Uganda begins vote count

Ugandans voted today on whether to allow multiparty politics after 19 years of President Yoweri Museveni’s so-called “no-party democracy”.

The president argued the current system was needed to keep tribal divisions in check after years of civil unrest.

Opposition groups had called for a boycott of the €9.8m referendum, insisting it was a waste of money and the reforms should be instituted without a vote.

Sam Rwakoojo, secretary of the Electoral Commission, said that vote counting began soon after polls closed and provisional results would be released on Friday.

Final results are not expected for several days. There was no minimum voter turnout required for the referendum to be declared valid.

Turnout appeared light, even though Electoral Commission Chairman Badru Kiggundu made a last minute appeal late yesterday, asking Uganda’s 8.5 million registered voters to “turn up in large numbers and exercise their democratic rights by choosing a system of their own choice”.

Kiggundu said the 17,000 polling stations closed as scheduled at 2pm today and said voting would not be extended, except for those already in line at closing time.

In the capital, Kampala, polling stations were largely empty early today.

“I am speaking from the bottom of my heart that I will not vote. … These people already know that we are going multiparty, why do they tell people to go and vote as if the voters are children?” said Resty Nnalongo, a Kampala entrepreneur.

Election officials in eastern and western Uganda said that few voters turned up there because it had rained overnight and early morning, but later in the day more people voted. They did not have preliminary turnout figures.

An election official in northern Uganda said that voter turnout there was low because people had been displaced by the region’s 19-year insurgency.

“In upcountry stations, there were many queues at the polling stations,” said Ofwono Opondo, a spokesman for Museveni’s National Resistance Movement. “The low turn up in Kampala is not surprising … This is the place where we have the opposition.”

Voters indicate their choice by placing an ’X’ next to a tree symbol for the return to pluralism or next to a house symbol for the retention of the non-partisan system.

Standing outside a polling station in Saint Anne village, three miles south of Kampala, Betty Mukasa was waiting for at least five other voters to show up so that polling could begin. She said it was her duty to vote.

“We did not like parties at all and now we have to decide whether they come back or not. This government trusts common people like us to decide for the country’s future,” she said.

International observers from 132 organisations and six local groups monitored the voting.