Why Yoweri Museveni's victory is not a surprise to anyone

By Moses Byaruhanga

The campaigns are finally over and the results for the presidential, parliamentary and local government elections are out with the National Resistance Movement (NRM) having obtained majority support in all the three. This is not surprising. All the opinion polls before the elections were clear that President Yoweri Museveni would win. Even the opposition and their supporters both local and foreign were aware about this. So they had concluded that in order to defeat the NRM, they had to sponsor one presidential candidate.

The talks in The Democratic Alliance (TDA) were basically framed on the principle that no one individual opposition candidate could defeat Museveni. This is known by the opposition people who participated in TDA talks and those foreign forces who sponsored them to the extent of holding some of the meetings in Europe. Why were Europeans interested in organising the opposition? They have never offered to help  the NRM as a party.

This brings me to the report by the EU election observer team. It was unfortunate but not surprising because the same people were involved in sponsoring the TDA talks to ensure that the opposition fielded one candidate against Museveni. So the European Union (EU) team was already biased.  You can imagine having a referee who supports one of the teams! He would do his best to favour his team. So they had to make a statement a few hours before the Electoral Commission (EC) announced the results.

Their statement was inciting. They said that the EC was not independent and therefore the results should not be respected! If the people had taken to streets as had been planned by the opposition, the EU would have been partly responsible.

Fortunately, the NRM has built a strong state. The security system had already got wind of it and the plans were nipped in the bud. Others said that the elections did not meet international standards. Well, our malaria, poverty, per capita income, level of industrialisation, etc,  also do not meet international standards but Uganda is progressing steadily.

There were some regrettable incidents like the late delivery of polling materials in Kampala and Wakiso but that should not be reason enough to condemn the whole process. This late delivery of election materials affected all the candidates. Some groups have been arguing that the late delivery of the materials in Kampala was because it is the opposition stronghold and therefore the action was meant to benefit Museveni. That argument is not logical.

First, we need to agree on the definition of a stronghold. If it is based on the number of supporters, Museveni defeated Besigye in Wakiso in 2011. In the case of Kampala, Besigye defeated Museveni with 3,800 votes in 2011. However, even when Museveni lost Kampala in 2011 by that narrow margin, Kampala is the district where Museveni obtained the highest number of votes in 2011, 2006 and 2001.

Even in the recent election, Kampala came third for Museveni in terms of highest number of votes obtained in a district. The first five are Kibaale with 176,339, Wakiso 172,129, Kampala 157,098, Mubende 143,801 and Kabale 132,047. So Kampala and Wakiso are also strongholds for Museveni as well.

In fact for Museveni the whole country is his stronghold because if you look at our old regions, he won in Buganda with 52%, Ankole 74.8%, Kigezi 64.6%, Toro/Rwenzori 69.7%, Bunyoro 76.3%, West Nile 63.5%, Lango 50.7%, Karamoja 91.4%, Teso 52%, Bukedi 53.2%, Sebei 72.5%, Bugisu 55% and Busoga 64.9%. He only lost marginally in Acholi with 41% and Besigye obtained 42% and the others shared out the 17%.

If you analyse the parliamentary and the local government elections you will arrive at the same conclusion. Areas like Kampala and Wakiso are important for the NRM because even if Besigye wins there,  the NRM also wins by getting a lot of votes from those areas as seen above. Therefore, no one from the NRM would have planned for the late arrival of materials in Kampala and Wakiso because those are Museveni's strongholds as he gets many votes from those areas.

The other criticism by the opposition has been that the results were being announced by Dr. Badru Kiggundu without indicating  which district they were coming from and that by the time Museveni was announced as the winner, some of the polling stations from the Besigye strongholds had not come in.

I am not the EC's spokesperson but the electoral process should be known to all. Each candidate is entitled to two polling agents at every polling station. When voting is completed and votes have been counted, the results of all the candidates are entered in the Results Declaration Form commonly known as the DR. The  DR is signed by all the agents and a copy is given to a candidate through the agents.

When an agent refuses to sign in case they are not satisfied with the results or the process leading to the results,  the agent is allowed to give reasons why. The reasons are entered on the DR. This is very important. A candidate is supposed to collect their DRs so that they also tally their results just in case the EC announces wrong results.

Furthermore, voting is supposed to start at 7:00am by the polling officials first opening the ballot box in the presence of the agents and any voters around. In the case of Kampala and Wakiso, where unfortunately voting started late, nobody can claim ballot-stuffing with pre-ticked votes because the voting materials arrived when the voters were already in the line.

Furthermore, there is a tally centre at the district where every candidate is entitled to representation by two agents. If a candidate is well organised like candidate Museveni, the agents at the district tally centre should have a summary of the results from all the polling stations in the district so that by the time the district tally is made, the results from the EC at the district are not different from the ones his candidate's agents have. If there is a discrepancy, the agent should refuse to sign the tallied results at the district and give reasons why. It is the results from the district tally centres that are sent to the national tally centre at Namboole for Kiggundu to announce.

If Kiggundu announced wrong results, let any of the seven candidates disprove him with the results they obtained from their agents at every polling station. All the candidates have been furnished with a soft copy of the results from every station. Let them crosscheck with their DRs and carry out their tally just in case Kiggundu's computers had a virus.

Otherwise if they have nothing to say let them shut their mouths. There are those who have been adding the percentages of all the candidates, including the invalid votes and the percentage goes to 104% and then they say that the numbers do not add up. This has been going on on TV by people one expects to know better. The law is clear in section 57 (4) of the presidential elections Act. The percentages only refer to the valid votes cast excluding the invalid ones. Journalists should make the rounds on TV and other media do research and guide their audiences with facts.

The writer is a senior Presidential adviser on political affairs