The Afrobarometer, Africa’s premier opinion polling organisation, has recently begun releasing the results of a poll it conducted in Uganda in May this year.

There is much debate, joy, and also anger and frustration at the poll itself and the sweet and sour messages it contains for the government and its supporters on the one hand, and for its rivals, the opposition parties, on the other.

With opinion polls, it is customary that those at the receiving end of the results will tend to pick out for castigation the messages they don’t like.

Some pundits will then cloud the discussion with questions about whether any poll can be credible given “the environment.” Well, the Afrobarometer assesses environments carefully for conduciveness before it embarks on its business.

But somehow, the pundits tend to forget that, in the same environment, some polls have been remarkably accurate, and that there is no “environment,” in which polls are always entirely accurate or inaccurate. There is such a thing as “rogue polls”.

The results are, naturally, a mix of all sorts of things, all difficult to sum up in one fell swoop. For one with an interest in what people think of political parties, multiparty politics, elections and such things as vote-counting, it came up with some tantalising findings.

There was a time when Uganda as a multiparty democracy was at its most “vibrant.” It was also the time when politics was extremely polarising, along two major axes. If you were Catholic or Protestant, one could reliably tell which party you supported. The same tended to go for if you were from this or that region of the country.

Such was the tribalisation of politics that electoral contests were “do or die,” often ending in acts of arson, murder and vandalism on massive scale, the latter sometimes entailing groups of people invading other people’s gardens and chopping up their crops simply because they supported rival political parties.

That was way back in the 1950s and 60s, before party politics ended and more violent forms of contestation for power replaced it.

Then came Yoweri Museveni and his group. They had grown up under and even been active participants in the “bad politics” of the period leading up to Independence and after, before military rule.

Tapping into a deep vein of dislike for violence in politics, which many blamed on political parties, Museveni and group “suspended” the multiparty system and went on to construct a “no-party system” that continued to nurture anti-party attitudes over a period of 20 years.

Twenty years on, however, Ugandans had begun to crave competitive politics and in 2005 got what they wanted.

The recent poll, however, points to a remarkably slow growth in the level of trust people feel in parties other than the ruling NRM — which, nearly 30 years after it came to power, still enjoys high levels of trust at 70 per cent, compared with opposition parties at 30 per cent.

There are many things the NRM likes to claim credit for. They include “restoration of democracy,” marked by regular elections. People are generally happy with this, as 87 per cent of respondents expressed the view that elections are the best mechanism for choosing leaders.

However, just under 50 per cent feel that elections in Uganda do not enable voters to remove leaders they do not want, with 63 per cent fearing violence and intimidation during election campaigns.

This is hardly surprising given that 48 per cent believe votes are not always counted fairly, which may explain why 57 per cent do not want the president to appoint members of the electoral commission, which he currently does.

But if opposition parties feel inclined to celebrate some of these messages, here is something for them to ponder: Some 72 per cent of respondents think leaders, including leaders of opposition parties, serve their own interests and ambitions, not those of the people.

Do opposition parties present a viable alternative vision for the country? Some 21 per cent feel, strongly, that they don’t; 18 per cent think they do, while 26 per cent have no idea. In 2011, 41 per cent thought they did, while only 5 per cent did not know.

Since the restoration of multiparty politics over a decade ago, politics in Uganda has degenerated into sometimes unseemly, almost ongoing contestation, some of it violent. What do Ugandans think?

A sizeable 52 per cent want opposition parties, once defeated at the polls, to co-operate and work together with the winning party “to help it develop the country.” They do not want opposition parties to “monitor” and “criticise” the government after elections.

Clearly, more than 50 years after Independence, Ugandans are far from happy with the way members of the political elite play politics in their country.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]