With Uganda’s next elections approaching later this week, it is timely to consider what happened in the elections held just over 30 years ago. Idi Amin had been chased out of the country. The time had now come to cease military control and restore the country to democratic government. As is the case in every country, the people were hoping for a better, more prosperous future; however the spectres of the past had not disappeared.
When Idi Amin had deposed Milton Obote in 1971, there was great rejoicing on the streets over the fact that the corrupt dictator had gone. The same corrupt dictator leapt back into the game he knew so well and commandeered the 1980 election result in his own favour. Dictatorship was restored, and democracy was to be deferred for a long time. Instead of a negotiated agreement between all interested parties, the government became a one party takes all prize, and the losers were left out in the cold.
Thus instead of ushering in an era of prosperity, the December 1980 election ushered in 6 years of further civil war, which in some parts was even more brutal and repressive than had been the rule of Idi Amin. The civil war and economic decline of Obote’s second era continued until Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement seized power, bringing relative peace to southern Uganda, although insecurity in the north was to continue for another 20 years.