Elections
Candidates, Voters and Embarassies

Uganda's elections went according to the standard African formula:
                    political power = guns & money.
So, here some observations less common in newspaper reports.

As a road side advertiser in Uganda you do not only pay the ad-company. You will receive a visit from some well dressed officers kindly informing you about the government tariff on each signpost (they carry the tariff list, printed on a piece of glossy paper). After some friendly treatment with "sodas" or beers they will consider to offer you a firm reduction provided you do agree not to require a receipt. Nobody, school, clinic nor even a group of dwellers that decide their side road is not obvious to find for all and should carry a sign with the street name, is exempted from these less pleasant visits of well dressed men. You pay and secure your right to signal. But then come the elections:

The use of the sign posts you pay the politicians' well dressed cronies for does not include the period of run up to their elections

After the elections, the newly elected local politicians appoint new well dressed men to weighty functions like the said street-signpost-fee-collectors, provided they pay the appointing politician a good bribe for the "job" and sign for a contract the salary of which they are not supposed to collect nor even be offered. Apart from boosting the statistics of Uganda's "employment" rate, the politician's seat allows profitable harvesting, so disappointed election losers never agree they simply lost and always accuse winners of rigging and bribery. And they are always right: the winner has always rigged and bribed - only more or smarter than the looser. But! In this year's election for mayor of Kampala there was something unusual: the electoral committee decided during the election day that rigging and bribery was so rampant among all candidates that the process was cancelled half way and planned to be redone a few weeks later, hoping that on this second attempt at least the winning candidate will succeed to rig&bribe discreetly enough. That hope is not safe to come true: though cheating is every male African's main occupation, yes, passion we can say, and in far higher general esteem than working, they do by far not reach a level of competence in that sport remotely comparable to their counterparts in richer countries. The African cheaters' amusing technical incompetence is well matched by that of the cheated, from the smallest little street thug to the most important politician. A few years ago, for instance,  Uganda parliament hunted in vain for a man who had collected huge sums of money from its members saying that new ministries were on sale. It makes you see more readily than in higher-IQ countries that human societies differ world wide mainly in the degree of sophistication by which on all levels, from bottom to top, the somewhat less smart are manipulated by the slightly smarter. Ugandan society, where there are insufficient brains to centralize corruption as done in modern countries, so corruption is primarily the private business of small first line officers paying, in turn, their own "fees" upward, and so on until the high end of the chain of power, is very comfortable and a revelation to foreigners used to the bureaucratic chains and snares in their home country, because usually their budget is far more than a hundred times the local average, so for a trifle they get and do anything they want. Paradise!

Embassies in Uganda of the richer countries are particularly amusing to observe during local elections. Of course outside election periods one can get, say, an embassy travel advise against going to some region because an unknown and new viral disease raised its scary head, but a few phone calls will readily teach you it is yellow fever, for which you have been vaccinated ten years ago, etc. etc.. Most people do not even make such calls. On the other hand you will notice little energy in your embassy when you are victim of one of those many dangerous smart set ups by private Ugandans in association with government officers to bring you in "official" trouble, shower you with "court" cases and arrests. Most whites long enough in Africa, including myself, have seen the jail bars from behind. Few get, like me, out without discussing the ransom with some kind gentleman (by paying I would have saved me trouble, next time I surely pay). But do not call your embassy, your assailants will even give you your phone back for the purpose. They've seen that before and know that after the disappointing phone call you will pay. Many local laws (like prohibition of pure foreign company and land ownership) have been carefully molded precisely to give locals a foot between the white door to blackmail an extort, the paradigmatic way for Africans, small and big, to progress in life. The main problem of rich country embassies is how to make sure the "aid" money, which everybody knows largely returns to the big black shots' bank accounts at western banks, and gets prudently used there to invest in rich countries - the remaining part filling western high tech industry luxury products books with orders for Mercedes, Toyota Landcruisers, yachts and jets - does so without risks of the "donor" country  being held accountable by its tax payers. But now for the elections! My embassy issues a continuous flow of alarmist mailings about Al Qaeda and Al Shabab threats, and local intertribal riots, adorned with quantified lists of shopping items to hoard. It appoints "bloc heads"   (warden) supplied with state-of-the-art VHF radios. The bloc heads are told, surprisingly, not to be heads of blocs but of "control regions". Then the amused countrymen and women community of every "control region" are invited for a meeting to prepare for the election disaster. As far as I know, all those meetings were subsequently cancelled for lack of interest. What followed was a mail by each of the bloc heads saying that they nevertheless noticed a "wish among many" to informally meet the fellow countrymen and women in the "control region". What resulted from that I do not know. Then, the great election day was marked by an impressive sequence of embassy "situation assessment" emails in format and terms reminding of weather forecasts, adorned with a technical appendix concerning the quality of the VHF connections between the bloc heads. Of course nothing happened at all (except for the cancellation of the Kampala mayor election for cheating by all candidates, and the arrest of a stressed and disappointed Jinja election looser who, starting to realize his discomfiture in the counting  station, had pulled the plugs of the computers saying "I do not longer let you continue rigging these elections").

Well it is true, Uganda is not safe. The proper way to grasp what Uganda looks like is to imagine we evacuate from a western city everyone over 15, while giving guns, ammunition and car keys to the remaining population. Then totally isolate the city for two weeks and keep sending money. But Uganda is not as unsafe as when you would evacuate everyone over 19.