A record-breaking Ush2.4 trillion ($716 million) was spent in Uganda’s General Election in February.

A new report by the civil society group Campaign Finance Monitoring (ACFIM) says the money equivalent to 10 per cent of the country’s budget for 2015/2016 was largely used to bribe voters.  

The ever increasing amount of money spent during national political campaigns and electoral processes is establishing permanent distortions in Uganda’s progress to full democratisation, and puts unnecessary strain on an economy whose stability is in constant flux, concludes the 10-month study that tracked campaign financing in the just ended election season.

“There is broad consensus within civil society, academia and in the political sphere that commercialisation of political and electoral processes is a major challenge to Uganda’s progression into a modern democracy,” noted the study titled Extended Study on Campaign Financing for Presidential and Member of Parliament Races that the Alliance for ACFIM authored.

“The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution to democracy and believe it or not, we won’t get our democracy back until we change the way campaigns are funded,” noted John Mary Odoy, the chairperson of Transparency International Uganda, which hosted ACFIM.

A minimum of Ush435 billion ($128 million) was reportedly spent by political parties and candidates between May 2015 to February 2016, according to expenses ACFM could verify in the 16 districts across Uganda where it had a presence.

“If this figure is extrapolated in view of all the 112 districts of Uganda, it can be estimated that at least Ush2.4 trillion ($716 million) was spent by political parties and candidates on the elections campaigns of 2015/16,” noted the study.

The actual amount spent could, in fact, be twice or even thrice as much as that ACFIM could put its finger on if there was, for instance, a robust mechanism that enables an audit into how parties and candidates receive and spend their money.  

As it is, even the laws that exist, which critics say are weak at best, suffer from gross lack of implementation, which worsens an already problematic situation.

For instance, the Political Parties and Organisations Act requires every political party or organisation to maintain an accurate and permanent record of a statement of its accounts. Individual candidates are required to maintain full and accurate records of all assistance obtained during campaigns. Neither requirement is adhered to.

However, both the ruling NRM party and the Forum for Democratic Change, its leading arch-rival, which the Electoral Commission respectively declared winner and runner up of the 2016 elections, say ACFIM’s numbers are an outrageous exaggeration.

Although Dr Kenneth Omona, NRM’s deputy treasurer, would not reveal actual figures (because they have yet to compute them), he said the Ush333 billion ($98 million) ACFIM assigned them is way beyond what they actually spent.

“What we tried to do this time is we tried to minimise the use of money to activities that we could not carry out without money, like transport, public address systems, campaign materials and the like,” said Mr Omona.