‘No billion, no MP seat’

‘Rearing a monster’

Muguzi, the executive director of ACFIM, told The Independent that allowing personal money spent to become the dominant factor to winning an election is dangerous.

“We are rearing a monster that we will not manage,” he said.

Muguzi said he has seen the problem grow over the last 10 years starting in 2011.

Muguzi cites the time when MPs would get holed up in the parliament building for weeks because money lenders, armed with warrants of arrests, were waiting to pounce on them because they had borrowed too much money to spend on their election.

President Yoweri Museveni has also for years extensively spoken out against using money to win elections. In 2014 he spoke about it firmly at the NRM delegates’ conference.

Museveni said when candidates use personal money to win elections and hold on to their constituencies, it has serious implications on national security.

“They wrongly attempt the extreme futility to run their constituencies using their personal money, by providing petty sums of money to their supporters.  I call this futile because an individual cannot manage to support the families in a constituency or a sub-county.

“They attempt to fundraise for this church, the other mosque, this other school, etc., etc. What is the result?  Heavy indebtedness by the leader ─ to the extent of having their properties sold off.  This is not only total failure of leadership but endangers the security and independence of our country. We cannot have financially beleaguered people deciding the destiny of a country.”

Museveni said the use of money in elections is a political mistake because it distorts the purpose of leadership.

“A political leader is not a welfare officer, he is not an employee of the population, he is not a service provider.  He is from the people, by the people and for the people.  His role is to lead ─ to show the way by speech (advice, sensitisation, etc.) and by example,” he said.

But Muguzi says President Museveni has only paid lip service to the issue of unregulated campaign financing even after consistently speaking on the issue after he was sworn-in after the 2016 elections.

He says Museveni has not acted on binge spending in elections even in his election. Since his first presidential election in 1996, Museveni’s budget for re-election has grown exponentially.

There are no exact figures but rough estimates say it has grown at 60% every election cycle from say Shs13 billion in 1996 to Shs30 billion in 2001. Museveni is also accused of using his unrivalled advantage of incumbency to use chunks off classified budgets in sectors like Defence to outspend his opponents.

Museveni’s 2021 election budget is said not to have been as big as previously. Initial speculation was that it would hit Shs300 billion according to people familiar with his campaign activities. But Museveni conducted a scaled-down campaign due to COVID 19 restrictions that barred open air campaigns and outright political maneuvering, at least at the presidential campaign level. That means Museveni possibly spent less. But he still held big indoor meetings at district level and doled out bicycles to all village council chairpersons across the country and motorbikes at higher levels.

Failed bill

Muguzi says the solution to such activities is to enact a Campaign Financing law that puts a cap on election spending for candidates. He says having a law in place should be a first step even when its enforcement will be hard.

“Candidates can keep each other in check by mandating their opponents to declare their sums of money,” he says in reference to one of the provisions of the law which would put a cap on what a candidate can spend. “In a situation where Kateshumbwa spends a billion, Elioda can pick the law and run to court,” Muguzi explains.

Another provision of the law would be that money spent during campaigns is pegged to a bank account so that “one does not spend like they are on a burial ceremony.”

But Muguzi’s push for a Campaign Financing Bill is not new. It has aborted in parliament several times. ACFIM and its partners are, however, not giving up just yet. They say the bill has potential to tame the wild animal of money during elections.

The law would also require candidates to report on their spending after 60 days during an election campaign. They would show how much they spent, what item they spent on and also flesh out any unclear spending patterns. But Muguzi points out that very few politicians are in favour of the Bill.

“Even in the political parties which are in IPOD, nobody wants to do anything about it,” Muguzi says.

Frank Rusa, the Executive Secretary of IPOD agrees with Muguzi.

“For some reason, the political parties have not been very enthusiastic about that bill,” Rusa told The Independent.

Alex Ruhunda, Fort Municipality MP, tabled a Private Members Bill around 2017 but it failed to take off due to a host of factors. The Age Limit Bill took precedence and even the after effects of the Bill’s passing prevented him from tabling it again. “The technical team of parliament who were supposed to draft it frustrated me. I tried engaging the Speaker but nothing happened,” Ruhunda says.

When the Attorney General tabled a raft of electoral reforms bills in July 2019, there was some optimism because three of the Bills contained a semblance of Campaign Finance Bills, Muguzi says. But it all came to naught.

“There were improvements on the provisions but that is where it ended,” Muguzi says. In spite of a lot of hard work on the committee, Muguzi says, the campaign finance provisions in the bills suffered a similar fate as before.

“They removed them from the bills,” he says.

Muguzi says ACFIM is now targeting the new members of the 11th parliament to hopefully sponsor a private members bill on campaign financing. When the MPs are finally sworn- in, majority of them will be new and they will have to deal with the perennial demands voters in Uganda throw at lawmakers. They will get random calls for school fees, community projects, burials and all kinds of cash assistance on top of their accrued debt from getting elected. It is a vicious cycle of commercialisation of Ugandan politics.

Muguzi says ACFIM will continue the sensitisation on campaign financing even when the struggle to regulate spending for political office looks like a dead end.

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This article was done with funding from the African Centre for Media Excellence (ACME).