With about two weeks to go we are fast approaching the business end of the 2021 presidential elections.
The recent poll commissioned by the New Vision to determine the way the presidential elctions will go, threw up no real surprises.
One, that President Yoweri Museveni is leading in the polls. This election is really his to lose. With the end-to-end network that the National Resistance Movement (NRM), a reversal of their fortunes is improbable, if only because they have the biggest organisation.
Secondly, that Ugandans don’t want confusion and that this too – like the last five contests, is going to be a two horse race. That Robert Kyagulanyi aka Bobi Wine has taken over the dissenting vote from Kizza Besigye, has been clear for a while now, with all the usual suspects trailing miserably in his wake.
Will the balance change in coming weeks? Will Museveni’s numbers slip below the crucial 50%+1 mark by mid-January?
Prophesising the winner of this election is out of the scope of this column, more interesting though is to divine how people will vote and which segments of the electorate will be the game changers, or not.
"Broadly there are two types of voters, those who will vote for Museveni and those who will not.
But if you drill down further, these are subdivided further into five groups....
The NRM voters are divided into three groups.
The first group – The diehards, are those who will vote Museveni whatever the ills of his government and his own personal shortcomings. These are often people whose fortunes or very survival is directly tied to the continued stay in power of the NRM.
The second group – the pragmatists, is of those, who while they turn up their noses at the excess of the NRM, would vote for Museveni anyway. Their logic is a pragmatic one, they are in business or at the peak or approaching the peak of their careers, they don’t want anything or anyone to rock the boat. They calculate that a continuation of the Museveni administration, will not hurt them much but in fact lead to their continued prosperity. Also they don’t think the alternative candidate offer much promise for their prospects.
The third group of people -- the apolitical, who will vote the NRM are those who will stay away all together from the process. Abstaining from voting is often times a vote for the incumbent. The fact that you don’t vote for the ruling party means you are against them, a vote which would do some good for the opposition. That is why it is always key for the opposition to turn out the vote, as Barrack Obama showed in 2008 and Joe Biden in 2020 in the US elections.
That leaves two groups who will vote for the opposition.
The first group, I-would-vote-for-a-jerrycan-rather-than-Museveni, is convinced that the NRM is irredeemable and would vote for anyone who puts himself up for election against Museveni. The core of the group are people who have been shut out of power by the NRM’s continued existence and want them toppled by whatever means necessary. A fear of instability is a greater risk to take than the continuation of a Museveni administration.
The second group don’t think an NRM loss is a possibility, but want to, on one hand create a protest vote that will hopefully make NRM look up and take notice. Also within this group are those who want to create a momentum that will hopefully build up to the point that they can see the back of Museveni and his NRM in the near future.
Interestingly these could have easily fallen into the second group of NRM voters – the pragmatists, but they are more moralistic and can not countenance voting for the NRM, which they see as corrupt and worse, evil. They don’t believe that the end justifies the means. Grudgingly they will admit that the status quo is not bad for them.
While the opposition has hyped up the nearly five million new voters who have come onto the role – they have turned 18 since 2016, it would be wrong to think the youth vote is an omnibus one. While youth opinion is less coloured by a wish to maintain the status quo, because they have accumulated little property, for instance and, which as a result tends to shift them towards rebellion against their elders and the status quo, there still those who recognise that their parents’ fortunes could be undermined by change, that their career path is best served by the status quo or that they cant be bothered to vote anyway.
So the voters who will make a real change in this election are the NRM pragmatists and the apolitical/abstainers....
The pragmatists will have to be convinced by the opposition that their boat will not be rocked by a change of government.
The apolitical/abstainers’ disgust with the NRM will have to be raised sufficiently enough that they can be convinced to get out of bed and vote against the NRM. Or be convinced that an opposition win will threaten life as they know it, which they think can be better but they would rather settle for the current situation than chaos, that they turn up to vote for the NRM.
The recent polls cement the perspective that this is not a popularity contest. People’s decisions will be governed by self interest – “what can you do for me”, more than whether I like this candidate or the next. At the risk of sounding obvious the balance of self interest between the pro-NRM, anti-NRM and the abstainers, will determine who wins the next presidential election. It always does.
