One of Makerere University guild presidential aspirants in the April 14, 2023 polls has run to the institution’s Guild Elections Petition Tribunal seeking to set aside the results announced by the electoral commission.
Mr Hillary Oremo Odwee emerged runner up in the nine-man race after garnering 2,531 votes. He lost to Mr Robert Maseruka with only 27 ballots.
Mr Oremo in his petition, claims that over 6,000 first year students — a group that he says has majority of his supporters — were disenfranchised.
“The relegation of first year students from participating in the voting process between the prescribed and notoriously known time period of 8am to 5pm was an act of discrimination basing on their social status, which is a violation of their fundamental human right and dignity,” the petition read in part.
He further contends that the extension of the voting time announced by the guild electoral commission at exactly 5:34 pm on the voting day, came after the first year students were already psychologically disoriented and had resigned from the entire process.
According to the petitioner, this was a violation of the polling process. History, he said, has it that for the past 10 years, freshers’ voter turn up is usually overwhelming.
Although the EC said Mr Odwee did not get any votes from the Jinja campus, he says he has obrained sworn testimonies from students indicating that he got many votes.
It’s against this background that he’s demanding for a re-election to be conducted for only freshers and that the Directorate of ICT (DICT) provides voting results from the Jinja Campus.
In the meantime, he wants the results announced by the EC to be set aside.
If the tribunal does not serve them justice, Mr Odwee has threatened to go to the courts of law.
“We shall go to the courts of law because we are highly dissatisfied with the results of this election,” he said.
The tribunal’s secretary, Winfred Kabumbuli acknowledged receipt of the petition in an April 17 notice to all students.
Several freshers said they had been locked out of the e-voting system while others said they were only able to vote after 5pm.
Most of them learnt late that to be able to successfully cast their ballot, they had to disregard one figure (2) from their registration number as they logged into the e-voting system.
The EC chair, Mr Levi Tshilumba told this publication that it was a technical issue beyond his control.
“It was a bit of a technicality, a small technical issue; it is more of something to do with the programming. After a thorough investigation a solution was found and some of them were able to vote,” he said.
The university council on September 16, 2022 enacted a new students’ guild statute in which it suspended physical elections.
This followed the July 2022 violent campaigns that resulted into the death of one Betungura Bewatte, a second-year law student at Uganda Christian University, Kampala Campus.
The University has since then held two consecutive guild elections virtually.
