UGANDA'S FLAWED ELECTIONS: In defence of UPC, Observers report and Muwanga

In yesterday’s series, Francis Bwengye was spitting fire at the Military Commission and the Commonwealth Observers report for messing up and misrepresenting the election. Today, UPC’s Yonah Kanyomozi tells Daily Monitor’s Emmanuel Gyezaho why he thinks his party won the disputed 1980 general elections.

Q: In your heart of hearts, do you believe the UPC won that election fairly?

A: I think UPC won the 1980 elections. The question of fairly is a bit subjective. There were some flaws in some places but on the whole as the CommonWealth Observer Team said, on the whole the election of 1980 reflected the wishes of the people of Uganda. Because you cannot say the UPC rigged here and rigged there. If they were rigging and there was general rigging, they should have done it in Buganda. In Buganda we virtually lost the whole place. So it cant have been selective. Secondly rigging elections starts at the time of registration or even before. In the making of election laws at the time, the UPC wasn’t in power. The people who were in power were the late Muwanga.

Yes Muwanga was the Chairman of the Military Commission. His Vice Chairman was Yoweri Museveni and a host of all these other people who were ministers including myself because I was in the Military Commission as an economic advisor to the Military Commission. So if there was any rigging, we should have been the ones to do it. Secondly I don’t see anybody wanting to rig himself out of elections.

The President himself now, the present president was defeated in Nyabushozi by non other than Sam Kutesa. He was number three in those elections.

Thirdly there were certain things, which happened which became funny. For example the DP’s started announcing elections of areas even where we hadn’t voted because materials hadn’t arrived.

In my own constituency, Bushenyi South as it was then called, which is now present Rushenyi and Kajara, elections did not take place on the 10th. We elected on the 11th and yet on radio Kigali and BBC, I had been defeated even before we elected.

I think there was an over enthusiasm. The other thing is, when the elections were over, when this government came in power in 1986, people tried to instigate and inquire from the DP whether they had a case which could pin the UPC down and these people were not willing to come up with any information that was saying the UPC rigged the elections.

They didn’t. Justice George Kanyeihamba was sometime quoted as saying that they tried to get that information even when they were outside the country in those four years that we were in power so that they would influence the British Government. The parties which were here, especially DP, never produced any evidence that was credible enough to deny the UPC victory at that time.

Q: What about the various election anomalies especially at the Nomination stages? There were reports of road blocks held to prevent non-UPC candidates from getting to nomination centres in Moyo and Arua. Chango Macho was barred because he didn’t present a certificate of proficiency in English yet he was a University lecturer. Was this not all in UPC’s favour?

A: No, not necessarily. Because when you are going for elections you must first make sure that you are very careful. You look at the law; take everything they want even if you are a professor. If they say we want a certificate although you have been known as a professor, you will get there and they
will say, well Prof so and so, sorry you have not presented your papers, and that is what happened to Chango Macho.

Actually Chango Macho did not go with the relevant papers to help him and I gather the irony of fate is that the man who was in chair was actually a student he had taught. So it doesn’t matter, you follow the law. In Arua, there are circumstances, which I have never understood fully. But even from the Common Wealth report, there are anomalies of people not presenting the very requirements that the Electoral Commission wanted and mark you, the Secretary of the Electoral Commission, Mr Vincent Ssekono (Now Permanent Secretary Local Government Ministry) had been actually head hunted by the DP to go into that place.

The late Gasasira, who was the permanent secretary, if he was here would tell you. He was head hunted and put into that position and he (Ssekono) would have actually stopped those anomalies since he was in position to do so as a secretary or influence the Chairman and say, no this was wrong. But Ssekono did not even raise a finger at that time. And you can’t say he was stopped because, the UPC was not yet in power, and the Military Commission was. So these are the things that people need to understand. I am not saying that there were no flaws. There might have been flaws here and there but they were not going to change the situation. These would not have stopped the UPC from winning.

Q: UPC got at least 16 unopposed seats amid serious claims of electoral malpractice. Did UPC get these seats unfairly?

A: Of the 16 lets take a look at those in Lango sub region. Whether they were there or not, they would have gone to UPC anyway.

Q: Why?

A: Because that is a UPC area no matter what you do. You can see it even now. Even now there are very few people who are not UPC in that region and despite the fact that 20years of non-presence of party structures, it is still a UPC area. In fact the same can be said of Teso and some extent Mbale.

So you have got to deduct those off your unopposed people. Go to Arua. In some places where they got unopposed people, UPC people would have won most of those places. I am trying to say, okay even if it was to change; the numbers would not have altered substantially from the winning side. I think.

