4 years, 2 months ago-
Some people have said that the act of dictator Museveni taking every new elected parliament members of the NRM, to the so called Luweero bushes trek,is an act of intimidation, to cow them in the coming years,BUT some people in the know say there is witchcraft involved and a reknown Museveni’s personal witchdoctor, is the designer behind the act.
The government of Botswana is preparing a formal request to Kenya to arrest and handover visiting Uganda President Yoweri Museveni to them to face war crime charges in Uganda which include opposition persecution & gross human rights violations.
Botswana is the only country in Africa that doesn’t recognize Museveni’s ‘victory’ which President Ian Khama described as the biggest fraud in history of mankind since that snake tricked Adam and Eve. In a statement from the presidency to the army general council leaked to our news desk, the president says …. “I hereby order our border guards to be on the lookout in case that criminal sneaks into the country on his many wastrel trips to South Africa.
As the commander in chief I also order the army to intercept or bring down any aircraft within our airspace carrying that demagogue who has continued to twist democracy and deceive popular will of Ugandans in this 21st century. Museveni may escape today but we will sure catch him like a squirrel and bring him to justice. Already our prisons department has prepared a special jail where we will keep him during trial, same jail is where he will spend his next 30years paying for his crimes.
Our attorney general will write a letter to Kenya in the next 72 hours to the effect of cooperating in immediate arrest of Museveni when he visits the country, failure to do so will degrade our relations and as usual Brookside milk products from Kenya will not be welcomed here again—we will ban them for good. Uhuru can’t keep aiding that despot Museveni in defeating Uganda’s popular will and perpetuating electoral theft, no this is a new Africa. He must arrest Museveni and hand him over to us. More economic sanctions will follow on both Kenya and Uganda” These rattling will surely trigger diplomatic standoff between Kampala, Nairobi and Gaborone. It also await to be seen if Nairobi will heed Botswana’s request.
BORN AGAIN PASTOR GETS 2 BILLION FROM MUSEVENI, TO HELP FIGHT OPPOSITION AND PROMOTE MUSEVENI.
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A city pastor JOSEPH SERWADDA of victory christian centre in Ndeeba, has been given 2 billion shillings by Yoweri Museveni.to help mobilise his congregation across the country against the opposition in Uganda.Joseph Serwadda has over 100 churches across Uganda which are affiilated to his Victory christian centre.An impeccable source told me that the money was handed over to the pastor in cash,,by a state house employee a one Molly Kamukama. Serwadda operates a radio station, Impact FM and a TV station called Dream TV. He also organises an annual event at Namboole every December 31st. The pastor is known to lead a very luxurious lifestyle at the expense of his flock, and he is reported to have ordered a private jet..He was the only member of the inter-religious council who was against Shaka Ssali moderating the presidential debate.
Ugandan opposition parties are faced with a familiar conundrum—fairly sure that the election they just lost was rigged, but unsure how to prove it.
There is evidence that President Yoweri Museveni’s main challenger, Kizza Besigye of the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), made significant gains in many parts of the country, especially urban areas. It is also clear that intimidation and repression were widespread, including the repeated detention of Besigye in the weeks of and after polling day. But neither domestic courts nor international election monitors are likely to declare an election unfree or unfair on the basis of this kind of background manipulation, although both the European Union and U.S. State Department found the election process to be marked by a lack of transparency and worrying irregularities. At the end of the day, it is only hard evidence of ballot box stuffing or faulty vote tallying that is likely to sway them.
So, do the results, published by the Electoral Commission (EC) in almost complete form towards the end of February, point to a rigged election? And if so, how was it done?
When evaluating election results it is important to keep in mind two questions:
Is there clear evidence of rigging that systematically benefitted one side over another?
Was this rigging sufficient to change the result of the election?
In many elections, we see one of these questions answered affirmatively but not the other. In the Ugandan context, Museveni officially received 60.62 percent of the vote, with Besigye on 35.61 percent—a gap of almost 2.5 million votes. So, with these two questions in mind, what do the results tell us?The results: Election rigging, Ugandan style
As expected, urban areas including Kampala voted overwhelmingly for the opposition, with Besigye winning a presidential majority in 14 constituencies, up from just 4 in 2011. These results fit with reports by journalists and commentators during the campaign. But in other ways, the election results appear far-fetched. In national elections, it is practically impossible that 100 percent of registered voters at a particular polling station would turn out to vote. Yet the results for this election show a high number of such cases clustered in particular areas.
