What NRM did not learn from 1980 general election

A voter destroys polling material in Kampala following the late delivering of ballot papers on February 18. As it happened in this election, there was the tactic of the late opening and early closing of polling stations in 1980. PHOTO BY MICHAEL KAKUMIRIZI 

Firstly, we should take pride in our people, who once again displayed a remarkable faith in the idea of choosing their government. Once again, they went largely unrewarded, except perhaps at the level of local government.

Despite the failure to at least hide what they have done, members of the ruling NRM party are still trying to “sell” what happened last week as not just genuine, but also “normal”.
They are now a mirror image of the many stalwarts of the Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC) party who still insist in referring to their 1980-1985 effort as “the elected government”.
This is where the trouble lies.

The NRM’s root justification for being in power is the outcomes of the 1980 election. And today, many in UPC cite the NRM’s current electoral conduct to “prove” that it must have been telling lies in 1980.

In his February 13 Daily Monitor opinion piece, UPC special envoy Joseph Ochieno persevered with this point.

The basic argument is that a few power-hungry individuals began an armed rebellion against a perfectly legitimate authority, and that the current illegalities of those now victorious rebels is a direct result of them never having had a valid political point to begin with.

First of all, we should always remember that the NRA was in fact just one of six different rebel armies that went up against the 1980 UPC regime. Their reasons were many, and they were not all in agreement with even one another.

By trying to narrow the anti-Obote rebellions down to the actions, character and outcomes of the NRA’s particular war, Mr Ochieno tries to cleverly discredit the entire rebellion by focusing on one of its worst examples.

Just because the NRM has become the phenomenal election-rigging machine that we see today, does not mean that the 1980 elections were not also rigged, and that therefore the rebellions were not justified. There is a disingenuous trick of logic in trying to say otherwise.

In fact, this is why the advent of the NRM regime has been the better outcome for the UPC, than say, DP finally taking power, since NRM now has as much to hide about vote stealing, as does the UPC.

It is these “managed histories” that remain a blind spot in our national political discourse, and why an election year in Uganda is always the occasion for political crisis.

Each scheduled election year since independence: 1966/67, 1970/71, 1974, 1979/80, and 1985/86, saw the vote replaced by a violent change of power, or just crisis.

1966 became the year the Independence coalition government fell apart, and prime minister Milton Obote used the military to make himself president.

The army commander of that violent putsch – one General Idi Amin – was to then use the same means to make himself president by ousting Obote in 1971.

The honeymoon period of Amin’s government ended in 1974, with the intelligentsia he had gathered around himself abandoning him to his ways, which is where the Tanzanian invasion found him, and drove him out in 1979.

The crisis of the 1980 election eventually led to Obote’s army commanders throwing him out in 1985. They too were to then be ousted in early 1986, by the rebel armies they had sought to make peace with.