With about $700 million at his disposal and a fractured opposition to boot, winning the election was the easy part for President Yoweri Museveni.

But considering the ever dwindling voter turnout (58 per cent this year, down from 69.2 per cent in 2006), the question on the minds of political actors in Uganda is: Do elections mean much any more?

“If you know that you are going to win by 68 per cent, why go to the extend of using underhand methods? Why would you deploy the entire military? Going by what we have seen in this election, I even doubt there will be an election in 2016,” said opposition strongman Kizza Besigye, while disputing the results of the last poll in which civil society had assessed his party’s manifesto as the best. 

The manner in which the February 18 polls were executed could only deflate the opposition’s hunger to contest future elections.

First was the bungled job on the voter register — 500,000 ghost voters, 140,000 dead but still eligible to vote, names and photos that did not match, and missing voters’ names. These were awkward enough for the Electoral Commission.

Then came the clincher: Voter bribery, stuffing of ballot boxes, buying off rival agents and deployment of the military to intimidate voters — all this by the ruling party. Many voters became disillusioned.

Fourth occupancy

But having dismissed the option of challenging Museveni’s victory in court, Besigye handed the incumbent a fourth straight occupancy of State House. 

For Museveni, with a terrible record on delivering on election promises, proving the Doubting Thomases wrong will be the harder part of his new tenure.

In 2006, Museveni ran on a pledge of prosperity, transformation and peace.

This meant wealth, better infrastructure (in ICT, rail, road, airports and energy) to transform the economy... and peace.

Museveni delivered on the last one — the guns of northern Uganda have since fallen silent and 1.8 million internally displaced people have returned to their homes.

On roads, however, it has been a mixed bag. Kampala may as well be the world’s pothole capital.

The joke doing the rounds is that foreign city planners troop to Uganda to study the “Kampala Phenomenon” of enforcing cost-free speed limits, aka potholes.

Yet Museveni’s government allocated a record Ush1.1 trillion ($472 million) to the road sector in 2008 and 2009, and has embarked on rebuilding major highways and transport corridors into the countryside.

Another unfulfilled pledge is the vow to tackle the decrepit rail track to Kasese in the west and Pakwach in West Nile.

The latter would create a less costly transport link with Southern Sudan, and ease traders’ burdens.

More Ugandan goods would find their way to Juba, and the Ugandan economy would be the better for it.

But this did not happen; indeed the same pledge returns in this year’s manifesto, and it could still be in the 2016 promissory note. 

At his last inauguration in May 2006, Museveni said the Bujagali and Karuma power dams would be generating electricity within 44 and 48 months, respectively.

That time-frame has long passed, and not a single megawatt of electricity has trickled onto the national grid from these dams.

What does this mean? Firstly, that in Uganda, elections are not won on the strength of manifestos or implementation of the previous campaign programme, in the case of incumbents.

Political analysts have said that it defeats logic that Ugandans still vote for Museveni with all these failures. 

The conclusion has been that Museveni’s real rival in the election was never Besigye, Norbert Mao or Olara Otunnu. It was, actually, his own failures.

“Museveni was clever. He knew what he faced and so he found scapegoats. Then he went around telling voters that he meant well, but was let down by other people. He has blamed everyone, except himself. So in essence, he was running against his own bad record, but blaming others — parliament, the civil service, the World Bank and the European Union,” says Godber Tumushabe, the executive director of the Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment.

Museveni has a thing for big numbers: a 400-plus parliament and an 80-plus cabinet.

Even with energy, he has gone for the jugular. He says Uganda will generate 3,800MW over the next five years.

It is this amount of electricity that Museveni believes will take Uganda into the next stage of transformation to a middle-income country.

Now, that’s very ambitious. In more than five years, Uganda has struggled to put together a simple 250MW power dam.

The thought that Museveni can pull off a job 15 times bigger, and in less time, is simply wild.

The current total output, even with a mix of thermal generation and renewable energy sources, barely reaches 500MW.

The working class — analysts say these do not usually vote for Museveni — cheered the incumbent when he broached the topic of mortgage financing in 2006.

By recapitalising Housing Finance, the working class Ugandans would be able to own homes.

There was even talk of rolling out low-cost housing projects by making the National Social Security Fund play a leading role in providing long term funds to support home ownership and to develop a secondary mortgage market.

As it turns out, Museveni was not talking of new capitalisation of Housing Finance.

The mortgage lender had already lent out this money — Ush30 billion ($12.8 million), which had come from sale of former government pool houses.

“This was not new money. We had been collecting it since 1995 and it was already part of our lending portfolio. We only transferred it into share capital for the government. So it doesn’t create any new impact on the market because we had already been using it to lend,” said Nicholas Okwir, managing director of Housing Finance. 

In short, Museveni’s manifestos, when put to scrutiny, come across as full of rhetoric, old information and erratic policies, whose implementation never happens. 

What needs to be done to ensure better service delivery and job creation?

For one, it is important to separate populist statements from deliverable ones.

There are deliverable areas like security, universal primary and secondary education (quality notwithstanding) that the masses can buy.

Two, fighting corruption remains a big part of Museveni’s promises, but he is simply not doing it.

How can a government achieve 3,800MW of electricity or build low-cost houses when its ministers spend the better part of that time influencing the project managers to flout procurement procedures and hand them deals?

The failure of such projects is not due to lack of money. It is due to patronage and corruption.

Uganda, for instance, cannot deliver business process outsourcing jobs that Museveni is promising while still relying on an erratic power supply and with no high speed fibre-optic cables across the country. 

One of the president’s biggest headaches this term has been the National Agricultural Advisory Services.

It was supposed to drive this prosperity, but it degenerated into a conduit for patronage for the ruling party cadre.

Many households waited for years on end for project money to arrive while the party officials were seemingly on holiday.

When the president visited these projects, all the corrupt officials did was to conspire with the owner of a well-kept farm as evidence that prosperity for all had arrived there.

Twice, Museveni suspended the National Agricultural Advisory Services for corruption and non-delivery of service.

Next time he should fire the minister, the board, the permanent secretary and, if need be, even himself.

A team that is this bad reflects badly on its leader’s manifesto.