In Kiruhura District—in the heartland of Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM)—67 polling stations logged highly improbable turnouts of 100 percent. Forty-three of those stations made the even more dubious claim of 100 percent of votes in favor of the incumbent. In the same district, a further 59 stations recorded turnout of between 98 and 99.99 percent of the registered voters. The total turnout in Kiruhura District was 86.87 percent, contributing more than 120,000 votes for the president or 91.35 percent of the district’s total valid ballots. In Nakaseke District, two sub-counties had 14 stations between them with 100 percent turnout and 100 percent of the votes in favor of the incumbent out of a total of 29 polling stations. Taken in total, all the polling stations across the two sub-counties recorded a 97 percent turnout, with over 97 percent of the valid votes going to Museveni. This pattern was repeated across multiple other districts.
The suspect results tend to come from rural districts—where media coverage and opposition party networks are generally weaker—and NRM strongholds, where opposition party agents are least likely to feel safe in monitoring procedures. The results suggest an election rigged in favor of one side, and with significant attention paid to where manipulation was—and was not—likely to be detected.
But this conclusion is cold comfort to opposition parties for two reasons. Firstly, the NRM has been careful to prevent so-called over-voting. Vote inflation looks to have been used to ensure 100 percent turnout and 100 percent support for Museveni, but no polling station recorded a turnout of over 100 percent, and so no electoral offense is represented, strictly speaking. Second, the total votes cast at these polling stations was considerably smaller than the overall gap between the two candidates. This evidence therefore fails to prove that Museveni got less votes than Besigye. Further data would be required for this, but it is extremely difficult to collect, and in spite of some questionable results there is little of the kind of hard evidence that would be needed to persuade a court of law.
In part, this is because of the strategies employed by the NRM government since voting ended. Ballot stuffing was reported in a number of districts, but it is the opaque transmission of results from polling stations to district tallying centers and then to the National Tallying Centre that has raised the most questions regarding the reliability of the Electoral Commission’s counting process. Attempts by the opposition to collate their own results were thwarted by police raids of party tallying centers, the seizure of computers and equipment, and the alleged intimidation and disappearances of party agents.
The EC is also culpable. Three weeks after the election, the commission still hasn’t released the results of the parliamentary vote—this would provide an opportunity to cross check the high levels of voter turnout in the presidential polls. In Kiruhura in the 2011 election, 22.45 percent more voters participated in the presidential elections than the parliamentary ballot, despite both being held simultaneously. Opposition candidate Amama Mbabazi and his movement are challenging the results in court with a petition that must be decided by March 31, but the case has been hampered by a suspicious robbery at their lawyers’ chambers by 30 assailants—some reportedly in police uniform—in which only the election case files and relevant computers were taken.
A warning sign for the NRM
A danger of election rigging, even if it does not change the actual result, is that it undermines the credibility of the government. This has clearly happened in Uganda, where Besigye has won a moral, if not an actual, victory. Rigged results also distort information on government popularity, potentially leading to a false sense of achievement and the low prioritization of much needed reforms.
Moving away from the overall figures, which show an overwhelming victory for Museveni, voting patterns in polling stations at police posts, stations and barracks tell a story of a ruling party in decline. In Gulu, at the barracks housing for police and their families, the station polled 62 percent in favor of the opposition leader, higher than the district total of 50.67 percent. In Ntungamo, at the police headquarters, votes for the opposition were particularly high—53.66 percent relative to the district total of 30.74 percent.
Typically, polling stations like these reflect the broader patterns of the communities in which they are based. If police are voting in large numbers at these stations, they are likely also voting for the opposition in numbers similar to the rest of their communities, potentially calling the loyalty of the police force into question. This hasn’t gone unnoticed, with police officers and their families being evicted from some quarters in suspected retribution for their voting choices. Police loyalty is particularly important for a regime that is increasingly reliant on coercion during periods of insecurity, such as elections. It might also mean a more prominent role for a better-resourced and more dependable enforcer—the military.
Ultimately, the 2016 poll suggests that the Ugandan state is less secure in its electoral legitimacy, opting to ensure favorable outcomes through subversive means. It seems clear that there was vote inflation, but this is unlikely to result in either observers or the courts intervening to challenge the final result, as opposition parties face the incredibly difficult task of trying to prove that it was sufficient to change the poll’s outcome. Yet although Museveni may have been declared the winner again, he is unlikely to rest easy in the knowledge that his mandate, and hence his legitimacy, is on the wane.
Nicole Beardsworth is a political analyst at the University of Warwick. Nic Cheeseman is associate professor of African Politics at the University of Oxford and the co-editor of the journal African Affairs.
Nicole tweets @nixiib and Nic tweets @fromagehomme.
