Democracy under siege

Report shows how dictators exploited COVID-19 to quash opposition

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | In 2018, the American democracy advocacy NGO, Freedom House, gave Uganda a score of 37% in its Freedom in the World Report and labeled the country “partly free”.

Then in its 2019 report, Uganda’s score declined to 36% and Freedom House downgraded its status to “not free”.  Freedom House said Uganda’s status declined from Partly Free to Not Free due to attempts by long-ruling President Yoweri Museveni’s government to restrict free expression, including through surveillance of electronic communications and a regressive tax on social media use.

In the 2020 report, Uganda’s score declined further to 34%; the same rating it has in the latest report of 2021.

In the East African region, Uganda is bundled in the not free status together with South Sudan, Burundi, and Rwanda. Kenya has a score of 48% and a status of Partly Free. Although Tanzania has the same overall score as Uganda at 34%, it is ranked as Partly Free because of the underlying methodology of the scoring.

The highest overall score that can be awarded for political rights is 40 and the highest overall score that can be awarded for civil liberties is 60. How a country scores in these general categories matters but so does how the country scores in the subcategories under each; for example under Electoral Process.

Tanzania has held a partly free  status for over five previous reports. However, Tanzania’s score rating has been declining steeply from 58% in 2017 to 34% in 2021. The latest report notes that since the election of President John Magufuli in 2015, the government has cracked down with growing severity on its critics in the political opposition, the press, and civil society.

Freedom House has not yet published details of the basis of Uganda’s 2021 rating but in the 2020 report it noted that while Uganda holds regular elections, their credibility has deteriorated over time, and the country has been ruled by the same party and president since 1986.

It said the ruling party, the National Resistance Movement (NRM), retains power through the manipulation of state resources, intimidation by security forces, and politicised prosecutions of opposition leaders. Uganda’s civil society and independent media sectors suffer from legal and extralegal harassment and state violence.

Global decline

The decline of freedom in the Uganda that Freedom House notes country appears to be part of a global trend. According to Freedom House, the international balance of freedom shifted in 2020 in favour of tyranny.

That is the main finding of the 2021 Freedom in the World report released by recently the American democracy advocacy NGO, Freedom House titled “Democracy Under Siege”.

The report describes how in 2020 democracy’s defenders sustained heavy new losses in their struggle against authoritarian foes who exploited a lethal COVID-19 pandemic, economic and physical insecurity, and violent conflict that ravaged the world.

As COVID-19 spread during the year, governments across the democratic spectrum repeatedly resorted to excessive surveillance, discriminatory restrictions on freedoms like movement and assembly, and arbitrary or violent enforcement of such restrictions by police and nonstate actors.

While most countries with stronger democratic institutions ensured that any restrictions on liberty were necessary and proportionate to the threat posed by the virus, a number of their peers pursued clumsy or ill-informed strategies, and dictators exploited the crisis to quash opposition and fortify their power.

The report shows how in 2020, in a variety of environments, flickers of hope democratic were extinguished, contributing to a new global status quo in which acts of repression went unpunished and democracy’s advocates were increasingly isolated.