Uganda’s political class started discussing and anticipating the 2016 general election almost as soon as the 2011 elections ended.
Now that 2016 is finally here, little else will be discussed for the first two months of the year.
Many Ugandans, especially the older generation and supporters of Opposition parties such as the UPC cannot believe that Yoweri Museveni who trailed the UPC and DP during the 1980 general election and was dismissed as almost a joke that year has now been head of State for 30 years.
This bitter fact has still failed to sink in. He has now become the longest-serving president in East Africa and Africa’s fifth longest-serving leader.
So far in the 2015-2016 campaign season, the two main challengers to Museveni, Amama Mbabazi and Kizza Besigye, are engaging in conventional election campaigns.
Virtually the same The Electoral Commission is virtually the same as the one from 2011, the police publicly comes across as favouring or acting on behalf of Museveni and at the lower rural grassroots level intelligence operatives and the police are enforcing an atmosphere that more or less makes it impossible for Mbabazi, Besigye and the other presidential candidates to freely interact with the locals.
Under normal circumstances, the Opposition parties to the election should boycott it since the election may not be a fair one. But they persist in campaigning on one hand and denouncing the use of the State machinery against them.
Whether they are doing this to go through the motions as a way of accounting for the financing they have received for their campaigns or some plan to use the incidents of State sabotage as their legal evidence against Museveni when the time comes to reject the official results, remains to be seen.
The FDC camp and its supporters show the greatest motivation and believe more than any of the other campaigns that should their candidate be elected, Uganda will see a major change for the better.
The Museveni camp, by definition, is the least interested in a change of national leadership.
It prefers that things continue as they have for the last 30 years. It is the camp that has the most intense in-fighting partly because little binds its members together except the fear of change and the wish to continue enjoying the easy privileges that come with power in Africa.
However, because Mbabazi presents himself as NRM running as an independent, it has sometimes been difficult for him to garner an impassioned network of highly-motivated grassroots campaign agents.
When money or other temptations are offered them by the Museveni camp, it is easier for some of Mbabazi’s supporters to slip back into the NRM from where they came than it is for an FDC campaign agent to become an NRM supporter overnight.
That is the challenge that faces Mbabazi’s decision to continue identifying himself with the NRM.
Besigye’s enduring popularity across the country continues to be demonstrated rally after rally. The only barrier that stands between Besigye and presidential victory is the State machinery and Museveni’s determination to use it as a last resort if it must come to that.
Besigye since 2000 has not yet worked out a formula for overwhelming this State machinery as some other Opposition leaders in Africa who ran against the State machinery managed to finally do.
The Commonwealth summit in Kampala in November 2007 and the papal visit of November 2015 should have brought out Uganda’s administrative and organisational ability. There was much international prestige at stake.
That these two major international events could take place with months of preparation and yet most roads in Kampala remained dusty, with no street lights and the country could only manage a lacklustre show, demonstrates that there is little that can be done for Uganda.
We are a fourth-grade country both in leadership and the wider society and fourth-grade countries can only produce fourth-grade results, even when they try their best.
For the vast majority of the population, there will be plenty of things to preoccupy their minds other than politics or the general elections.
There will be fees, school and university. This is now the greatest burden on many families, particularly university tuition fees.
Young people will continue to be frustrated by the high youth unemployment rate of 83 per cent and for many who manage to find and hold onto jobs, they are often tedious.
The wages last only a week and a half before being eaten up by personal expenses and then one has to live on debt and hand-outs until the next pay date.
The tens of thousands of small, “moms and pops” businesses will continue finding it harder and harder to run their operations.
Where competition helps improve performance and the overall standard of products and services in countries like Germany, America, Japan and Sweden, in countries like Uganda is devastates society.
Competition and variety destroys faster than it creates in countries where the workforce has low skills and little motivation.
The businesses that produce bottled honey, candles, packed groundnuts and other basics make profit on too small a scale to accumulate capital to expand their premises or buy new machinery, thus remaining virtually hand-to-mouth operations.
Every time a new kiosk or grocery shop is opened in a Kampala, Jinja, Mbarara or Entebbe neighbourhood, it halves the volume of goods sold by the existing shop.
Other than their daily economic struggles, the majority of the Ugandan population will continue to grapple with personal battles and perplexities.
The Kampala print gossip media in its reporting shows that even among the well-to-do and famous in the city, nightmares abound, from failed marriages to infidelity, to rivals stealing their wives or husbands, to spoilt children turning into shisha or drug and alcohol addicts, to their businesses folding in a pile of debt.
Loneliness, unreturned love, boredom, inner emptiness, a lack of real purpose in life can be discerned in the many topics and messages handled by radio stations and on the large Internet social networks such as Facebook and WhatsApp.
If one or two of the aggrieved parties following the election decides to embark on a military campaign such as Museveni and Andrew Kayiira did after 1980, that could decisively change the year.
If none do, then 2016 will roll by as an ordinary year in Ugandan history.
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