{UAH} Pojim/WBK: Elections are coming; time to sing, dance and make money - Comment
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Elections are coming; time to sing, dance and make money
One of the good things to arise out of the reintroduction by President Yoweri Museveni and his government of competitive elections for political office and all the campaigning that precedes them, be it at the national or local level, is the way electioneering enriches the lives of many Ugandans.
I mean enrich in a double sense. One refers to actually putting money into people's pockets. There are, for example, the large number of campaign agents, whose job is to mobilise support for candidates.
These receive money for all kinds of things. For the most part, they are neither supervised in their spending, nor asked to account for the cash.
As a result, local experts in these matters contend, they keep much of the money for themselves. It is claimed that some go on to buy new cars and bicycles, or even build new houses or renovate and enlarge existing ones. In other words, they display signs of enhanced prosperity after the elections have ended.
They are not the only ones who make money out of electioneering. Ordinary voters, too, benefit via the phenomenon of vote buying.
The sums involved may not be large, but at least one can buy a beer, a soda, or a piece of soap or even a kilo of sugar. Occasionally, some may get relatively large sums, if they are lucky.
The other form of enrichment concerns adding a little colour to the otherwise boring lives of some people. Campaign rallies, for example, come complete with music, drinks and merrymaking as politicians move around with musicians who are also well compensated for their troubles. For some members of the public, attending campaign rallies literally amounts to partying.
Campaigns also see long motorcades descending on villages where the main forms of transport are bicycles, motorcycles, lorries and pick-up trucks transporting goods — and walking.
The arrival in poverty-infested villages of these motorcades of large, colourful and expensive vehicles driven by well-dressed members of the political and security elite provides locals with a welcome opportunity to stare at and admire them and, for some, to dream of becoming like them one day.
And so it feeds the aspirations of ambitious villagers to also pursue political careers and get to live the good life.
Even for those who remain aloof from electioneering and possibly loathe politics and all the manoeuvring that characterises it, election seasons bring some benefits. As campaigning for next year's presidential elections picks up, the police are recruiting and training young men in "crime prevention."
Indeed, every time an election is coming up, for some reason the government somehow remembers that crime is a big problem.
And every time, the recruitment, training and deployment of youth for crime prevention is the preferred solution, not the enabling of the police to do their job of keeping law and order. And every time, as soon as the elections end and the winner has been declared, the government's preoccupation with crime diminishes, and the "crime preventers" vanish.
The government and the police say it's all about involving members of the general public in policing their own communities in collaboration with the police.
The potential value of community policing is immense. But only if the police are serious about it and actually get it right.
Consider the goings-on in one crime-infested location of Kampala, from very close to the Central Police Station on Kampala Road, all the way past the Bank of Uganda to Entebbe Road. This area is where Kampala's most skilled mobile phone thieves ply their trade.
A few weeks ago someone I know became a victim. Subsequently, it became clear that most people who work in or frequent this general area are aware of the activities of the young men who snatch phones from their owners and run off.
There is evidence that even police officers are aware of this phenomenon. Reports suggest that some officers can even recognise the thieves. So how do they manage to continue to steal in the same location? This is where it gets really interesting.
Many Kampalans lose their phones in this way. They run to the police to report. Some get them back. Others don't. All, however, pay "tracking fees" in the hundreds of thousands per stolen phone. Thereafter, they may or may never hear back from the police.
An uncanny symbiosis has thus developed between the thieves and agents of the state who should get them off the street. It can't be asking too much to suggest that combating phone theft be outsourced to real crime "preventers."
The decision may make some officers poorer, but many Kampalans will be the happier for it. If it works.
Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: fgmutebi@yahoo.com
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