Q: Is the image of the UPC as a party that stole elections a fair portrayal?

A: But this is because of the propaganda. The propaganda has been immense like saying that the UPC has done nothing, UPC was a dictatorship and UPC spoilt this country. If you look at the record of UPC as a party in government, the performance is superb. Even in the four years of what they call Obote II, and that was immediately after Amin, the performance compares favourably with the performance of the present government, in data in infrastructure building, in education, in trying to rehabilitate the economy.

The records are there. Look at the national projects done in the UPC period, they are tremendous, you just can’t talk anything. What has this government done in comparison except that one; it has may be rehabilitated the infrastructure that the UPC had constructed. There is no new road that has been done, and if the new road has been constructed, it has collapsed even before it runs a period of five years.

And that one is known why. It is because of internal corruption in appointing contractors; two you can look at the number of schools that were built, the hospitals, the parastatals, the forward move on the cooperative movement for rural development, you cannot compare. And the statistics will show it to you. And mark you UPC was in power for less than 12 years. This government has been in power half the period we have been independent and UPC was doing all these with less borrowing.

The UPC government borrowed to the extent that by 1985 we had public external debt standing at 1.2 billion dollars without being forgiven or anything. Two by 1971 we had only borrowed 500million dollars. If you see the things which were built, it was incredible. So I don’t think the UPC on its own record can be blamed for anything.

Yes there was a war here but who started the war? NRM started the war, or Museveni did, at that. When he started the war, what was the reason he started the war? We finished elections on the 11th. On the 15th President Obote was trying to form a government. On the 5th of January, that is when he was sworn in. A month later, Museveni was in the bush, fighting what? Corruption, dictatorship in one month? I always tell my friends in the NRM and those who are now going to FDC. How could you in one month have judged that the government is going to be corrupt, inefficient and a dictatorship?

You haven’t even exhausted the courts; you take up guns and go to Luwero. On reflection, historians will question at a later date: Was the war in Luwero necessary? No it was not. It is an interesting question because if you are to look back, in one month you couldn’t have known that the government was a dictatorship, it was going to be inefficient and corrupt. And in any case now, nobody talks about the UPC Government being corrupt. You have seen the pictures of Dr Obote’s homes in Lira, Akokoro and Kololo. That is all he has.

Compare it with the present (laughs) I hear one of the president’s daughters has a huge mansion in Bunga. Can you tell me what type of job she does? I am sure her dresses which are very expensive, cannot be supplying that big a market. So you can see that going to war was a power game. It had nothing at all to do with whether the government was going to be inefficient, corrupt or not. Unless they were gods and were looking or crystal gazing and seeing that these things were going to be happening. When the war happened, then what happened? Devastation in Luwero!

Q: Well, the bush war heroes claimed they went to the bush because the 1980 elections had been rigged.

A: Yes. Go through all those election records and see. The UPM had more than 78 candidates and only one of them won. That was Crispus Kiyonga. He won on sympathy because the DP candidate had died. Even the president of the UPM party failed, the Secretary General Bidandi Ssali failed. Eriya Kategaya, in fact he is called Tukahirwa but in his village because he had changed parties, they called him Tukaferwa (we lost). He also failed. These are issues, which people need to take into account.

Q: With hindsight today, what would UPC have done differently in the 1980 elections to save the party’s name?

A: I think people should not have been over excited and used the roadblocks you are talking about or being sticky on the law like in the case of Chango Macho. That should not have happened. Secondly, in Arua if there were those roadblocks, then they were unfortunate because if all the roadblocks were blocking all the candidates then all the candidates would not have reached the nomination centres. That should not have happened. Another thing is because of over enthusiasm; people might have over stepped themselves and done something, which they ought not to have done. In retrospect, I think we should try and avoid excesses. I am a person who believes in the middle way. You don’t need to be extreme. Anything, which is extreme, has negative results and radicalism in anything is bad. I am not a radical. If you see a radical politician, they tend to be unprincipled. They can be radical left, radical right and anything in excess just spoils everything. I think in retrospect all those things should have been avoided. But the terrible condemnation that they have put on the UPC, the UPC doesn’t deserve that.

Q: I have done research on the conduct of the 1980 polls and realised that the UPC was given serious prominence in the Uganda Times, which was the state owned newspaper much to the chagrin of the other parties. The media was thus used unfairly.

A: That is true but then you have seen it today with The New Vision. Listen to Radio Uganda and watch UTV, the first thing is that the President has done something, Museveni has said this, and the minister has done this.

