{UAH} Pojim/WBK: 2016: How political parties stand

http://www.monitor.co.ug/Magazines/PeoplePower/2016-How-political-parties-stand/-/689844/2842472/-/11ixea4z/-/index.html

2016: How political parties stand

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The 2016 general election campaign season is now well and truly underway. A record number of persons have picked up forms for the presidential race.

This report takes a look at the overall political picture beyond just the presidential race and examines the extent of party or organisational strength, ranking the various groups in descending order of strength in the realistic environment, that is Uganda today:

No. 1 NRM-Museveni
The NRM as a political organisation has held state power for close to 30 years.

That, this is possible, means there are still enough people with real power, resources and influence who are willing either to work toward its entrenchment in power, or are afraid of challenging the incumbent, or are willing to turn a blind eye to its excesses for 29 years.

Whatever the reason, it still points to the NRM as a major player in Ugandan politics today.

Much of the support the NRM still enjoys comes from expediency and not conviction, which is why the distribution of money and the buying out of critics or opponents has now become its method of operation.

There are two Uganda's, the urban and the rural. In Kampala and most towns upcountry, the government generally lets the population be and in Kampala permits open debate in public and the media.

In the rural areas and many towns, though, it is a starkly different story. Here, the local population, particularly in western Uganda, lives under an NRM dictatorship that is almost a "reign of terror".
Just to be reported as belonging to an Opposition party leads to pressure and harassment from local NRM officials and village security operatives.

In Kampala and other major towns, vulnerable Opposition leaders and activists are being bought off using mainly State funds.

For these reasons, the faction of the NRM loyal to President Museveni can be assumed as the leading contender for victory in the 2016 general election.

The common perception is that if it has to come to that, President Museveni will deploy the army to clamp down on Opposition supporters and candidates.

This kind of extreme measure can be taken, but has its risks. Key army and police commanders can be listed for trial at the International Criminal Court if information and visual evidence of their involvement in a violent crackdown is documented.

Besides that, the NRM-Museveni faction faces increasing uncertainty due to the many conflicts and splits within it.

A senior Museveni loyalist and minister of Trade, Amelia Kyambadde, said on Capital FM's "Capital Gang" talk show on August 8 that if the party is not careful and the current in-fighting continues, the "NRM could collapse".

Anger at being pitted against Museveni's son-in-law, Odrek Rwabwogo, for the vice chairmanship of western Uganda for the NRM has forced a historical NRA commander during the 1980s guerrilla war, Maj Gen Matayo Kyaligonza, to more or less publicly endorse Amama Mbabazi for the presidency in 2016.

However, Museveni historically has always had a textbook way of running his guerrilla operations and political activities.

A source before the 2006 general election told this writer that the Museveni family and his close campaign aides actually take their campaigns seriously.

They meet, review their progress, discuss new information, and run their grassroots operations with some degree of formal, administrative method.

If it were not for the wrangles eating up the NRM-Museveni camp, it would be able to operate more effectively than it is managing at present.

The wrangles within the Museveni camp have made matters much easier for the second ranked camp: Amama Mbabazi's.

No. 2 NRM-Mbabazi

The reason reference is made to "NRM-Museveni" is because there is another faction of the same NRM party that is loyal to the former prime minister Amama Mbabazi.

For the last year and a half, the Sunday Monitor has written extensively about the intriguing new challenge to Museveni by Mbabazi.

Much of that reporting was based on an understanding of Mbabazi's historical role in the Museveni-led Fronasa and NRA-NRM guerrilla wars and his clout within the NRM government after 1986.

New information on the Mbabazi camp now helps give us a more detailed picture, which is why we rank the Mbabazi camp in second place after the Museveni camp.

Without going into too much specific detail, it can be stated categorically that the Mbabazi campaign is much more established and much firmer on the ground across Uganda than had been anticipated, but is also a little more disjointed at the campaign headquarters than we had realised.

Going by the latest information, Mbabazi will be able to field parliamentary candidates in all, or almost all districts in Uganda, an organisational ability that so far eluded the main Opposition party, the FDC.

That Mbabazi is strong on social media is something most political analysts agree on. What is surprising is how extensive too is Mbabazi's reach in traditional mass media such as newspapers and radio.

Mbabazi's strength as a presidential candidate is, from all evidence, much more formidable than even most of his supporters are aware of and the media and political class realise.

