On Friday, the High Court in Uganda nullified the election of the Minister of Defence, Amama Mbabazi, citing vote stealing, violence and a quite shocking list of poll mischief.

The ruling against Mbabazi, following a petition filed by his rival businessman James Musinguzi, didn't catch many people by surprise. In nearly all the election petitions brought against people who are ministers or were backed by President Yoweri Museveni and the ruling Movement, the courts have mostly returned the verdict that the elections were stolen.

Even in the petition by Museveni's rival, exiled Col Dr Kizza Besigye, all the judges agreed that the Museveni camp and the Electoral Commission swindled and botched up the election.

The majority, however, held that there wasn't evidence that the theft margin was large enough to alter the president's ultimate victory.

After every election, Ugandans ask: "Why hold elections if you don't want them to be fair or someone to run against you?" The question is never answered. The next election is held, and rigged.

Students who were at the university and were election officials in the polls that led to independence in 1962 say there was cheating. Since that time, every subsequent universal adult suffrage election by secret ballot has been worse than the previous one. Also, it has been more violent.

One reason for this is that the political elite of all colours and stripes has never really had credibility as people's representatives. The main criticisms facing Museveni's government, like all previous ones, are three. One is that it is corrupt. Second, that it is tribalistic. Third, that he and his henchmen are "power hungry".

Governments never get criticised much over things like their banking laws, industrial policy, tax strategy and the environment. Because the attacks are personal and paint politicians as crooks and vampires sucking the peoples' blood, elections are rarely seriously about present and future policy. They are some kind of old tribal cleansing ceremony. By winning it, leaders hope to come out pure, as if they had performed some naked dance around a dead leopard in the forest to rid themselves of bad spirits as in the days of old.

With this mindset, elections get very personal, and an opponent is viewed as if he or she is the agent of the rival witchdoctor.

In Uganda, the ruling Movement system, which combines the party, government, and civil community into one state organ, has so many people employed in politics that about every 20 Ugandans are represented by a politician.

President Museveni's outspoken and volatile senior political adviser, Maj Kakooza Mutale, was remarkably frank when he appeared recently before a parliamentary committee probing the 2001 election violence.

He said President Museveni and the Movement will not give up or lose power any time soon because the present brand of politics has turned into the largest employer in the country. He said there are over 600,000 politicians elected through the Movement machinery, and if one considers the mouths they feed, they are not about to go hungry by not supporting the present set up.

Mutale was correct, of course. And that is the problem. If you have nearly a million Uganda Movement politicians, and consider that about four voters eat from the hands of each of them, that makes it about four million mouths - half of the eight million voters. The Movement, ideally, wouldn't even have to campaign to win elections with that number. Yet, not only does it campaign, it beats, threatens opponents and steals votes in a big way. This suggests that the present ban on free politics has successfully hidden a deep political crisis.

No one is sure when these frustrations will erupt. What nearly everyone knows is that it will have an ugly head indeed when it does.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Editor of The Monitor newspaper of Uganda.

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