Q: But Dr Obote wasn’t President at the time

A: I don’t know why they chose to push him. But the Chairman of the Military Commission was Muwanga. Muwanga was UPC for sure. But they should have prevailed over him because his assistant was Museveni anyway. He also didn’t seem to care about that and to realign the presentation in the papers or the media.

Q: Wouldn’t questions of neutrality thus arise since Paulo Muwanga was UPC?

A: Yeah, but his Vice was UPM. Neutrality wouldn’t have risen. But if a government is in power, it doesn’t mean that it should do the wrong things. You can’t say well, we will call in the Pope or the Archbishop or something to run the government when we are going to hold elections. It does not mean that fairness or equity ends when you are in power.

No, you should look at the law; you should look at the general good of the welfare of the society you are leading. You open to them, you should accept criticism, you should bend even backwards to see your own mistakes because from mistakes you can correct the anomalies and stay in power if you want to.

I am not saying stay in power in the manner that we see at the moment or we saw in Mexico of keeping power for 70years, no. But if a government is serious and wants to look at the development of its own society, if it accepts internal self-criticism, constructive criticism from its citizens then these excesses wouldn’t happen.

Q: Some observers believe that since Muwanga was UPC, he did everything possible to ensure the UPC won and that is possibly why Obote appointed him as his Vice President when he formed a new government.

A: No, no. Muwanga from the word go. Let me tell you, I was in Moshi. If it wasn’t for fear by the pressures being put on Tanzania, when in the Moshi Conference, Muwanga would have been coming here as the Chairman and the leader of Government instead of Lule. If we had voted, and we tried to vote actually, Muwanga was the thing.

As a result, that is why they formed the Military Commission because the people did not want Lule as the head. So they formed the Military Commission, those groups which had people in the field, that is UPC, FRONASA (Front for National Salvation) and Save Uganda Movement (SUAM). And the people who came in the Military Commission, the whole structure were from those.

UPC took the Chairmanship; FRONASA took the Vice Chairmanship, SUAM took the Secretary. So Muwanga would in any case have been the first President after Amin if we had followed the feelings of the meeting. But we had pressure because they said the British Government didn’t want the UPC back as they had helped to overthrow it in 1971. So it wasn’t a reward. Muwanga deserved it.

Q: Where do you see the future of UPC?

A: We are going to go for the annual delegates conference and we should choose a leadership, which should propel this party to keep its national identity. And we have the people, many people who will stand for the presidency and other elective positions. Am sure we will get cohesion and the lessons of being out of government twice, of being put in a freezer for 20 years, should have taught us now that when we come back, we will be careful to see that we propagate our social system. We have a strong belief in uplifting the common man, that’s why our programmes were very effective. We will play our part and our role in the future of this country. I am sure about that.

Q: Your last words on Dr Apollo Milton Obote

A: Obote was a nationalist, he was patriotic, he was a Pan-africanist, he was not corrupt and he was very, very smart. Very smart in the way that you couldn’t believe it, he would listen, be able to chair those cabinet meetings. There is no cabinet meeting that took place if he was in the country without him chairing. He would advise the ministers and we too were taking decisions collectively.

Where he had a problem was that he was at times a poor judge of character. He would choose at times people who would later betray him or work against him. Starting from the Grace Ibingira’s, Felix Onama and of late the people he had wanted to be in the Presidential Policy Committee (PPC), the ones he thought would be his right hand men, they have all ended up in the NRMO.

He had such fascination and admiration of proping up a person like Dr Ruhakana Rugunda. Rugunda definitely worked against him. So he was a bit of a bad judge of character that is why it cost the party at times and put it into a crisis. Like when he dropped Kakonge from being the Secretary General and yet Kakonge would have been the person to support him, when he did not take Adonia Tiberondwa to be on the PPC and when he decided to say that the party should not take part in elective political activities in this country when NRM had come into power.

If he hadn’t done that, the history of this country would have been different because those of us who went in the NRC ended up doing a superb job although we were very few. We ended up chairmen of committees; we ended up stopping bad laws from being passed. And if all of us had gone as UPC in those elections in 1989 and 1996, we would have changedŠnow because of taking faulty decisions we have ended up having some of our areas with our supporters going away from us.

But otherwise he was a superb person and he wasn’t sectarian. If you see the developments in Buganda and the entire country and in the selection of people who were holding positions in government. He looked at Uganda as Uganda and a place he had to serve. So we are definitely going to miss him, at least his advice since he was already ageing any way. But he had that dynamism of being able to look at the national interest and not being corrupt.