President’s new term is no solution to Uganda crisis

Posted  Monday, May 9 2011 at 00:00

Dear Tingasiga:

This week, Gen. Yoweri Museveni will, once again, be sworn in as president of Uganda. This will legalise his claim to remain on the Ugandan throne. But he remains illegitimate from the constitutional democratic perspective. It bears repeating that the 2011 presidential election process was a charade as usual. When you have the Electoral Commission, the Police, army, spy agencies, broadcasting and media councils, the Treasury and other organs of the state absorbed into one of the competing parties, the ‘election’ ceases to be worth the name. It becomes a farce.

When you train tens of thousands of militias in the run-up to the elections, all of whom are instructed to “defend the votes,” it makes the exercise a joke. When you use obscene amounts of the State’s cash to buy political support, it ceases to be fair competition. When hundreds of thousands of dead people are registered to vote, and hundreds of thousands of living citizens are not registered to vote, it becomes a macabre display of political cynicism.

When 5,000 registered voters are older than 110 years of age, it becomes an exercise in fiction. When the registered numbers of voters in Kigezi, Nkore, Buganda, Bugisu, Bukedi and Kampala are inflated by as much as 36 per cent, no parsing of the results can legitimise them.

The irony is that the 2011 elections offered Museveni a chance to redeem his lost legitimacy. Had there been a clean, free and fair election managed by a truly impartial EC, President Museveni would have probably won the contest.

Yes you read me right, Tingasiga. Gen. Museveni would have probably won that election without the need to bribe and threaten and rig. I spent enough time in Uganda between Christmas and the end of January to confirm this view for myself. But the President blew that chance by resorting to his usual comfort zone of unfair competition. That is why I consider the ‘results’ of the February 18 exercise to be invalid.

The analogy of students doing O-Level examinations may help those who continue to urge us to accept these results. Imagine S4 students at Queen’s College, Rwakitura, most of them among the brightest in the country, preparing for O-Level examinations. All through their years, these students have excelled in academics and extracurricular subjects. They are expected to cruise through their examinations. However, Mr Nkeitwa Mururu, their headmaster, is not a man inclined to take risks.

His nature is to cheat whenever he can. So, to be absolutely certain of success, Mr Mururu colludes with the executive secretary of the Uganda National Examinations Board to buy the examination papers, which he leaks to his students on the night before the examination. As expected, the entire class passes, every candidate getting a distinction in nearly every subject. Now, would you say since these students were expected to pass anyway, we should accept their results as valid? Do such students deserve to be admitted to A-Level?

Most people would declare such results null and void. Furthermore, Mr Mururu and his UNEB associates would be charged with crimes under the Penal Code of the Republic. The results of an election mean far less to me than the process that leads to the outcome. This is a principle which we must nurture and fight for. We must reject the common refrain by foreign election observers who, after detailing the fraud in the elections, endorse the ‘victory’ of the beneficiary of the crime.

A young Museveni, along with Kizza Besigye, Mugisha Muntu, Kale Kayihura and many others said no to that in 1981. They took up arms. Thirty years after the first shots of that war, a much older Museveni prepares to be sworn-in again as president, a beneficiary of another election that was as fraudulent as that which he claimed to have prompted him to wage war against the legal, but illegitimate government of the day. Mr Museveni’s Pyrrhic ‘victory’ in this year’s election is central to the current crisis.

Whereas high food and fuel prices are a perfectly legitimate reason to demonstrate, they are not the main reason why the Walk-to-Work campaign has taken hold. In my view, the demonstrations and palpable anger in the land are symptoms of a deeper problem that is really a deficiency of human rights and freedoms, which include the right to compete for power in a free and fair manner. They are also a consequence of the social and economic injustice that has been perpetrated on citizens by a syndicate that Vice President Gilbert Bukenya has aptly called a Mafia Clique in government. Those who would like to frame the walk-to-work demonstrations as an attempt by Dr Besigye to grab power that was denied him by the electorate misrepresent the root cause of the crisis.

The farcical ‘election’ of 2011, like the earlier ones of 2001 and 2006, has caused deep despair among millions of Ugandans. Denied free and fair means of expressing their displeasure with the ruler, Ugandans have done what disenchanted citizens the world over have resorted to. That their right to peaceful protest is guaranteed by the Ugandan Constitution is a matter which should inform the arguments of the most avid supporters of the Ugandan President.

To condemn people who are exercising their constitutional right is to betray one’s contempt for the rule of law. I understand why some may not believe that not everyone is enjoying the goodies that the Museveni patronage machine has dispensed for 25 years. It is hard to stand up in solidarity with the wretched-of the-earth when your personal economic existence is utterly linked to the survival of the regime.

I also understand why the President and his courtiers will do whatever it takes to legalise a fraudulent result of a farcical election. However, swearing-in of the President, with his hand on a Bible in front of the Chief Justice, will not cool the crisis that engulfs the country. It will only be a mockery of the Lord God and of his people whose cries are dismissed by those who feast at the country’s high table.

Museveni’s supporters, and all Ugandans at home and abroad, who have the long view, should join in the peaceful search for a just society, one in which Museveni, Besigye, Muntu, Mao, Otunnu and all of us can live in peace and freedom, as equal citizens under God.

Dr Mulera is a consultant pediatrician and neonatologist
mkmulera@aol.com