How pre-independence polls set bad precedent for Uganda

February’s general election will be the sixth consecutive one since 1996, but Uganda’s ninth in its 58 years of independence.
After creating a country called Uganda, the British made sure they handed it to an elected leadership.

Elections before independence
When the independence wave started sweeping across Africa in the early 1950s, the British commissioned a study named ‘Operation Elections’.

The previous year, 1957, former British colony Ghana had become the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to gain independence.

At the end of the study in 1960, a document titled ‘Democracy in backward countries’ was produced. The document was in support of democratic elections.

“Since international expectation and African nationalists demanded elections before independence, they must be held,” the report stated in part.

In its conclusion, the report highlighted doubts over elections having any meaning to Africa.
“Westminster democracy cannot be expected to work well in countries with low standards of living and education,” it said.

Calls for elections in Uganda
The nationalists who spearheaded the independence crusade demanded the introduction of a secret ballot and adult suffrage. These nationalists included teachers, clerks and in some cases local traders. Prominent among them in Uganda were Augustine Kamya, Jolly Joe Kiwanuka, and Ignatius Musaazi.

“The schemes to develop representative African local government was mooted in the 1940s on the belief that few Africans were ready for the vote,” wrote Lord Hailey in The Future of Colonial People.

The demand for adult suffrage gathered momentum in Uganda in 1952. According to the Uganda National Congress (UNC) manifesto, Ignatius Musazi said: “Freedom in this fast-moving civilisation of the Atomic Age was seen as bound up with adult suffrage.”

In 1958, the first elections were held and Ugandans voted their representatives to the Legislative Council (Legco).
“The African politicians who won elected office called for rapid progress to independence. The door at which they knocked was already opening rapidly,” Fredrick Cooper wrote in Decolonisation and the African Society.

While adding his voice to the call for all adults to vote, Apollo Milton Obote said, “The (colonial) government’s refusal to accept adult suffrage for Africans is a complete degradation of the African mentality, independence and adulthood. We know that only in independence shall we be respectable men and women of dignity.”

The first secret ballot in Uganda was held in 1961. Though they were largely boycotted in Buganda region, they were well attended in other parts of the country. The boycott in Buganda posed a challenge to the legitimacy of the elections.

“There are mechanical means whereby primitive tribes can be made to go through the motions of the ballot, but such a process is neither dignified nor meaningful. This was ‘handing a native a pistol and carefully explaining its mechanism,” The Times newspaper in London, the UK, reported about the election.

According to the Uganda Argus newspaper of January 20, 1960, then UPC secretary general John Kakonge called on Ugandans not to embrace those who were underestimating their ability to have a peaceful vote.

“We should shame and demonstrate to the rest of the world that Uganda people are mature and capable of governing themselves,” Kakonge said.

Elections favoured the educated. This was expressed through the requirement for literacy and fluency in English. This combination eliminated many people.

“A tiny educated elite had suggested a qualified franchise in the early 1950s. In 1958, the district council in Ankole had rejected even a qualified direct franchise, as the council was already composed of people who speak English best and represent Ankole well,” said the Progressive Party in its manifesto.
At the nominations, the leading parties, Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC) and Democratic Party (DP), were driven by religious and ethnic undertones.

According to D.A. Low’s book Political Parties in Uganda, “The popularity of the main rival to the UPC, the Democratic Party, was driven partly by the sense among Catholics that the colonial State had systematically favoured Protestants.”
Party support was put together on the anticipation of possible reward of office after the elections. Though parties had written manifestos, their campaigns rested on spoken word. This was because the number of voters who could read was small.

“Immediate independence was necessary because we are in a terrible hurry to bridge the gap between our poverty-stricken country and the prosperous nations of the Western world,” John Kakonge promised according to the Uganda Argus of January 27, 1961.

What was not known to the voters and candidates alike was that the two looked at adult suffrage differently. Candidates saw the ballot as an avenue for Ugandans to express their rationality and orderly citizenship, while to the voters the ballot was seen as rooted in ethnicity and locality as opposed to nationhood.

Soon the ballot created two classes of citizens: The electors who expected service and the elected who secured the right to decide the future of the electors. This resulted in having leaders who saw elections as an exercise to gain power and not to be challenged.

Unfortunately for Uganda, the situation was made worse by the opportunistic deal agreed by Obote and the British to secure the 1962 elections which effectively endorsed Buganda’s claims to a distinct status.

Those who lived in the kingdom were the kabaka’s subjects before they were citizens of Uganda.
This endorsement created a weak and divided country at the time of independence, and a country whose legitimacy was built on a shaky foundation.

This not only set the ground for the immediate political manoeuvres, but set a bad precedent for subsequent elections in the young country.