Nairobi — For 33 years now, queues have played an important part in the lives of Ugandans. It all started in September 1972 when the man who was then custodian of the national vision, Idi Amin, had a dream while touring eastern Uganda: He had expelled all the Asians of Uganda, then numbering some 80,000, and the black people had become happy and prosperous - in the dream.

He woke up and implemented the dream, swiftly killing off the country's industrial capacity and the formal trade sector.

A critical shortage of essential commodities ensued, and the public could only get their hands on things like sugar, salt and soap by queuing up for rationed supplies. Amin had fierce military governors in the provinces who were fond of displays of rough justice like making a thick gruel of salt in a bucket and forcing traders who hoarded goods to drink it up.

OTHER INVISIBLE queues emerged, like those for civil servants to buy cars imported by the government; queues to buy beer and soda for wedding parties; and the famous one at the central bank for purchasing foreign exchange. After Amin himself was expelled in April 1979, the queues for essentials broke down for about a week as citizens were allowed to loot whatever his army had been hoarding in the stores.

Then the shortages returned and the government was back in the business of organising queues. One of the nation's short-lived leaders in 1980 organised queues for university students to buy cheap shoes. The man who took the nation's helm late in 1980 and held it until July 1985 enlisted the ideas of the World Bank and IMF to create two queues.

People in a hurry could queue at the second window and pay higher prices while the patient and privileged ones would queue at the first window and pay the so-called government price. After 1986, the queues for essential commodities were managed by local councillors until they were allowed to die out as everybody was sent to the fast queue, where commodities were sold at the market price. But soon, other queues followed. Ugandans started voting for their leaders and the country was too poor to print ballot papers and buy ballot boxes.

To vote for a leader up to parliament, people had to line up behind the candidates. These election queues were transparent but also had problems. Councillors in the electoral college who had received "facilitation" from candidates did not know how to vote if they did not believe in their facilitators.

Others whose spouses were candidates also faced uncomfortable questions from the public if they lined up behind a different candidate. Some candidates are said to have fainted on glancing over their shoulder and seeing the length of the opponents' queues. But eventually, the country moved on to secret ballot voting, and these problems were eliminated.

BUT THE secret ballot did not accompany pluralism at first, and anybody aspiring to lead Uganda had to wait in a secret queue, and hope that when the current leader got tired of ruling, they would get a chance. And so when one impatient soldier cum doctor called Kizza Besigye in 2000 declared his intention to take up the chalenge, he was condemned for jumping the queue by those who claimed to be standing ahead of him.

Since then, politicians and observers have been trying to identify the people in the queue, the positions they occupy and the length of the queue. However, a constitutional amendment has allowed the mounting of parallel queues, and Besigye was at the head of one of them when he was taken away to cool down at the breezy Luzira campus of the University of Understanding (for many years, the number plates of prison vehicles in Uganda read UU). But not before his return from a four-year South African exile had triggered the longest queues for voter registration the country has ever seen.

Besigye returned a couple of days before the deadline for registering voters for next year's general election and suddenly, millions of people who had had no interest in voting rushed to get registered. Were the fresh queues full of people who want Besigye to take the leadership? Only a fair election can reveal the answer.

Joachim Buwembo is managing editor of The Monitor of Kampala.