Reply To: How Yoweri Museveni Cheated Elections

[Yoweri Museveni]

It is surprising that as Uganda approaches the February 18, 2016 general elections, there is little insightful reflection on what elections essentially mean in our
body politic.

The simplistic belief is that elections are when people appoint presidents. This upholds the thinking that elections are when local masses can oust and replace presidents.

The question is whether elections are constructed for appointing presidents and whether the foreign powers that imposed elections on Ugandan politics were interested in instrumentalizing the ousting and appointing of presidents.

If it is true that elections are basically for choosing presidents, why is it that it is the Western states and financial institutions that extend credit to Uganda, that are the elections funders and observers?

When a creditor bank enforces company shareholders’ annual general meeting; its interest is not how the AGM appoints company leaders, it is in legitimizing the credit portfolio.

There are types and levels of truths; the wider, epistemological truth is that elections are about voter right to select presidents, but the deeper, ontological truth is that through elections, citizens endorse the public debt, and directly mortgage their country to international creditors.

So, what essentially are these general elections? Elections were not conceived in Uganda; so, whatever Ugandans want the February 18 elections to be, which is to appoint presidents, is subject to what elections were conceived for. The pre-his- tory, genealogy, and history of elections need revisiting.

Summarily, elections pre-history is that 18th century Europe governments borrowed from local banks to operate colonies in North and South America. They lost the colonies and resorted to taxing their local working-class population to pay the public debts.

Eventually, there were several 19th century public uprisings over high taxation. The settlement was universal suffrage general elections around taxation and public debt administration. Western world elections are thus essentially about (public debt) tax policy, and not appointing presidents.

So, Ugandan general elections were instituted not for presidents but for legitimizing taxing of the public – the voters. This is because the modern Uganda state, resembling those in the West, is constructed around public debt capitalism.

Public loans are contracted by the population through participating in the elections of those who receive, disburse and repay the funds. In Uganda, universal suffrage general elections were recommended by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and were followed in 1961 by a World Bank loan.

To access foreign loans, the 1967 parliament revisited the motion that Ugandans did not want elections with one that elections were deferred to 1971.

The deeper reason Obote was to stage elections in 1971 was to access Western loans and the reason Amin did not receive loans was reneging on the coup promise to stage elections.

When Amin was ousted, the Commonwealth Development Fund drew the reconstruction and credit funds plan and demanded elections within two years. When Prof Yusuf Lule was ousted, the elections plan was maintained. When Godfrey Binaisa was ousted, the condition was elections in six months, still within the two years after Amin removal. The NRM/A required the

1989 NRC elections and the dubious 1996 and 2001 Movement System general elections to access Western loans.

Today, Uganda’s external loans portfolio is about Shs 38 million per citizen! This excludes the $21bn-Democratic Republic of Congo-invasion-debt which, if factored in, and the collapse of the anticipated oil revenue also appreciated, would make debt-ridden Uganda bankrupt.

What, therefore, is the import of public loans to this election? One is that the creditors may not want the president who contracted the current Uganda debts to lose. This president is more likely to use repression to impose austerity to service and repay the loans.

It should be appreciated that it is Ugandan foreign creditors that demand elections, send election observers who stop at witnessing mass voter participation, file their reports and depart before the results. Their interest is mass voter turnout.

This explains why such large loan recipient regimes as DR-Congo under Mobutu Sese Seko and Egypt under Hosni Mubarak used to stage universal suffrage elections every five years.

The challenge for Ugandans is not to prefer between the lower truths of elections as voters choosing the president and the higher truths as where shareholders endorse loans acquisition and repayment.

It is for Ugandans to know that their preferred lower truth is not as important in the current electoral process as the higher truth of voting to sink our country deeper into public debt and individual poverty.