Gadaffi uses mercenary soldiers from sub-Saharan Africa. As his country rises up against him, he probably uses them even more than he did before, since the loyalties of his “Libyan” soldiers must be in doubt. This is causing a violent backlash against Black Africans in Libya.
Unfortunately, many of the victims of attacks against the “mercenaries” are simply immigrants from other parts of Africa who are in Libya hoping it will prove to be their gateway into Europe. Many of these individuals are now bunkered into homes or camps trying to defend themselves against attacks by Arab Libyans.
This can only help Gadaffi, as it deflects peoples anger and resentment away from him and towards a powerless minority group. Divide and Conquer.
The world tends to focus on the centers of conflicts, but many of the deaths happen at the fringes. Immigrants, women, children…the often powerless and voiceless.
Once Gadaffi is removed from power, there will be many dominoes falling across Africa. His personal investments in businesses and in cultivating relationships with cultural rulers constitute billions of dollars and form an intricate web of control across the continent.
These two articles in The East African explore some of the potential fallout from his inevitable downfall:
The 2011 Presidential Elections in Uganda have concluded relatively peacefully, with rolling results being announced over the course of the weekend. Incumbent President Museveni won handily, with 68-ish% of the vote (I add the “ish” because 117 polling stations did not return their results before the Sunday evening deadline).
The blogging community and, in fact, the entire country are fairly quiet at this point, breathing a sigh of relief that things went as calmly as they did despite widespread accusations of ballot stuffing, voter intimidation, and other irregularities. Things basically turned out the way everybody expected them to.
There are calls for protest, but they are only coming from the candidates who lost the election and not from the general populace. Steven Youngblood, a trainer in Peace and Electoral Journalism in Uganda, sees these as empty threats:
Two losing candidates, Olara Ottunu (1.6% of the vote) and Samuel Lubega (0.4%) today threatened to mobilize Egypt-style protests (AP). Seriously, these guys could barely muster 2% combined of the vote total, and they’re going to organize protests? Fantasy. The one opposition candidate with the most credibility to organize demonstrations, Kizza Besigye (2nd place, 26%), has complained that the election was corrupt and unfair, but has stopped short of calling for protests. The other losing candidate with some gravitas, Norbert Mao, is expected to make a statement Tuesday.
I[s it] just me who notices the inconsistency when Besigye says, on the one hand, that he won the election by vote count (“49%, 48%” or some such contrived ratio), and on the other hand that the NRM bribed and intimidated all his voters away, and stole all the votes?
Which is it? Did his voters get deterred from voting for him, but that nevertheless they voted for him, even though they did not (due to either reason he cites: bribery, intimidation, the works)? Please.
It’s not that people don’t think the elections were rigged. Uganda Picks quotes a DEMGroup report on the elections stating that:
* 139,541 people on the voters’ register are dead persons while 418,623 of the registered voters are foreigners.
According to the same report, 5,000 registered voters would be over 110 years old, remarkable in a country with a life expectancy of 52 years.
This NTV video also highlights an incident of vote buying:
The two most vocal losing candidates, Kizza Besigye and Norbert Mao, have both publicly rejected the results and are making some very provocative statements about their plans to contest the elections. Another Uganda Picks post quotes Besigye saying:
“This has been a well-planned electoral rigging that we have never seen before. These pre-ticked ballot papers were in many parts of the country. We have witnessed ghost voting, multiple voter register and falsification of the results from different polling station in a wide spread fashion.”
[Besigye] called upon the people to exercise their rights if the results were not as they expected. He also went on to note that dictators are not removed by free and fair elections and that Kayihura (Gen. Inspector of Police) did not have enough army men to prevent what happened in Egypt from happening in Uganda.
The peacefulness of these elections has allowed some bloggers to to look at the funny side of things. Urban Legend Kampala keeps things in perspective, with fictitious interviews:
Urban Legend: Mr Museveni, what plans do you have for this next term of yours?
Museveni: Well, generally speaking our vision is to consolidate the gains made so far by my government so far, to keep Uganda progressing on track, to discover and exploit even more ways to maximize our natural resources and to further cement the vice-grip I currently have on power until the point that not even Armageddon can unseat me.
Urban Legend: Good luck with that, sir.
…and photographic evidence that presidential candidate Olara Otunnu didn’t vote because he was too busy DJing at a club:
We had a candidate that did not show up to vote for himself. Or to vote for another candidate. Or to vote for anyone for that matter. Minutes after 5pm on polling day, we broke the news on his whereabouts here, on ULK, your number one source of hot information. Our reports showed that he was outside countries partying hard, celebrating his victory. Pictured here (in background).
The next test for Uganda will be the Mayoral Elections on Wednesday, 22 February. This election is expected to be more closely contested than the presidential election and, potentially, more tense within Kampala. At this time, though, police and army coverage is so heavy that it is unlikely that things will get out of hand.
It’s never been so easy to drive across town in Kampala. The combination of some people laying low as a precaution against elections violence, and thousands of people heading back to their villages for the weekend to vote has left Kampala feeling almost deserted.
Things are almost eerily quiet, and only the increased presence of army and police on the streets gives the feeling that there is the potential for violence.
