Uganda: telecoms used to monitor election results

Uganda’s incumbent president, Yoweri Museveni, has won a sixth term in office, the country’s Electoral Commission has announced. Museveni’s National Resistence Movement (NRM) party won 68.38 percent of Fridays vote. However, Uganda’s opposition parties have accused the NRM of electoral fraud. Now, allegations of SMS-blocking and collusion with a Ugandan telecoms company are focusing critical attention upon the results of last week’s election.

According to Ugandan newspaper, The Observer, President Museveni and the NRM party officials were able to receive election results from across the country within hours after the polls closed, thanks to a leading Ugandan telecom company.

Although they didn’t say so, the ruling party had organised and run their own tally centre with express instructions from President Museveni to have properly tabulated results in a record eight hours, long before the Electoral Commission presented theirs.

The tally centre was similar to what the Inter-Party Cooperation (IPC) was trying to set up, although government threatened to arrest whoever tried to tally and announce results. In fact, the IPC’s tally centre at Nakulabye in Kampala was invaded by security officers on Friday.

IPC officials later accused the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) of jamming their SMS service. According to a highly placed source, the ruling party established the centre so they could plan their next move in time if the results didn’t go their way.

There was apprehension in the NRM camp that for all the money spent, estimated at about $250 million (Shs 550bn), on top of other efforts invested in the campaigns, they could still lose the election.

A source at the telecom company involved in setting up the short code that NRM’s agents would use to transmit the results told The Observer that the party’s officials approached the company in the week leading to the voting and asked that they set up a special system for the purpose.

The telecom’s developers went to work and by Wednesday had set up the short code route through which NRM agents at each polling station across the country could relay the results via SMS; the results would then be instantly tabulated at the NRM’s centre stationed at the party’s secretariat.

The short code route, while similar to those of other content providers such as SMS Media and Be Mobile, differed in one way: it was one-way instead of two-way; meaning that you could only send information to or through it but there was no platform for a return message.

And, while the route was open to anyone who has a mobile phone, it was only known to NRM’s agents who received 60,000 new SIM cards for the purpose.

An agent at a polling station in Kampala confirmed the existence of the special telephone numbers which were designated for the exclusive use of NRM polling agents across the country and their tally centre in Kampala.

A person with a different SIM card could send a message through these lines, but the only data received at the headquarters was that from the 60,000 distinct numbers. Asked to comment, the NRM spokesman, Ofwono Opondo, denied knowledge of this system when contacted yesterday.

“That is absolute rubbish,” said Ofwono. “I’m not aware of a tally centre of the NRM or a single telecom company that worked with NRM.”

Ofwono explained that the NRM runs a data centre which, among other duties, was responsible for identifying and deploying agents to observe, tally and transmit results from each polling station across the country.

The agents work in a hierarchy from the village to the administrative officer at district level who sends the final information to the data centre.

“These results are for internal consumption to know our performance generally but not to announce [them]. We wait for the official announcements of the Electoral Commission and if they announce a different figure we can then say but our agents told us this is what we scored,” Ofwono said.

By Angela Meadon