More candidates than voters likely

Most nominations for the 2021 Uganda elections have been done and we are on the home stretch to the February 18, 2021 vote. It’s a difficult time to be a journalist and voter in Uganda.

Consider this. Forgetting the contest for the presidency, which always has relatively few candidates, in the 1996 election there were 276 elective seats in Parliament that were contested by 814 aspirants.

I remember that at The Monitor then we decided that, over the course of the campaigns, we would cover every constituency race and mention nearly all the candidates.

We did cover all the constituencies but not every candidate. By 2001, things got thick: There were 295 electoral seats and candidates in their thousands. But the paper’s capacities had bulked up too.

The animated and novel first encounter between President Yoweri Museveni and Dr Kizza Besigye and the snappy freshness of the Reform Agenda pressure group — the precursor to the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) — sucked up a lot of our attention. But we could still do a listing and mention all the constituencies and most candidates and get a pass grade for our civic duty.

For 2021, the thing is up to 353. Nobody has totted up all the candidates but a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that there is an average of 10 candidates per constituency, totalling nearly 3,600. The journalists are now counting sand.

If the Ugandan economy expanded as dramatically as its electoral and political markets, we would be an upper middle-income economy. None of this growth, given the historical advantage of incumbency and the ability of the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) to inject steroids in its votes, will result in a change in who is declared President and which party will have the majority in Parliament.

Does the fact that the outcomes have largely been already fixed mean it is all in vain or the practical benefit of elections are limited? Not at all. I have always believed that a rigged, or even shambolic, election is far better than none.

For a president and ruling party to rig an election is acceptance that it is worth stealing. Furthermore, even a bad election keeps the idea of democracy alive. The thinking around these “elections without change” is now growing in interesting directions.

Nic Cheesam, a professor of Democracy at the University of Birmingham, in the UK, who writes a lot about African politics, in an article in Africa Report, “The remarkable power of African elections”, offers some interesting thoughts.

Grant goodies

In summary, his argument is that, even where elections are fiddled, where the same party wins or votes result in democratic reversals, there still is progress.

That is because governments that “changa changa” elections still want to gain popularity; so, they grant goodies and will sometimes come through with good policies.

Among other things, he lists free primary education, which has had significant impact. In Uganda, UPE resulted from the 1996 election, in which Museveni (he says “If election manipulation was a sport...Museveni would be the Olympic champion) ran as the leader of a one-party state.

At base, however, there has been a change, where politics in Uganda — like in many other places in Africa — is no longer a vocation but employment, in which the primary purpose is to earn a salary and perks. With expanded education, improved life expectancy and a relative period of stability, the economy just isn’t growing fast enough to soak all the labour in well-paying formal work. Politics, funded by taxpayers, has become an attractive bet.

Crowded candidate fields

It is likely that having as many candidates as the population of a small island nation running for Parliament, to keep to the spirit of Cheesam’s argument, increases the number of platforms politicians run on and becomes a delivery vehicle.

You can’t afford to sit safely, even as an NRM, when at the next nomination you will face 20 Movement rivals, and can only scrape through after shooting half of them.

These crowded candidate fields may also say something positive that those of us who despise the political games will find hard to admit: They could well indicate improved access to political office and an asymmetrical deepening of democracy at the local level.

There is something refreshing in seeing a powerful minister’s child, the head of the local cattle dip, the retired school master, the recently disgraced government official, the incumbent MP’s estranged wife and the popular comedian in one of the town’s FM stations all running for the same seat.

There is hardly a constituency anymore that has a prince or princess who can’t be challenged. Even the humiliation of having no one queue behind one at an NRM nomination is no longer a deterrence.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the Wall of Great Africans. @cobbo3