CNN Insight

A Close Election In Uganda

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

JONATHAN MANN, INSIGHT (voice-over): He's triumphed over his enemies. Now he takes on a friend. Ugandan leader Yoweri Museveni runs a close race for re-election against a once-trusted comrade in arms.

(on camera): Hello, and welcome.

There aren't a lot of African leaders with reputations to rival Yoweri Museveni's. His country is stable. Its economy is growing, and its upcoming election, though already flawed, will apparently be real. So real, his opponent is publicly optimistic about winning it.

On our program today - a good close one in Uganda.

President Museveni has often been described as a new kind of African leader. Groomed in the ways of war, he has achieved the nearly unthinkable - turning his country into an economic star in Africa. It's been a remarkable transition.

(voice-over): Mr. Museveni first emerged in the public eye as the founder of the Front for National Salvation, the group that overthrew Idi Amin. After a stint in the next government, he fell out with the administration and formed the national resistance army that took power in 1986.

Uganda has become something of an economic powerhouse since then, averaging an annual growth of 6.4 percent in the last decade. His commitment to free markets and privatization has won him praise from Western capitals.

(on camera): Catherine Bond now on the president and his campaign to stay in office.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CATHERINE BOND, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Despite evident popularity among supporters here, Museveni faces one of the stiffest challenges to his long political career. Many predicting next week's presidential election could be close. Another candidate, Kizza Besigye drawing equally large crowds in the south and north, where 15 years of war and insecurity have made Museveni unpopular.

So if Museveni, who captured power in a takeover, loses, will he step down?

YOWERI MUSEVENI, UGANDAN PRESIDENT: I will not lose the elections. So that is completely academic. But of course, (inaudible) why not?

BOND: At this rally, people want him in, not out.

(on camera): Who are you voting for in the election - Museveni or somebody else?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Museveni.

BOND: They say he has transformed Uganda.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (inaudible).

BOND: The economy and education are key issues. The real vote winner - Museveni's making the first seven years of schooling free.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Of course, as (inaudible) in the country, peace in the country then (inaudible) education in the country, and so many others.

BOND: Free education in high school as well is what many want next. And higher public salaries.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That is the main (ph) thing because we earn very little money. We do a lot of work. We are exposed to a lot of risk.

BOND: With Museveni still ahead in opinion polls and Besigye behind, some voters want Museveni to complete his task of modernizing Uganda. But others, someone new to build on his legacy.

(on camera): Whether Museveni wins or not, few here deny that in 15 years, he's changed Uganda mostly for the better - with the exception perhaps of life for people in parts of the north of the country.

Catherine Bond, CNN, Pallisa, Uganda.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: The challenger, Kizza Besigye, shares a lot in common with Mr. Museveni.

(voice-over): Like the president, Besigye is from western Uganda. He fought alongside Mr. Museveni, serving as the director of medical services for the national resistance army and as Mr. Museveni's personal physician.

Here, once again, is Catherine Bond.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BOND (voice-over): The man who wants to be Uganda's new president Kizza Besigye, a medical doctor and retired colonel. Dr. Besigye's CV includes a string of top jobs under Uganda's president for 15 years, Yoweri Museveni, though now he's competing against him.

Dr. Besigye has emerged a surprisingly strong contender, the candidate from within who has shaken things up and drawn huge crowds. But an opinion poll, which placed Besigye and Museveni only 4 percentage points apart a few weeks ago now says Dr. Besigye's popularity has slipped.

KIZZA BESIGYE, UGANDAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: You ought to be very careful about the opinion polls made here. So far in every place I've been in, talking about intimidation. There is a lot of violence against our supporters. People who take opinion polls, and they just go and ask, "Whom will you support in the next election?" Those who support us will not say that they will support us.

BOND: So what do voters want? In this coffee-growing area, more cash for their crops, more jobs, fewer taxes and better public schools.

Drumming up support for Dr. Besigye, people say they will be voting for him not because they disagree with Mr. Museveni's policies, but...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Because there are some things which he promised to put in a practice, but they have not been put in.

BOND: Dr. Besigye has his own long list of promises. Among them to abolish the small, but unpopular graduated tax. He also says he will double teachers' pay, sell the presidential jet and fight corruption.

So however popular here, this former mayor campaigning for him served time in a U.S. prison for fraud. But Besigye's political assets include an otherwise untarnished record, and his wife - something of a Hillary Clinton - Winnie (ph) is both the power behind the scenes and a politician in her own right.

