{"id":2394,"date":"2021-01-17T17:07:55","date_gmt":"2021-01-17T17:07:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/uganda\/?p=2394"},"modified":"2021-01-17T15:54:11","modified_gmt":"2021-01-17T15:54:11","slug":"we-did-our-part-but-was-it-all-necessary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/uganda\/all-news\/we-did-our-part-but-was-it-all-necessary","title":{"rendered":"We did our part, but was it all necessary?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Africa-Press<\/a> – Uganda<\/a>. <\/strong><\/span>Voting day 2021 was quite unlike any other I have experienced and I have voted several times in the past. It was a day stripped of many things; sunshine, internet connection and the noise and bustle that normally comes with election fever. Temperatures were cool in as many ways as you can imagine. However, this did not take away intensity and purpose from the would-be voters, those who turned up anyway. Who can tell the impact of the urban-rural migration that we saw days to the election?<\/p>\n

Yet on the day, some of us could not be held back from fulfilling our civic duty. The atmosphere which should have been cool at my polling station, I felt, was being made unnecessarily tense by the security deployed. Even when we couldn\u2019t really do much with our phones, given the internet shutdown, anyone who so much as looked at their phone \u201csuspiciously\u201d as if they might take a photo, was cautioned to stop it immediately.<\/p>\n

And this was a long distance away from the polling area, given that our queues had been rendered static by the biometric machine malfunction. When one of the security personnel deployed at the station insisted on feeling multiple women\u2019s heads with her hands, the voters feared the spread of coronavirus but tried to protest in moderation, lest they be mistaken for hooligans. In light of the Covid-19 pandemic SOPs, the police may need to review its procedures on frisking people in the name of security.<\/p>\n

Sad, that the freedom to take photos was one of those things of which the citizens had less, along with the connection to share them. Perhaps you might have seen some of these ridiculous scenes with security personnel\u2019s hands running through the head of a woman with very short hair. Everyone wondered what she was looking for in there. Only this uniformed woman seemed unable to see how ridiculous the exercise was. The rest of us were aghast. Perhaps this is one of the things this election delivered\u2014more power to the uniformed forces to do as they pleased with the wananchi and a silencing of the voices of legitimate protest.<\/p>\n

While some things were in short supply, the internet was nowhere to be found, effectively plunging us back into the dark ages of snail mail\u2019s distant cousin, SMS and the good, old phone calls which the telecom companies should have, at the very least, considered discounting. All through the blackout, which persisted even as I wrote this column, I could not take my mind off the real cost of the internet shutdown. Business transactions have been interrupted and prevented and in a way that seemed worse than during the Covid-19 lockdown. Businesses which came out of the lockdown limping and had somehow started to establish themselves online may now see any small earnings or profits\u2014if you dare to hope\u2014eroded.<\/p>\n

While I was still pondering the businesses, I remembered the musicians, artistes and promoters who were still on lockdown and for whom online concerts, video releases to YouTube and the like, offered some glimmer of hope. Then it all went dark. I am sure every internet user around the country has a story to tell, of the difficulties occasioned by an exercise whose necessity is still in question.<\/p>\n

Even if the only effect of this shutdown was that it sets a bad precedent for the future, it would still be bad enough. Our children may start to believe democracy and basic human rights are mutually exclusive; that you cannot have peaceful elections with the internet switched on.<\/p>\n

Ms Nampewo is a writer, editor and communications consultant angella.nampewo@gmail.com<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Africa-Press – Uganda. Voting day 2021 was quite unlike any other I have experienced and I have voted several times in the past. It was a day stripped of many things; sunshine, internet connection and the noise and bustle that normally comes with election fever. Temperatures were cool in as many ways as you can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":2393,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,8],"tags":[233,240,234],"class_list":["post-2394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-news","category-files","category-homepage-english","tag-africa-press","tag-africa-press-uganda","tag-uganda"],"yoast_head":"\nWe did our part, but was it all necessary? - Uganda<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Voting day 2021 was quite unlike any other I have experienced and I have voted several times in the past. 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