Pure Good Governance

Every candidate has mastered one thing; the understanding that the main way to succeeding in elections is to make fantastic promises. And indeed, on the campaign trail, candidates are busy making all sorts of promises – to heal the sick and raise the dead; to build bridges even where there are no rivers!  Little wonder someone once said, the routine political promise is like a piece of Mary Poppins pastry: easily made, easily broken!   To date, streams of broken political promises have continued to upset significant portions of the electorate not only in Uganda but everywhere around the globe.  The electorate’s distress can only be seen through the apathetic reaction to political processes – the declining number of people queuing up at polling stations is one of those indicators.    While past performance is not always a certain indicator of future performance, a previous, solid track record of delivering on promises made during campaigns sho...

A couple of days ago, a colleague reminded me that even the 1996 general election that has gone down in our books of history as a relatively peaceful election had streaks of violent incidents.   One of the presidential candidates then, Paul Kawanga Semogerere was stoned by citizens in one of the districts in western Uganda where he had gone to campaign.   It was in that same election where another presidential candidate warned the electorate on the possibility of returning to the deadly days of Obote if ‘they didn’t vote for him’ – talk about psychological intimidation. Since the 1996 elections, the face and structure of violence in elections has fundamentally metamorphosed.   The 2001 and 2006 elections have been recorded as Uganda’s most violent elections.   Election observers reported several cases of government-sponsored violence, with the largest number of incidents being directed towards supporters of the opposition candidates. Political rallies and meeti...