So is this winsome couple a winning formula?

(on camera): Though it 's been a close race so far, an opinion poll has put Dr. Besigye a full 12 percentage points behind President Museveni - a gap, which if accurate, could prove difficult to close.

Catherine Bond, CNN, Kampala.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: Joining us now to talk about the contenders and the contest is Vincent Magombe, director of Africa Inform International, who's just returned, we should mention, from Uganda. Thanks so much for being with us.

Let me ask you, first of all, is this really going to be a fair election, do you think?

VINCENT MAGOMBE, AFRICA INFORM INTL.: Many people are starting to question that it may actually not be fair at all because there is a lot of violence being committed, especially from the president's side. The military has been very much involved in harassing supporters of Dr. Besigye.

MANN: Is that a sign of anxiety on the part of the president or his supporters, do you think?

MAGOMBE: I think the appearance of Dr. Besigye on the scene really shocked Museveni. It caught everybody very much unawares, and there seems to have been in the last few weeks, when I was in Uganda, some kind of panic in the camp of President Museveni. And this is mainly around him, the people surrounding him who feel that in any way possible Museveni should remain in power.

So they've been going out to the villages and harassing supporters of Besigye, and there have been a few deaths, in fact. So we hope that this violence could decrease by Monday. But if it doesn't, then it could actually play a very negative role in the whole election process.

MANN: A crucial question, of course, is what the president would do if, in fact, he loses. He told our correspondent Catherine Bond that he would, of course, respect the result. But is that clear to everyone else?

MAGOMBE: Well, when I was in Uganda, there were quite some rumors flying around, and in fact, some real evidence that their people, very top generals on the side of Museveni - Museveni's government, who are not willing to hand over power.

Now, whether Museveni himself wants to hand over power is one thing. But with all these people who are supposed to be very extremist in their positions, one wonders how smooth that handover could be. But we hope that with international pressure probably from countries like United States and Britain, President Museveni, if he lost, he may have to abdicate power.

MANN: This may seem like a simple-minded question. But obviously, everyone in power wants to hold onto it. Do the generals you're talking about have a particular reason to fear a change in government?

MAGOMBE: Well, I think that is Museveni's problem. Museveni's problem has really been that he's surrounded - himself, he's some sort of a wonderful gentleman who has done a few good things. But he's surrounded by a very corrupt ring of people, many of them are army generals and commanders who have amassed a lot of wealth, some of it from Congo. And in fact, within the country, there have been a lot of questions about that wealth.

Now, these people just don't know what to do if Museveni lost power. You know, where would they go? Recently, his own son was promoted to a commander in the presidential protection unit, and that unit has been widened to include several almost battalions. Now, where will all those people go?

So they are fighting for their own survival, knowing that Besigye has actually promised to arrest some of them probably if they continue undertaking the violence that they are doing right now.

MANN: Corruption has been an issue in this election. How big a problem in MANN, how big an issue?

MAGOMBE: Well, that is why it's very questionable, some of the assertions from Western Europe and America and so on that Museveni's government is some kind of angelic system. The corruption that exists in Uganda today, when I was there in Uganda a few weeks ago, is shocking. I mean, it has reached right at the heart of government.

And very, very, very many people are extremely corrupt. Almost everything that somebody does as a civil servant - you know, you just have to get some kind of sidekicks and so on. And there is no way that President Museveni can fight this corruption in the five years that he's talking about.

So that is probably the greatest card that Colonel Besigye has to play and is playing - the fight against corruption if he became president of Uganda.

MANN: Mr. Magombe, we have more to talk about. We have to take a break now. But when we come back - more on the Uganda that Mr. Museveni has built. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MANN (voice-over): Uganda's successes have been political, economic and medical. A national AIDS campaign unlike any in Africa and, in some respects, unrivaled in the developing world. The president has mentioned the disease in virtually every public appearance going back years. Local governments and independent organizations are actively working against it. And HIV rates are believed to be going down dramatically.

(on camera): Welcome back.

Mr. Museveni's achievement has to be measured against his predecessors. For nearly a quarter century, Uganda was ruled by a succession of terribly brutal men, the worst of them, Idi Amin, is alone believed to have killed half a million of his own people. That Uganda should have survived is remarkable, that it has, in many respects, succeeded doubly so.

