Civil Society Organisations (CSO) and the monitoring of national elections in Uganda: Understanding the role of the Uganda Joint Christian Council (UJCC)

Abstract

The recent government’s limitation of the Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) that monitor national elections is in stark contrast to the critical role they play in the democratization process in Uganda. According to one of the Uganda Joint Christian Council (UJCC) Secretaries, this was more specifically with the 2021 national elections monitoring. Accordingly, the Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), like the Uganda Joint Christian Council (UJCC) and many others in Uganda, were not accredited by the Electoral Commission (EC), as had been the case before with the previous elections. This government suffocation of election monitoring was equally extended to the international election monitoring organizations, like the European Union (EU) and the Commonwealth Observation Group (COG), among others. While the role of some of these organizations, like the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative (FHRI) and the Human Rights Network for Journalists (HRNJ), among others in this regard, has been documented, there is little scholarship on the role played by UJCC in the monitoring of national elections. This article preferred to use the behavioral theory and the rational choice theory. This preference is because these theories complement each other in corresponding with the issue of national elections and monitoring. Similarly, both theories encompass the rationality aspect in decision-making used by the individuals or agencies that are monitoring elections. Based on the past national elections of 1994 and 1996 in Uganda, this article employed a historical research design, drawing on the archival sources and field interviews, to examine the role of UJCC in the monitoring of national elections in Uganda. To build a coherent interpretation of the primary and secondary sources, the collected raw data was analyzed through triangulation and then categorized according to the key research questions. This helped the researcher to make historical and qualitative sense out of the collected data. This article argues that the interference of the government in the monitoring role of the CSOs will complicate and undermine the otherwise good role they play in the democratization process of Uganda. Findings of this study indicate that UJCC played a significant role in the monitoring of national elections in Uganda.