Where do Uganda’s parliamentary candidates get money to buy votes?

It is election campaign season in Uganda. Thousands hope to sit in the next parliament. Besides ten army MPs, over 500 will be declared elected as constituency MPs, women representatives, and special interest group representatives. To be among this privileged club is so important that people invest vast amounts of money in their pursuit of admission.

One understands their willingness to raid their personal savings or sell their real estate and other valuable holdings to finance their ambitions. Some seek and receive funding from friends and family, while others get money from internal and external investors. These sponsors expect favourable consideration and support once their candidates win election.

The ego-boost from attaching the title “honourable” to their name is enough reason to fight for the parliamentary seat. The huge salary and luxurious benefits that await the people’s representative is a great motivator. The dream of being appointed to the cabinet is equal in weight to the prospect of access to lucrative business and other personal opportunities. Representing people is very low on the list of priorities.

So, the search for votes is at full speed in this party primaries season. Gifts to individuals and churches are flowing fast. Candidates are issuing promises without telling their constituents where the money to finance their dreams will come from.

Such promises help candidates to deceive their inadequately informed voters that an MP is a service provider, one from whom great things will flow once installed in their seat in parliament. The idea is to create the impression that material bribes of hoes and mattresses, of cash donations at weddings, funerals, and church fundraisers, and of football tournaments for the youth are signs of great things to come.

Beneath the façade of seeking to serve their people is the unspoken central driver of the campaign: “Enable me to become an ‘honourable,’ complete with my tax-payer-funded gas guzzling vehicle and other benefits.” The inadequately informed voter falls for the deception, believing that their life’s struggle will vanish like the dark clouds that precede the glorious days of July.

No doubt a few candidates are driven by an altruistic desire to impactfully serve society and posterity. We all know a few in the current Ugandan parliament who discharge their legislative oversight with exemplary dedication to the truth and transparency.

However, most ruling party MPs excel in sycophancy, merchandising parliamentary support for the executive, and perpetual solicitation for personal gain from the ruler. They are beholden to the ruler and the party, not to those whose votes they bought with cash, booze and other trinkets.

Opposition party MPs are marginally better. They raise legitimate questions and challenges that keep the ruling party alert. However, they too undermine their credibility by participating in the orgy of self-reward of obscenely discrepant salaries and benefits in a country whose professionals earn only a small fraction of what the legislators receive.

Meanwhile, the voters remain oblivious to the real business of parliament. That an MP’s powers are limited to representation, legislation, and oversight is a foreign concept to most Ugandan voters I have spoken with in recent years. To them an MP is the person that they hope will get them something when they are in need. Blank stares greet my request for examples of what the individual has benefitted from the person that bought their vote during the last election. The stunned look on their faces after I explain that their MP’s monthly salary and benefits exceed what is allocated to their Health Centre IV, for example, betrays pitiable naivete.

It is this naivete that parliamentary candidates exploit with the finesse of a seasoned milkman. They bribe voters with cash and other trinkets as though that is the role of a member of parliament. They know that such gimmicks matter. Voters take them very seriously.

I understand that the voters favour candidates who give them money and material bribes. They shun able, bright and committed candidates who offer to discharge their constitutional responsibilities but fail to accompany such messages with alcohol and bribes that are worth less than a dollar.

Commercialised politics is now an entrenched tradition of our country. The competition is now about who gives the largest amount, not one who is best able to eloquently and knowledgeably represent their constituents in parliament.

I have been monitoring the financial investment by candidates in my constituencies in Kigyezi. Some candidates have been spending cash as though the national mint was in their bedrooms.

Where do they get all that money from? Is it all from their savings? Do they have godparents for whom they will be honourable proxies in parliament? Does their spending have a bearing on the legislative positions of the successful candidates? What, besides money and ego, motivates a person to risk everything, including family land and housing, in pursuit of a job as a member of parliament?

The ballot buyer-seller relationship in Uganda has reached a stage that invites scholarly investigation. Studies from other countries have shed light on the subject. An Indonesian study found that campaign money effectively raised the probability of candidates being elected.

A Kenyan study by Karuti Kanyinga and Tom Mboya titled “The Cost of Politics in Kenya” found that the average cost of contesting for a senate seat in 2017 was $350,000. The figure for a candidate for woman MP was $228,000, a constituency MP $182,000, and $31,000 for a member of a county assembly. The Kenyan study found that fewer than 20 percent of the candidates got financial support from their political parties.

Commercialized politics marginalises the financially disadvantaged, discards meritocracy, fosters mediocracy and renders representative democracy a distant dream. It entrenches political corruption and erodes public trust in government.

The citizens are content to receive crumbs from the rulers. The successful MPs seek to recoup their investments through deal-making, corruption, compromise with the executive, and fawning subservience to the ruler. Democracy becomes an imaginary dream for the majority, and a dancing graveyard for the cynical men and women who are contented with watching their voters wallow in social and economic hopelessness.

Buying and selling votes undermine societies. A future government of Uganda, one that is committed to democracy and good governance, will have to establish and enforce campaign finance laws. These should include extensive and sustained public education about rights and responsibilities, strict spending limits for all, including the president, demand for full disclosure of funding sources, and strong penalties for violations of the laws. It is doable. We just need the patience to wait for peaceful transformative change.