We're joined once again by Vincent Magombe of Africa Inform International. You were saying before we had to stop that in some sense, Mr. Museveni's reputation may be inflated in the West. Let me ask you to back into that in a funny way. What was the Uganda like that he inherited?

MAGOMBE: Well, it was very bad, we must say. Idi Amin, people know what Idi Amin was. I personally was a playwright at that time. I wrote a play about Idi Amin. So we know the horrible situation that existed during that time.

But I think the biggest problem that the world faces in relation to Uganda is that everybody tends to judge Museveni against that background, and they quite rarely judge him according to what he does. For example, for 15 years now, there is a very, very horrible war that is going on in northern Uganda. There is a very bloody war that's going on in western Uganda as well.

And I believe that President Museveni has failed to stop that war. There is also the role of President Museveni in Congo. These are new things which Museveni has done during his time of office, which - against which he should be judged, not all the time always against Idi Amin, against the background that Obote regime created.

So I think that there is a problem there.

MANN: OK, well, that's fair enough. Tell us, because you've touched on two important subjects, about the conflict domestically. Who's fighting and why?

MAGOMBE: Well, over a period of time, there have been rebel groups in northern Uganda, for example. There is one called the Lord's Resistance Army, headed by somebody called Joseph Kony. And then there's another one called ADF (ph), which is in western Uganda.

Now, these rebel groups, in a way, don't have very clear political program. But one can only interpret their resistance and their uprising in the context of the lack of democracy that exists in the country. I believe that if there was proper democracy in Uganda, much better democracy, there would be no need for people to go to have arms.

In fact, the rebel leaders are taking advantage of the vacuum that exists in terms of lack of democracy.

MANN: OK, tell us about the Ugandan presence in the Congo. Why are there Ugandan troops there? And the government has announced plans to bring them back. Are you doubting their sincerity?

MAGOMBE: In the past, you've got a government that says it was going to bring back soldiers from Congo, and it never did or it just had very symbolic withdrawals from there. And in fact, I remember the last time there were clashes between Rwanda and Uganda, you know, many of us called for international pressure on the two governments.

And only when the United States and, you know, the United Nations threatened economic sanctions against Uganda and Rwanda did President Museveni and President Kagame withdraw a few troops. Now they have said they are withdrawing. We are sure they have withdrawn. I've seen some of the soldiers arriving in Uganda when I was there a few weeks ago.

But how honest President Museveni is in terms of, for example, refusing or (inaudible) supporting the rebel groups in eastern Congo, you know, that has to be questioned very much. And I believe that if Uganda does not withdraw its troops wholly from there, the conflict in the Congo will continue being what it is.

MANN: Now you passed over something that's intriguing. One of the particularities of Ugandan democracy is that it is what the president calls no-party democracy. There are more than a half a dozen candidates for the presidency, so there is democracy of a kind. How different is no-party democracy from multi-party democracy that you'd like to see?

MAGOMBE: Well, the whole thing is we have to understand that President Museveni has really committed some kind of real crime against democratic norms, democratic processes in Uganda. You know, the whole idea of the fact that, you know, when President Museveni argues that without parties, then Uganda is democratic cannot be justified.

Any society needs choices, and you can only provide those choices by having alternative institutions - for example, parties - to which people who are disgruntled with the government can go and complain. And then those institutions can raise these problems in parliament.

Now, without democracy in Uganda, without those parties being in place, you can talk about all sorts of things that parties divided Uganda. At the moment, we have civil wars, and there is division. There's tribal, ethnic divisions without the parties. So I believe that it's high time President Museveni really left that whole idea of no- party systems and embraced the popular viewpoint in Uganda right now that people want multi-party democracy.

MANN: On that note, Vincent Magombe of Africa Inform International. We thank you so much for being with us.

MAGOMBE: Thank you.

MANN: We take another break now. When we come back, Ugandans and their election and the Internet. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MANN: Welcome back.

Election campaigns in much of Africa look different than they do in the developed world. But the look and even the location of some of the campaigning is changing. We go back to Catherine Bond now for that part of the story.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BOND (voice-over): Uganda's president Yoweri Museveni out in the countryside on the campaign trail. The dancing may be traditional, but these days campaigning is a blend of old and new. And back in the city, it's not just newspapers that will influence voter opinion in what's expected to be a very close presidential race, but the Internet as well.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We heard that one of the candidates, Aggrey Awori, had a Web site which had been designed in America. We looked at it, and we said, well, we think we should design a Web site for all other candidates. So that's when we starting approaching the various groups to say, well, we want to design a Web site for you. Then we did design a Web site.

