Govt moves to close Daily Monitor, stop Besigye win

The NRM government has been taken by complete shock by the strong performance of the FDC presidential candidate Dr. Kizza Besigye in the just ended general election and has begun putting some damage control to the situation.

This is how events have unfolded.

The lead story in the New Vision, which is a government-owned paper, was "Museveni leading."

The headline was intended to prepare the ground for the official announcement of a Museveni "win."

The chairman of the Electoral Commission, Badru Kiggundu, got instructions from State House to start announcing provisional results, but to start with results from places where Museveni had won, in particular western Uganda.

Those are the results which put Museveni at 59 percent at first, then they began to climb into the 60s percent, something which Radio Katwe had predicted the day before the election was going to happen.

Radio Katwe said there was a secret plan by Museveni and his half-brother General Salim Saleh reached in a meeting with Kiggundu, to announce a 63 percent win, and give Besigye 30 percent.

Many people who tried to follow the results by visiting the Daily Monitor website on Friday February 24, 2006, found that they could not get through to it.

By mid afternoon, the website had been blocked by the government. The results being broadcast by KFM were also being posted on the Daily Monitor website, so it had to be cut off.

In the morning, the Daily Monitor got instructions to the effect that it should stop saying its was giving out results from its "Tallying Centre", but instead call it a "Relaying Centre."

In the afternoon of February 24, the Managing Director of Monitor Publications Limited, Conrad Nkutu, received a phone call from Godfrey Mutabazi, the chairman of the Broadcasting Council.

Mutabazi said he wished to visit the Monitor offices at Namuwongo to discuss the broadcasting of results by Monitor-affiliated station, KFM. Mutabazi came with the CID officer in charge of election malpractice, Elly Owomnya.

After Mutabazi had made his phone call, Nkutu received a call from the director of the CID, Elizabeth Kuteesa.

The CID and the Broadcasting Council had received instructions from State House to find any fault or loophole in the Monitor and FM which would lead them to both be shut down. That is why they were visiting the company's offices to meet Nkutu.

As many people now know, the Daily Monitor has been publishing and with KFM, broadcasting the real results as they were coming from polling stations all over Uganda.

These results, sources tell Radio Katwe, took Museveni by complete shock He was stunned into silence and panic at how well Besigye was doing.

The results were showing the two rivals neck and neck, despite the massive rigging that took place in western Uganda.

Museveni decided to act before the situation got out of hand. Already, the foreign observers, western embassies and the international media were starting to refer to the Monitor result tally almost in official terms, because they reflected what was on the ground.

The latest reports are that the NRM is planning as many "spontaneous celebrations" as possible in Kampala.

This is so that by the time results are officially announced and certified on Saturday afternoon, February 25, Ugandans have resigned themselves to a landslide Museveni victory and Ugandans will even have started to believe that maybe he genuinely won.

Radio Katwe cannot yet predict what is going to happen to the Daily Monitor, but it warns the public to prepare for the possibility of the Daily Monitor and KFM being shut down, something which could happen by next week.

It is also possible that by night time in Kampala on Friday, the KFM radio will have been ordered to stop broadcasting its tallied results and maybe even hand the data over to the CID.

We shall update you on this story as we get more details.