Wake up, everyone! Yoweri Kaguta Museveni is the winner of the just concluded presidential election in Uganda. End of story.
How did it go down? The Nation wrote last Saturday in one headline, “We’re impressed with well-organised Uganda poll, says EU.”
That headline just stinks, sorry. C’mon man, this is Africa south of the Sahara, where even legislators still randomly settle scores with flying chairs. Even in the best of circumstances, when did we ever have a perfectly executed general election? And what are the chances it would begin in Uganda, where an octogenarian is clinging to power after nearly four decades of rule by fiat?
The story confirmed why that headline stinks. The Nation wrote that the Head of the European Union (EU) Delegation in Uganda, Ambassador Atillio Pacifici, said they were “impressed with the level of organisation and peaceful conduct exhibited during the presidential and parliamentary polls.”
But that was just the opener. The more you read, the more the language got rosier. The good ambassador was quoted saying they saw “an extremely well-organised election exercise with people very orderly waiting to cast their votes and everything went on very peacefully.”
Moreover, the EU was “very impressed [with] the [electoral commission] presiding officers, [who] were very professional.”
The superlatives alone raise a red flag.
Look, the United States of America, the world’s democratic “beacon on the hill” as Ronald Regan called it, has practically half the country screaming fraud, albeit without evidence, in its general election. And the world is to believe that in the Pearl of Africa everything was just hunky-dory, the epitome of perfection? Nah.
There was a wrinkle, the Nation reported halfway through the story. The EU had no election monitors in Uganda, after all.
Say, what? Yup. What’s more, the Nation wrote, the EU delegation in Uganda said via Twitter last Saturday that the envoy’s remarks were “taken out of context” and as a result “give a misleading view.”
So, what was that headline all about? Who mislead readers, the apparently misquoted envoy or the Nation? For the headline and the equally misleading reporting in the first half of the story, the Nation should take responsibility.
