Learning from the market

To win an election, FDC will need to build capacity to field a candidate in each and every electoral contest from the district, to the constituency, sub county, parish down to the village – or at least in 80 percent of the contested positions. In the last election FDC contested 201 out of 290 constituencies, 61 out of 112 women district MP, 43 out of 112 district chairmen, 560 out of 1503 LC3 chairperson positions. The story gets worse the lower one goes. So NRM contested 10,656 positions across the country unopposed.

This greatly undermined Kizza Besigye’s chances of success. The best way to beat Museveni was to increase voter turnout. Passion did that – by 10% from 58% in 2011 to 68% in 2016. And Besigye profited greatly from this. Had voter turnout reached 85%, President Yoweri Museveni’s vote rigging machinery would have been overwhelmed. But how do you increase voter turnout?

Without a grassroots campaign infrastructure, on voting day only your passionate supporters will show up. But not all your supporters are passionate. There is the woman who may be cooking at home, the man digging in his garden, the guy selling at his kiosk, the lady who has gone to collect firewood, the guy fetching water etc. Don’t take them for granted. All these people need a grassroots infrastructure to knock on their doors and get them out and vote.

Fielding candidates in every contested position connects your presidential candidate emotionally and functionally to voters. If you have a candidate for LC2, he has self-interest to rally many voters to go to the polling station and vote for him. But there is also the emotional part: his relatives, friends and in-laws will most likely turn up to vote for him in solidarity. There is a high chance that in both cases they will also vote for the presidential candidate of his party.

It was not passionately accusing Pike of dirty tricks that brought Monitor from bankruptcy to market leadership and profitability. It was in recognising our weaknesses and fixing them. I know many FDC supporters reading this will get angry and hurl insults and accusations at me. But that will never win Besigye (or any other FDC candidate) a presidential election. But fixing the itty-bitty teeny-tiny things like having candidates in every contested position will create great potential for them to succeed. Will they listen?

Since many FDC supporters are also admirers of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, here is advice from him.

“Our critics believed we stayed in power because we were hard on our opponents,” he wrote in his popular book, From Third World to First, The Singapore Story, “This is simplistic… We had learned from our toughest adversaries, the communists. Present-day opposition leaders go on walkabouts to decide where they will do well based on the way people respond to them at hawker centers, coffee shops, food courts and supermarkets and whether people accept the pamphlets they hand out. I have never believed this. From many unhappy encounters with my communist opponents, I learned that while overall sentiment and mood do matter, the crucial factors are organisational and institutional networks to muster support.”

FDC has talked big about the importance of institutions. Yet its behavior reflects an even worse disregard of the importance of institutions. The party has consistently sought to rely on an individual, Besigye, and the passion he evokes in his supporters to win presidential elections.

FDC has also exhibited an acute disregard to science, data and evidence to guide its strategies. It seems obvious, therefore, that if elected, Besigye would govern personalistically and from his gut feeling rather than institutionally and based on evidence. ** amwenda@independent.co.ug