and put them into another box.
So when it came to the 1980 general election, the DP and UPM demanded that the counting be done on the spot at each polling station.

The poll was scheduled to start at 8.00 a.m. and end at 6.00 p.m. on the 10th day of December 1980, which was the gazetted day. At the close of the day counting of votes commenced as the Electoral Commissions' radio announcement had directed. By the afternoon the Military Commission started getting feelers from UPC agents throughout the country that the DP had won over 50% of the seats where so far counting had been completed. The UPC, the Electoral Commission and the Military Commission panicked. Then they decided to extend the poll to 2.00 p.m. on 11th December. The Electoral Commission made an announcement to that effect.

The Group was relieved from tension in which the Proclamation put them when on the morning of the following day, Paulo Muwanga had in advance of their representations, prepared a press statement which he had, allegedly agreed upon with the "leaders" of the UPC and DP. For no apparent reasons the UPM was left out of the agreement. According to the Group, this statement "had the effect of preserving the Proclamation in force whilst authorising Returning Officers and the Electoral Commission to publicly announce the results".

During all this time Obote and Muwanga were meeting in camera doctoring and concocting the results. After this, they “allowed” the Electoral Commission to announce the “results” which were doctored and concocted according to their wishes.

Muwanga's ill-fated Proclamation was published on the 11th day of December 1980 and not on the 10th as the government gazette purported. It is obvious that the Proclamation could not have been published on the 10th December and then deemed to have come into force on the same day. The date of 10th seems to be a fraudulent one. Although this date is stated to be the publication date, the Proclamation seems to have been enacted and published on the 11th of December.

The Military Commission dated the publication 10th December because that was their last day in power. It should be noted that their mandate had ceased on the date of 10th December which was the voting date. Above all, Muwanga as the Military Commission's Chairman, had no powers either on behalf of the Commission or on that of himself alone, to make any Proclamation.

The (Commonwealth Observers’) Report docs not mention anywhere the tact that by the time statutory power was restored to the Electoral Commission the Secretary to the Commission, plus three of the seven members of the Commission, who were all serving actively when the polling began, had disappeared from their offices.

The remaining four were all staunch UPC supporters and Obote’s appointees. On the 11th day of December, Vincent Ssekono, the Secretary to the Electoral Commission disappeared into thin air after he had been intimidated by Obote personally. According to Ssekono himself, he had been hurriedly summoned to Obote's home at Kololo to meet Obote who told him that if he, Ssekono, interfered with the UPC's victory he would be sent to the gallows. Obote told him that he and the U PC had fought against Amin and they therefore had to come to power at any cost. Frightened by this, Ssekono had to abandon the whole exercise and flee the country.

The Report only mentions Ssekono in thanking him for his "helpful and co-operatrive approach in facilitating our work". It does not at all mention his mysterious disappearance at the peak of the election exercise. The Group could not even mention the fact that ten days before the polling, Ssekono's personal assistant was shot dead at his home in Makindye by people in UNLA uniform who are believed to have been UNLA soldiers.

The COG's predicament is ably summarised by Fred Bridgland of the Scotsman when he said: “In actual fact, by the time Mr. Muwanga handed nominal power back to the Electoral Commission they were paralysed by fear and had effectively become Mr. Muwanga's prisoners.

All the Commonwealth Observer Report tells the reader is that the Observer worked with Brigadier Oyite-Ojok, the pro-Obote Commander Uganda Army to persuade the Electoral Commission to start announcing the results as presented to it by Mr. Muwanga. This raises a multitude of questions which the Report ignominously fails to answer.

For example, why did theCommonwealth Observers need to persuade the fear-ridden Electoral Commission to start announcing the results? And why did they need the Commander of the Army (Oyite-Orok)to help them? The Electoral Commission was neutered by legal decrees as well as by fear, and returning offices were cowed into silence.”

Conclusion

Those diplomats and political analysts who criticise the Commonwealth as
having "allowed itself to be used to endorse an exercise which had been a mockery of democracy and which should have been assessed as such before the Commonwealth decided to come" are justified.

The Commonwealth Office which is supposed to observe the principles of democracy and to be an association of free and democratic states rendered itself to ridicule in the eyes of the majority of Ugandans, Africa and the world at large.

That the 10th December 1980, Uganda election was heavily rigged is no more in question regardless of the COG’s reckless observation and illogical conclusion. The majority of Ugandans and all democratically-minded peoples of the world reject the report as being "bogus".