Ah, Uganda. The Pearl of Africa, if the pearl in question was harvested from a particularly diseased oyster and then ground into dust by the boot of perpetual ‘governance.’ Once again, the ritualistic dance we call an election has concluded, and once again, the losers are doing the only thing losers in a managed democracy know how to do: pointing at the shiny machines that didn't work. This time, the protagonist of our tragicomedy is Mubarak Munyagwa Sserunga, a man whose nickname, 'Mugati Gwa Butter,' suggests a level of softness that his political aspirations simply cannot afford. Munyagwa, the former presidential candidate for the Common Man’s Party—because nothing says 'common man' like a career politician with a dairy-based moniker—is shocked, truly shocked, that the Biometric Voter Verification Kits (BVVKs) were about as effective as a screen door on a submarine.

The premise of Munyagwa’s grievance is almost adorable in its naivety. He argues that because the biometric kits failed or were bypassed, the election falls short of the law. Oh, the law. That quaint collection of suggestions that politicians treat like a Terms of Service agreement—scrolled past and ignored until something goes wrong. To Munyagwa, the failure of these silicon totems is a constitutional crisis. To the rest of us with a functioning cortex, it is merely Tuesday. The idea that a digital thumbprint scanner is the thin line between a glorious democracy and a despotic farce is the kind of techno-optimism that only a desperate man or a grifting tech contractor could believe. We have reached a point in human entropy where we believe that if a machine doesn't beep, the soul of a nation is lost. Newsflash: the soul was sold off decades ago; the machine is just the receipt.

Let’s look at the players. On one side, you have an incumbent machine that views 'biometrics' as a pesky Western suggestion, like salad or human rights. On the other, you have Munyagwa and his CMP, shouting into the void about 'credibility.' Credibility in a Ugandan election is like virginity in a brothel—a concept frequently discussed but rarely encountered. Munyagwa’s insistence that the absence of BVVKs renders the exercise illegal is a classic maneuver in the Loser’s Playbook. It’s not that the people didn't want him; it’s that the *gadget* didn't verify the people. It is a masterful displacement of failure. If the 'Mugati Gwa Butter' can’t win, it must be because the thumbprint scanner was gluten-intolerant.

The real comedy lies in the fetishization of technology in places where the basic infrastructure of trust has been incinerated. We ship crates of BVVKs to the continent as if we are exporting 'Fairness' in a box. We assume that if we can just digitize the corruption, it somehow becomes more palatable. But as Munyagwa rightly points out—though for the wrong reasons—the technology is often the first thing to 'fail' when the results are already written in the back room. The 'failure' of a biometric kit isn't a glitch; it’s a feature. It provides the necessary ambiguity for the winner to claim victory and the loser to claim victimhood, while the 'Common Man'—whom Munyagwa purportedly represents—continues to wonder where his next actual piece of bread and butter is coming from.

Munyagwa’s lamentation about the 'deviation from electoral law' is particularly rich. It presumes that the law is a static, sacred thing rather than a malleable piece of clay in the hands of whoever holds the baton. In the theater of the absurd that is modern geopolitics, the law is merely the script, and the actors in Uganda are notoriously fond of improvisation. Whether the kits worked or not is irrelevant. If they had worked perfectly, Munyagwa would be complaining about the algorithm. If they had been gold-plated, he would be complaining about the glare. The goal isn't a fair election; the goal is to have a sufficiently complex reason to stay in the news cycle after you’ve been trounced.

This entire saga is a perfect microcosm of the global democratic decay. We have replaced actual political discourse with arguments over hardware specifications. We treat the ballot box as a magical box that purifies the collective stupidity of the masses, provided the Wi-Fi is strong enough. It isn't. Whether in Kampala or Kansas, the result is the same: a bunch of self-interested grifters arguing over the rules of a game they all know is rigged, while the spectators slowly starve. Munyagwa’s 'Butter' is melting, and the only thing left on the table is the cold, hard reality that a thumbprint scanner can’t save a country from itself. But please, keep complaining about the kits. It’s much easier than admitting that the entire system is a hardware failure that no IT department can fix.