As of an hour ago, Museveni had 2.4 million votes to Besigye’s 780,000.
Some reports are trickling in of voting irregularities such as ballot boxes arriving at their station already full of ballots, and many disappointed people arriving at their polling stations with voter cards in hand whose names are not on the list. A shipment of ballots from Mbale, one of the few areas reporting violent elections-related clashes, apparently took over 12 hours to reach Kampala instead of the normal five. People will be asking what happened during those missing 7 hours. Mostly, though, things seem to be proceeding in an orderly manner.
I’m sure that by tomorrow or Monday we will be seeing compilations of the irregularities, and the opposition will highlight them to claim victory when the final tallys are reported (the Electoral Commission is required by law to announce results within 48 hours of elections) and Museveni is announced the winner. There is the potential for isolated eruptions at that point.
For now, though, it is looking likely that this election season will pass relatively quietly, regardless of the credibility of the results. And if it takes an election to reduce the daily traffic jams in Kampala, let’s not wait another five years to have another one!
The birds don’t know it’s election day. Or maybe they do, but they just don’t care.
I was just out for my occasional 6:30 morning run, and saw people already lining up at the two polling stations I passed. I tried to get a feel for any underlying tension, but everyone seemed relaxed so far.
Then, as I continued on, I saw a flock of cattle egrets flying low over the papyrus marsh around Nakivubo Channel. On the power lines above, the bulbuls were singing, and as I sit here at my home I am being serenaded by a robin chat. It dawned on me that life for them, and for the many other wild animals we share this world with, just goes on as it always has.
It’s hard to keep things in perspective when you are human. Everything in our lives feels monumental, and when we have a bad day we are convinced that “the world is going to hell in a handbasket.” Our own, individual experience gets transferred to the whole planet.
There are monumental things happening right now on a human scale. Protesters in Bahrain are being gunned down by their government, Egypt and Sudan will never be the same, and South Africa just parked a gunship off the coast of Cote D’ivoire. It’s even monumental that for the first time in recent history, the world’s eyes seem to all be on Africa.
But I think it is important and humbling to remember that not everything happens at the human scale. This aggrandized sense of our own importance is what makes a dictator willing to kill a hundred more protestors to stay in office long enough to skim a few more billion dollars. It leads people to rig votes to stay in power and can lead to murder when our feeling are hurt or our egos are bruised.
But we are a blip in the history of this planet. There are trees on this planet that are 6,000 years old. Mountains date back millions of years.
Uganda is going to the polls today. It might be peaceful, it might not. But let’s just try to remember, when all is said and done, the sun will still rise in the morning, the tides will still ebb and flow, and what really matters is how we treat each other every day.
A large majority of the Ugandan population is under 30. To reach these voters, the National Democratic Institute partnered with popular local musician Bobi Wine to release a video encouraging youth to avoid election violence, and to encourage them to report any election irregularities to UgandaWatch2011. With the election day upon us tomorrow, I think it is worth returning to this video that was released last July.
The chorus of the song, in English, is:
So if it is voting, let’s go and vote but votes should not separate us,
Let’s stop feuding ‘cause of those contesting,
Votes should not separate us.
As we’re feuding, they’re in agreement.
Votes should not separate us.
Voting comes to an end but we still stay
Votes should not separate us
Let’s all hope for a peaceful election day tomorrow. For up-to-the-moment Twitter updates, go to #UgandaVotes.
According to a Valentines Day article in The East African, Ugandans won’t be feeling the love for at least three years as the government tries to recover financially from the incumbent party’s looting of the treasury to fund their campaigns.
Over a third of the national budget was spent in January alone, the month before elections, and over 85% of the overall budget has been spent at the halfway point of the fiscal year:
By December 2010, the midway point of the Ugandan financial year, Ush6.4 trillion ($2.75 billion) had been appropriated of the Ush7.3 trillion ($3.14 billion) 2010/11 national budget and of this, Ush3 trillion ($1.29 billion) had been spent.
In January, parliament approved a supplementary budget of Ush602 billion ($260 million), pushing the total figure to Ush8 trillion ($3.4 billion) following additional budget allocations for State House, the Electoral Commission, the army and the Inspectorate of Government.
Within a few weeks, Finance Minister Syda Bbumba admitted that the government was broke, a statement that invited uproar and scrutiny of the government’s fiscal discipline.
On closer scrutiny of public finances, it turns out that 85 per cent of the entire budget has been spent, but more importantly, Ush3.2 trillion ($1.3b) was blown in January alone, an official at the Ministry of Finance said.
Not only does this mean that Uganda will need to limp through the next five months on about $400 million, cutting needed services, but it means the next few years will be tight as well. The government will either need to increase its debt burden or print more money, which will push inflation higher at a time when many citizens are already feeling the pinch of rising prices.
There is also rising frustration about an unexplained $3 million handed out to MPs to “monitor government programs” as reported in The Monitor newspaper. With no accountability attached to the payout, it is widely seen as a bribe and many of the opposition party MPs are making a statement by returning the funds.
On the bright side, hopefully all of this money that has been distributed throughout the country will be spent here in Uganda, and the GDP will actually be boosted by in the coming months.
