The British parliamentary system, now regarded as an international Gold Standard has come a very long way.

By Sam Akaki



Foreign and local election observers have their work cut out for them. If they are expecting to find in these presidential and parliamentary elections, a British-style electoral process which is taken for granted in all western liberal democracies, then they have come to the right place, but some 190 years too early, (Obasanjo to head Commonwealth election observers in Uganda, New Vision, February 5, 2016). Why?



The British parliamentary system, now regarded as an international Gold Standard has come a very long way, once passing along the same bumpy route Uganda is treading today. Before the 1932, for example, British parliamentary elections were characterised by brazen bribery and corruption, the extent of which would compel the Commonwealth, EU and other international observers to declare such elections null and void. Where is the evidence?



According to ‘William Pit the Younger', a biography by former British Foreign Secretary now Lord William Hague, "in order to go to the House of Commons, candidates were prepared to pay voters vast sums of money, in kind or cash. In 1931, one candidate paid the voters £15,600 and £12,525 of this was paid in Inns and public houses (bars) for refreshments for the voters. Probably the largest sum ever spent was £80,000, which was used to bribe just over 2,000 voters in the constituency of Liverpool. It is estimated that in 1831, out of 658 seats in the House of Commons, only 171 (or 25% of MPs) were elected without bribery".



Note that £1 in 1831 would be worth between £80-1,430 in today's money, depending on whether you are using real value, labour value or income value to make the conversion. In other words, today, the 2,000 votes in Liverpool would have cost an MP between £6.4m-£114.4 million!



We are not asking any Ugandan to go back in time to the 1830s' Britain. We are only reminding everyone that the vast majority of Ugandans are facing the more or less the same living conditions as the British did in the 1830s. There was dehumanising poverty; child labour; suffocating pollution from coal then used to heat houses, cook food and heat water to produce steam to power machines in factories; the lack of sanitation and raw human waste was discharged directly into the sewers, which flowed straight into rivers; the lack of clean water as people could get water from a variety of places often polluted by human waste; poor housing and overcrowding due to large families, living in houses built very close together with thin walls and roofs made out of cheap materials and diseases such as typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera which existed all over the UK. It was such poor people who sold their votes for cash.



To their credit, the British did not take up arms, as Ugandans did in 1981, in order to end vote-buying and other electoral irregularities. Instead, they agreed on a series of reforms. For example, The Representation of People's Act 1832, also known as the Great Reform Act, which introduced equal representation, created 67 new constituencies; broadened the franchise's property qualification in the counties, to include small landowners, tenant farmers and shopkeepers and gave the vote to all householders who paid a yearly rental of £10 or more.



The Second Reform Act 1867 reduced the property threshold in the counties and gave the vote to agricultural landowners and tenants with very small amounts of land. Men in urban areas who met the property qualification were enfranchised, thus doubling the electorate in England and Wales from one to two million men. Sadly, women were still excluded from voting until July 1928, almost 100 years after the first Reform Act!



Against this background, if the British experience teaches us anything, it is the fact that democracy is neither an event that materialises overnight, nor is it delivered through the barrel of the gun. Rather, it is process that gradually matures through practice and perfection over centuries. Above all, it demonstrates that vote-buying and other election irregularities are a process of democratic maturity.



In other words, just as it was futile for the NRA/M to take up arms because the 1981 election was rigged, so it is for anyone to threaten violence if they consider the 2016 elections to be rigged. This is because, as we have seen, vote-buying has only intensified and it will remain a feature of our elections even under any other president. Why?



As Britain's long route to liberal democracy has shown, fair elections and human development are two sides of the same coin. Therefore, vote-buying in Uganda will only end when Ugandans are sufficiently socially and economically developed to recognise that the role of their elected leaders is not to give them cash, pay school fees for their children or meet other family expenses including funerals costs; but to introduce and defend social and economic policies that are close to their hearts.



Meanwhile, any election Observer wishing to judge Uganda's 2016 election by Britain's Gold Standards should come back around the year 2300. Any Ugandan planning war to end vote-buying demonstrates both their ignorance of the history of democracy and naked greed for power.



The writer is the former FDC international envoy to the UK and European Union, also former independent Parliamentary Candidate in the UK, now executive director — Africa-European relations.