BOND: On the Net, candidate Museveni, 56, is portrayed as a revolutionary - a husband, father, farmer and statesman. Candidate Kizza Besigye, 44, who's nearest Museveni in opinion polls, appears first with his wife, Winnie. Besigye is also portrayed as a young man, national political commissar and army colonel.

But with just 100,000 estimated Internet users in Uganda from a population of more than 20 million, are Web sites worth it? Analysts say yes.

CHARLES ONYANGO OBBO, MONITOR NEWSPAPER: The candidates with the best Internet sites interestingly have also been able to gain the most support from Ugandans in the diaspora. So I think there's a link there. I think a lot of money has flowed in this campaign from Uganda diaspora. They have formed support groups. They are fund-raising money.

BOND: Ugandans abroad don't have the right to vote, though. So beyond fund-raising, a Web site's an effective campaigning tool. Yes, again, say analysts, who contend that voters in the countryside take their cue from family members living in the city.

EDWARD BALIDDAWA, UGANDA HOME PAGES: So the Internet has been a powerful tool in a way. But it has helped to inform the urban community, and then the urban community are going back to the rural area and influencing the decisions of the rural community.

BOND: Back on the campaign trail, this time with Kizza Besigye. Again, there are speeches and music to work up the crowd. But apart from campaigning in the flesh, candidates have also been careful to pencil in talk shows on the more than 20 FM radio stations now dotted around Uganda.

(on camera): FM radio stations are another and still far more important campaigning tool. In both Ghana and Senegal, it's said FM stations played a key role in opposition victories for presidential candidates.

(voice-over): In Uganda, too, it's thought opposition candidates benefit most from radio debates.

ANNE LYDIA SEKANDI, RADIO ONE: In the past, the incumbent would not have had to hear as much political opposition because basically only the state radio was able to have a voice, and they wouldn't give that voice to the opposition.

BOND: Placed fifth in opinion polls, wealthy businessman Chapaa Karuhanga is also vying for the presidency. His focus, the economy.

CHAPAA KARUHANGA, PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We look at the realm (ph) of poverty today. I want to (inaudible) the foreign investor and also protect the indigenous people.

BOND: A good platform for candidates maybe, but it's hardly a smooth ride.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you really think that this entire historical problem of an unequal economic relationship between Africans here and foreign investors can be resolved simply by you negotiating from state house? Do you think.

BOND: With political talk shows incredibly popular here, what do callers talk about?

SEKANDI: One thing that has stood out greatly is the issue of change - to change or not to change? So we do not know whether it is to change for change's sake or to change because we want better.

BOND: Considered crucial, the FM stations have found themselves at the center of a row. Uganda's electoral commissioner saying he, not they, should announce the final tally or winner of next week's election first.

HAJI AZIZ KASUJJA, UGANDA'S ELECTORAL COMMISSIONER: Let the electoral commission finally declare who has won. That's what I wanted to say. That's what I'm saying, and I was reading the law.

BOND: But because in Uganda's 1980 elections the loser was proclaimed the winner, this has aroused suspicion.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In 2001, the issue is that if you say that we are free to announce who has won (inaudible), we can (inaudible) and announce those results. Why should you give - why should it be the monopoly (ph) of the electoral commission?

BOND: In fact, on Monday, when as many as 11 million or more Ugandans go to the polls to choose from six presidential candidates, the commission's official results and a running total will be posted on the Web site of a government-owned newspaper here, the first time this will have been done in Africa.

And though the vast majority of voters won't see it, they will hear many of the results phoned in to privately owned FM stations.

(on camera): What do you think is the role of the FM stations in this election? How has it affected your campaigning?

MUSEVENI: It's all right. We can use it. I can use them. (inaudible). They quicken the process of (inaudible) information.

BOND: Information and technology playing a key role perhaps in keeping this election democratic.

Catherine Bond, CNN, Pallisa, Uganda.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: One final thing before we go about turning a page in history. In 1972, Idi Amin expelled tens of thousands of Asian entrepreneurs - a move that led to the collapse of the Ugandan economy. President Museveni has been courting the community back to Uganda, and some have returned from Britain, Canada, India and the United States.

Perhaps more importantly, they are investing heavily in their old homeland - one reason why the economy has been doing so well.

That's INSIGHT for this day. I'm Jonathan Mann. There's more news ahead.

END

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