Prime
The charade that is our multiparty system
What you need to know:
- System. Uganda uses a political system that seems to work only for politicians—and donors who bring in money fix one or two minor political problems and then claim they are improving governance.
There are only a couple of months left before we bid 2019 farewell, and once 2020 sets in, the political temperature in Uganda is going to rise significantly. There will be few things to talk about apart from politics. After all, few things excite Ugandans more than politics. Newspaper headlines will, for the most part, be about politics. News and current affairs shows on many TV and radio stations will also be about politics as the country moves closer to 2021, the date for the next election.
The problem is that we are going to be excited about things we really should not be excited about. Many things are already foregone conclusions. Ugandans know, for example, who the next president will be. Yoweri Museveni knows who the next president will be. Ugandans know the party that will have the majority in Parliament. They know that after election results are announced by the Electoral Commission, some candidates will dispute the outcome. They know that there will be election petitions. They know that there will be violence, some of it possibly claiming lives. And they damn sure know that there will not be real change—for the better.
Uganda has been a multiparty democracy for more than 13 years. The governing NRM continues to consolidate its grip on power, which it has held for 33 years. Four Opposition parties are represented in Parliament, but they have as much chance of taking power as someone looking for glaciers in a desert because of steep odds stacked against them. In fact, the Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy (NIMD), which promotes good governance around the world, says “Uganda still has a de-facto one-party dominant political system and a polarised political landscape”.
Uganda uses a political system that seems to work only for politicians—and donors who bring in money fix one or two minor political problems and then claim they are improving governance. Ordinary voters do not know how the multiparty system works. And this raises a pertinent question about whether political leaders chosen under this system can cater to the interests of people who elect them.
In 2018, NIMD introduced what it calls the Political Party Capacity Strengthening Project (PPCSP). The project, funded by the Democratic Governance Facility (DGF), a consortium of European Union (EU) nations with diplomatic missions in Uganda, is intended to make political parties vibrant.
In the eyes of NIMD, the real parties are those with representatives in Parliament—the NRM, FDC, UPC, DP and JEEMA. The rest — the Alliance for National Transformation (ANT), the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), the People’s Development Party (PDP), the Conservative Party (CP) and the Uganda Federal Alliance—are not parties and are barely known.
But for those existing parties, there are serious problems. NIMD says “parties largely rely on the appeal of their leaders rather than the strength of their policies” and “face internal divisions and lack accountability and internal democracy”. That is pretty damning.
While the government can be blamed for using security forces to block or break up rallies organised by parties—part of the reason party officials cannot reach out to voters and talk about their policies—it cannot be blamed for the parties’ lack of accountability and internal democracy. The parties have themselves to blame for this.
Worse, the parties have had difficulty democratising internally, and strengthening their capacity (even by foreigners from well-established democracies) still pose major challenges. Uganda has few voters who are educated and are able to read manifestos of political parties and their constitutions. The vast majority of voters are either modestly educated or semi-literate.
The upshot of this is that voters do not have close ties with existing political parties because they do not know what the parties do. They do not contribute funds to enable parties to finance their activities and programmes.
Parties barely know their members as they do not have updated members’ registers. Apart from the NRM and the FDC, other parties do not even have websites. What’s more, party members do not have any form of identification.
There is total confusion about how parties work. The party in power and individual politicians both in the Opposition and in the government are making the most of this confusion. But voters are getting nothing.
The writer is a journalist and former Al Jazeera digital editor in charge of the Africa desk
[email protected]
@kazbuk
