15 February 2002
editorial
Yesterday's LC 5 elections were marred by violence in the run-up and during the polls. Candidates have been killed, and there was massive deployment of the army over a wider area than even in the disputed presidential polls last year in March.
The worst cases of violence happened not in the handful of places where the ruling Movement candidates were battling it out with opposition multipartyists, but in races involving Movementist against Movementist.
We also continued to see cases of government security agents abducting MPs and their supporters if they were not backing the "right" candidate.
The justification for the ban on free multiparty politics for the last 16 years has been that parties are divisive and breed violence. However the level of violence and election theft seen under the "no party" Movement system where people run purportedly on "individual merit" is worse than anything seen in the previous multiparty elections in 1961, 1962, and December 1980.
In other words violence and divisive politics have not been eliminated under the Movement system. It has increased. While the Movement can claim credit for several social and economic improvements, the evidence is that it has failed to qualitatively change the character of politics.
What is lacking is a tradition of tolerance, and living with competition. The only way we can develop this tradition is by practicing it over and over. Secondly, we need to have formal political organizations that can call their supporters in line.
This means the present monolithic politics needs to be relaxed to allow more free competition within the Movement itself instead of its secretariat or President Yoweri Museveni picking one candidate and telling the rest to stand down. Secondly, and more substantially, we need to open up the political space to allow parties to operate freely, field candidates, and hold them accountable for the conduct of their candidates and supporters.
Unless the country learns to live with adversarial politics, which can only come from practicing it frequently, it will never get rid of violence in elections. The Movement arrangement is now only fanning, not reducing it.
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