Even with many of their leaders restricted from leaving their respective homes, FDC supporters yesterday held a series of demonstrations across the country, leading to confrontations with security agencies and several arrests.
Although the demonstrations fell short of the high billing that the FDC leaders had predicted, Police and UPDF still had a busy day involving running battles with protesters in downtown Kampala and suburbs such as Nakawa and Kawempe.
In the countryside, FDC supporters held demonstrations in districts such as Busia, Kamuli, Kabanda, Kabale, Ntungamo, and Isingiro. Several FDC supporters were arrested during these demonstrations.
By midday in Kampala, police had arrested at least 30 FDC supporters who came out to protest in defiance of a court order issued last week by Justice Steven Kavuma, which banned the party’s ‘defiance campaign.’
In city centre places such as Mini price and Kisekka market, tear gas and bullets were fired in the rainy afternoon as a joint force of police and army tried to contain protesting vendors. A number of arrests were made.
Business came to a standstill from around 1pm to 2pm as traders locked shops and evacuated the city. Around the same time, two military jets flew low over the Kampala airspace, although the UPDF spokesperson, Lt Col Paddy Ankunda, described the activity as part of “routine test flights.”
The DPC for CPS Kampala, Aaron Baguma, told The Observer that police got intelligence information that some people were planning a huge city demonstration that could have led to havoc and disruption of businesses in the city.
“After we got information, we deployed heavily in all corners of the city to make sure that there is peace and stability,” he said, adding that some protesters managed to beat their security for a while and hold their demonstration.
Baguma, however, added that police was able to disperse them with tear gas and arrest their leaders. According to Baguma, police deployments in and around the Kampala business district will remain tight even after President Museveni’s swearing-in ceremony slated for May 12.
SEVERAL ARRESTS
Baguma named some of the protesters who police arrested in Kampala as Charles Mutasa Kafeero, Frank Kazibwe, Kassim Rusoke, Muhammad Munube, Godfrey Kyikashemeza, Joshua Kisekka, Ssekanjako Dakala, Musa Ismail Njuki and David Mwesigye.
On its part, the FDC kept a rolling update of its members who had been arrested, and urged those who were free to go and secure the freedom of their colleagues.
According to FDC, those who were arrested included Alex Gitta Mulibanga, the former FDC Entebbe municipality chairman, as well as Peter Othieno and four other members. They were reportedly picked from FDC Entebbe office and detained at Entebbe police station.
In Kyambogo, according to FDC officials, police arrested Kyambogo University students who joined the protests, led by the FDC Kyambogo University chapter chairman Moses Aguuda and the FDC national youth league secretary for foreign affairs, Joshua Akoyoyi. Others included the Kyambogo students’ guild speaker Ambrose Mukwaya and Paul Okuni. All were detained at Jinja Road police station.
QUIET FDC HEADQUARTERS
It is at the FDC headquarters in Najjanakumbi where protests were expected to start at 10am before ending at Nakibubo Blue PS. However, there was little sign of activity at Najjanakumbi, save for about 20 policemen and 10 military officers waiting outside.
Many of the party leaders were nowhere to be seen, except for the FDC deputy secretary general Harold Kaija, and chairman of the FDC national election task force Godfrey Ekanya (also the outgoing MP Tororo county).
Ekanya forced his way into the FDC office at 10:40am and, a few minutes later, he pushed away police officers under the command of Katwe DPC Samuel Mission.
Asked why they did not turn up to lead the demonstration, FDC spokesperson Ssemujju Ibrahim Nganda, told The Observer on phone that he and other senior party officials could not make it to the party premises because police had surrounded their residences.
“Our houses have been under siege; that’s why we couldn’t leave home, me and the leader of opposition plus some other leaders,” he said. The Kyadondo East MP said he was only able to leave his home at 1:20pm.
HOUSE ARRESTS
The FDC founding president Kizza Besigye, who was the party’s flag bearer in the 2016 presidential election, did not leave his home, as police continued its blockade over him. Kayihura said on Tuesday that Besigye would be kept incommunicado at his home “until further notice.”
However, the Police publicist Fred Enanga denied that they had confined the opposition leaders to their homes. Enanga said police had limited its role to “routine patrols” around the opposition leaders’ homes.
“We are not at their homes,” he said. “We were near their premises carrying out open surveillance so that if any of them came out to promote their defiance campaign, we would act.”
Other opposition leaders who were under house arrest by press time included Kampala Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago, Nakawa MP-elect Michael Kabaziguruka and Kawempe South MP Mubarak Munyagwa.
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