{UAH} GONE WITH DEMOCRACY - IF AT ALL EXISTED: Govt takes over new voters’ register
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12:06 PM |
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President Museveni (L) to head the programme and Nyakairima to work as the national coordinator of the registration
Sources told The Observer that Stephen Kagoda, the ministry's permanent secretary, told a three-day retreat of Parliament's committee on Defence and Internal Affairs today, that government had decided to centralize the registration to cut costs.
"Cabinet refused the idea of Uganda Bureau of Statistics (Ubos) and the Electoral Commission each carrying out a separate registration as it is costly yet they are all collecting similar data," Kagoda reportedly said at Imperial Resort Beach hotel in Entebbe.
Collection of data for different uses is, therefore, being consolidated into one programme, the Mass Registration Programme (MSP), overseen by the ministry of Internal Affairs. It will include preparation of a new voters' register and issuance of IDs that will work as voters' cards in 2016.
Gen Aronda Nyakairima, the Internal Affairs minister, his deputy James Baba, Kagoda, and other officials took the MPs through the details of the new programme. It begins on January 14 2014 with registration of all citizens above the age of 15.
Baba said enrolment centres would be opened up at parish level in the country. Bigger parishes, he said, would have more than one enrolment centre.
The target of the programme is to register at least 18 million people that government believes constitute the proportion of the population that is 15 years and above.
Kagoda explained that the reason this age bracket has been selected is because it is being targeted for electoral purposes. For instance, he said, children aged 16 and 17 today will be eligible to vote in 2016 as they will be above 18 years.
The officials told the MPs that the Electoral Commission would be handed this data a year later (on January 15, 2015) to extract a voters' register for the 2016 elections.
Ubos will, on the other hand, be handed this data around much earlier (August 2014) for purposes of conducting a population census. The spokesperson of the EC, Jotham Taremwa, said the ministry had not hijacked their powers but, rather, the two institutions were working together.
"We have been working together with the ministry on this programme and I don't see any harm in us [EC] extracting the voters register from the data generated for national IDs," Taremwa said.
Opposition protests
But sources told us that the opposition MPs on the committee protested against the programme, arguing that the process had been monopolized by the cabinet.
President Museveni, according to information supplied by the ministry, shall be the overall head of the programme. Nyakairima is the national coordinator of this registration. Sources told us that Ssemujju Nganda, the Kyadondo East MP, asked Aronda and Baba to explain why "a perennial candidate twice dragged to court for rigging elections had been put at the helm of this registration."
Baba insisted that political parties would be involved at the stage at which the EC gets involved in the exercise. Other opposition MPs who raised queries are Muwanga Kivumbi (Butambala), and Fungaroo Hassan Kaps (Obongi).
The Inspector General of Police, Gen Kale Kayihura, the Prisons Commissioner General John Byabashaija and the commissioner for Immigration, Godfrey Sasagah, attended the retreat.
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