Six months ago, when the world was just catching onto the horrors and indignities that nearly two million of our compatriots in northern Uganda suffer daily in the cruelly misnamed "protected villages," Museveni's administration tried its best to downplay the true scale of their misery.

Even after independent surveys and news reports turned the spotlight on the shocking number of deaths and the magnitude of the 20-year suffering of these Ugandans erased from the political balance sheet, their circumstances have barely changed.

Just last week, a new report, released by a coalition of nongovernmental organisations, says that at least 131 residents of the death camps perish every week.

"There are 918 excess deaths each week," the Civil Society Organisations for Peace in Northern Uganda (CSOPNU) said, according to IRIN (UN Integrated Regional Information Networks) . "Each month almost 25,000 people in Uganda die from easily preventable diseases."

According to IRIN, other grim statistics from the report include: a quarter of a million children incarcerated in those squalid camps have never received any education; each day about 58 children under the age of five die as a result of violence and preventable diseases; and a quarter of all children in the region older than ten years has lost one or both parents.

"Nearly half of all children in Kitgum, northern Uganda are stunted from chronic malnutrition," IRIN quotes the report. "Three times more children under five years die in northern Uganda than in the rest of the country."

The so-called protected villages are a national man-made tragedy that cries to be addressed immediately. But lately, debate over the Biblical proportions of the suffering there has degenerated into whether Olara Otunnu was right or wrong in claiming that genocide is being committed against the Acholi, who comprise most of the population in the 200-plus camps.

Even the fresh news of how little has changed under those infernal conditions is buried under a mudslide of media coverage focused on election candidates making political hay out of peripheral issues.

This, right here, is a powerful indictment of the wrong priorities of our government and nearly all of those vying to control the levers of power. If elections are not won or lost in the fight for the millions of those who have missed out on the much ballyhooed peace and stability ushered 20 years ago, what is the point of going through the motions of a barren exercise?

When you look back 20 years, examples of grand theft, incompetence, nepotism, and political skulduggery stretches as far as the eye can see.

How we can proceed with any meaningful nation-building without a major shake up of the establishment after scandals such as the Global Fund thefts that implicate senior government officials; the crass military assault on the judiciary; and the near total collapse of the energy sector?

Unless pushed, President Yoweri Museveni's administration is far too comfortable wallowing in the mud to do anything about cleaning the sty. To put it plainly, on multiple counts, this government has lost every moral legitimacy it ever had to be in power.

For example, the main reason that the NRM/A gave for waging a deadly guerrilla war was the rigging of elections in 1980. We now have enough evidence, thanks in part to the remarkable special report by Daily Monitor's Andrew Mwenda and Daniel Kalinaki, to show that Milton Obote's henchmen were altar boys compared to NRM's arch priests of vote theft.

On a not-so-Quick Note: Tip O'Neill, a now deceased former U.S. House Speaker, is credited with the quip that "all politics is local." But Nyatiuhwe, a great grand matriarch from Ramogi, my mother's clan, may have preceded him in underlining the importance of bringing the bacon home.

"Jo ma'di kenya ana ta juruga kendre izua mani ri ka ma aa rere," she famously said. That loosely translates as, "when those who eat the kill in foreign lands come home to tell me the story of their exploits, all I feel is a stomach ache."

The consensus among the Ma'di people is that no politician, dead or alive, has done more to bring the bacon home than the late Felix Kenyi Onama. Much of the socio-economic infrastructure in our ancestral land, including a hospital, dispensaries, schools, roads, and water wells, are the fruits from his era. And that was 35 years ago. Ever since, the Ma'di people (who are now split into two constituencies) have been short-changed by nearly every succeeding administration.

Things reached their lowest point when our economy and society was totally destroyed during the 1980's in a war that forced many, including myself, to flee empty handed to Sudan. We have yet to recover from the traumatic effects of that brutal war. So, Thursday's election for us will be about who among the politicians lined up have the integrity, ability, and yes, actual or potential political framework, to help us rapidly make up for all the lost years.