Makerere students casting votes for University leaders today

Voting is underway at Makerere University where students are electing their guild leaders. Voting started at 9:00 am at most polling centres, an hour later than the planned kick off time.

Abaasi Kizito, the Electoral commission spokesman has attributed the delay in the voting to slow transport which delayed delivery of voting materials.

"We had a delay because we were using the guild van to drop the voting materials to all 30 polling stations. Setting up the station and having all students delayed us a bit," Kizito said.

He adds that there was an exception for the school of Public Health where voting started at 7:40am to allow students time to attend to different engagements scheduled for the day. The school has a voting population of 124 students.

However, there was chaos earlier at the School of Social Sciences where several students found their names missing. Owen Natukunda one of the students whose names could not be traced wondered how he could miss in the register of a university in his final year of study.

Kennedy Yesigomwe, a 4th year student of Public Health told URN that they had a similar problem at the School Of Public Health.  "We found that most names are missing in our register. If they can mess our school which is small with only 124 students what about those schools with thousands of students?" Yesigomwe stated.

The university delayed releasing voter's registers due to closure of the university results management system on grounds of alteration of marks by university officials. Registers were released and pinned across university noticeboards around 7pm yesterday.

Sylvester Sabiiti, a 3rd year student of journalism and an agent of one of the candidates said that there is low voter turn up at the School of languages, Literature and Communication but was optimistic that the numbers will increase in the course of the day.

This year's election has attracted 14 candidates.
-URN