I am often taken aback when people talk about democracy, here. They talk of all types of it, like: electoral democracy, Parliamentary democracy, popular democracy, and so on and so forth. In truth we have tried to adopt Western democracy and perverted its practice to what is no longer recognizable as democracy
Take the recent LC 1 elections. The idea is that we practice transparency in the mode of the choice of our leaders at that level. What happened is actually warnings and threats against the people. The GISOS and DISOS were on hand to order the people whom to line behind to; failure to do it would attract dire consequences. And in the village setting this is very obvious. But even in the national setting, Arua has shown how obvious it is!
Or, the Election Register, the ballot boxes and the voting, itself. There is no credibility in any of these. At every point the whole process is mangled to assure one result; the choosing of the preferred candidate. It is meaningless to even register to vote, because, either your ballot will be counted on the person you did not vote for, or it is simply stuffed into where you have not intended.
If all that fails, the result is simply announced completely contrary to the tallying of the votes. We should no longer talk of democracy. Our system of rule is: Chwezicracy; or some other such name, in line with some politicians’ admiration for the 16th Century Chwezi dynasty, noted for its extreme political bestiality. We have completely failed the essence of democracy as we should have adopted it from our Colonial masters.
Assasira Atuzaliirwe, Ibanda
