/ 10 May 1996

Dark past haunts Ugandan election

Uganda’s president is waging an election campaign based not on economic prosperity and greater freedom, but on the country’s bloody past, writes Chris McGreal in Kampala

YOWERI MUSEVENI, unlike most African presidents, has a record to run on. Campaigning for this week’s presidential election, Uganda’s leader could point to economic prosperity, greater social freedoms and, for the traditionally minded, the restoration of kingdoms wrecked during the years of terror. But you would never know it from his election adverts.

Under a large photograph of dozens of skulls and bones lined beside a mass grave, one poster delves into Uganda’s dark history.

“Don’t forget the past: Over one million Ugandans, our brothers, sisters, family and friends, lost their lives. YOUR VOTE COULD BRING IT BACK,” it blares.

Another of Museveni’s adverts claims that the opposition is a front for the exiled former president, Milton Obote, who oversaw one of the bloodiest periods in Ugandan history.

The opposition derides the posters as a scare tactic. But amid concern in the Museveni camp that the election may not be a walkover after all, the president’s campaign has found some success in playing on fears that the most precious of his achievements might be lost.

Museveni can claim to have shaped a new country in the decade since his National Resistance Army put an end to a series of despotic regimes. Economic reform has spurred growth, built a new middle class and won money from Western aid donors. Although party politics is still banned, Ugandans generally enjoy greater freedoms than they have ever known. And, most importantly, the terror of late night knocks on the door, torture cells and wholesale murder which marked the years of Idi Amin and Obote are history.

Or Ugandans thought they were.

Museveni has raised the ugly possibility of their return should his main rival, Paul Ssemogerere, win the election. No one suggests that Ssemogerere is a despot. He served as Museveni’s prime minister before quitting the government in protest at the continuing ban on party politics.

But the Museveni campaign claims that an opposition victory would lift the lid on ethnic, regional and religious rivalries which it says tore the country apart and have been kept under control only by proscribing multiparty politics.

It points to the strong ethnic undertones which have emerged during campaigning, the threats of violence by some of Ssemogerere’s cronies if he loses and, above all, to the opposition’s shaky coalition of former rivals, including Obote’s party. “A vote for Ssemogerere is a vote for Obote,” one of Museveni’s adverts warns.

Eryra Kategaya, chief political commissar of the governing National Resistance Movement, dismisses the charge of scare tactics.

“There’s no way our campaign could have failed to raise these issues which are tribal. Unfortunately in Africa I don’t think politicians learn much from their history,” he said.

Nonetheless, the adverts appeared only after the polls started to show that Museveni could not take victory for granted even if he has remained the firm favourite throughout the six-week campaign.

Not all Ugandans are as grateful as their president might hope. Some among the rising middle class are demanding greater political freedom. Others have seen the opportunities for further success blocked by patronage, often based on ethnicity. And then there are those who have been shunted aside. Two hundred thousand civil servants have been dismissed. Those still in work earn a fraction of private sector wages. Tens of thousands of demobilised soldiers are living on the breadline.

To some extent the security issue has also played in Ssemogerere’s favour. He has seized on Museveni’s failure to put down a bloody rebellion in northern Uganda by the Christian fundamentalist Lord’s Resistance Army. While the president repeats old promises, somewhat ineffectually, to crush the rebels, Ssemogerere preaches conciliation.

“For too long the people of Uganda have suffered under the gun. For 20 years too many people have been the victims of war. I want a mandate to end all fighting,” he said at a rally.

But on the whole Museveni’s campaign adverts would appear to be working for him, particularly in a key electoral battleground – – among the people of Buganda.

Although Ssemogerere is from Buganda, his links to Obote appear to have stung him not only because of the exiled president’s bloody record but because he also abolished the Buganda kingdom. Museveni has since restored the throne.