In late February 2014, Mbabazi's wife Jacqueline flew to Kenya where she was hosted by Rachel Ruto, wife to the Kenyan deputy president William Ruto.

Speaking on 93.3 KFM two weeks later, KFM's Chris Obore said he had information that Ms Ruto shared with Ms Mbabazi the method of organising a nationwide grassroots political structure.

The Sunday Monitor quoted Obore on this and the Mbabazi camp has never denied Obore's version of what the two women discussed in Nairobi.

Whatever tips Ms Ruto gave Ms Mbabazi, the results suggest it was advice well-taken.

Sources say Ms Mbabazi and her sister Hope Mwesigye, former Agriculture minister, have been instrumental in creating this quite extensive Mbabazi network at the local level across much of Uganda.

Mbabazi himself seems to largely remain aloof from the building of his grassroots network and instead concentrates his time and effort on the international front (hence his frequent visits to Europe and the United States) and the intelligence and information-gathering side to his presidential bid.

Like the NRM-Museveni camp, the NRM-Mbabazi camp runs its campaign much like a military intelligence operation.
It is scripted, works around intelligence information, is cautious about being infiltrated by provocateurs and double agents and maintains fairly good operational security.

Once again without giving away too many details, the Mbabazi camp uses what a source called a "scientific" method in going about its campaign, relying on data, population trends and other information on Uganda's geographical and social-economic composition.

Also as State House probably knows, a substantial number of NRM party officials and operatives and intelligence officers and agents are working behind-the-scenes for Mbabazi, which might explain how he has been able to establish a district and village-level support base in so short a time since the Kyankwanzi NRM retreat in February 2014.

Other analysts might argue, of course, that Mbabazi has not just recently established this grassroots network but had been working at it for the last 12 years, at least.

In short, Mbabazi is now doing his old job as national coordinator of Fronasa in the 1970s and as director-general of the External Security Organisation between 1986 and 1992, only this time he is bringing those skills and that experience to his own presidential campaign.

Of the negative side, although widely regarded as a personally disciplined individual and workaholic, Mbabazi's campaign shows some signs of disorganisation and an awkward overlapping of roles similar to the situation within the Museveni camp, mainly because much of the heart of that campaign is made up of Mbabazi family members.

Fortunately for Mbabazi, the difficulty in achieving a smooth-running election campaign is eased by the seriousness of the divisions and bitterness within the NRM-Museveni camp.

These two election camps, NRM-Museveni and NRM-Mbabazi, are what we would term the "Group of Death" ahead of the 2016 elections.

No. 3 Forum for Democratic Change

It grew out of two pressure groups, the Reform Agenda and Parliamentary Action Forum or PAFO, and was the focal point of the general view that something was seriously amiss with Uganda under the NRM and President Museveni.Many critics of the FDC point out that its only goal seems to be a desire to see the exit from power of President Museveni and the NRM.

In academic terms, that seems to be a narrow goal, but politically a single, pressing national issue, when it cuts across the country and concerns a large section of the population, that is reason enough to be a legitimate national question.

That the FDC is nearly 10 years old now but emerged from practically nowhere in 2005 to become Uganda's second-largest party by parliamentary representation and votes won by its charismatic presidential candidate Dr Kizza Besigye in 2006 and 2011, indicates that the theme of change from the NRM and Museveni resonates with a significant portion of the Ugandan public.

A persistent challenge facing the FDC is that Besigye is not very good at the step-by-step, office-like aspects of a campaign, at least not like Museveni and Mbabazi.

Maj Gen Mugisha Muntu is slightly more technocratic than Besigye but so far his statements about building the FDC from the grassroots have been short of paperwork and technocratic detail.

In 2011, the FDC promised it would tally its own results, had contracted Internet and computer technology specialists to set up the systems and create a backup in the event that the main tallying centre was sabotaged by State agents.

Besigye also promised that he had secured 19 agents to guard FDC votes at each polling station.

But at the last minute, the FDC failed to pull off these two feats, the independent tallying of results and deploying the 19 polling agents.

This, say many critics of the FDC, including many of its own members, is what prevented the FDC from converting the national frustration with the NRM into election victories in 2006 and 2011.

No. 4 Democratic Party
The Democratic Party comes in fourth. For as long as there are many Baganda or there are many from Acholi, Ankole, Kigezi and Buganda who are Roman Catholic, and for as long as the largest religious denomination in Uganda continues to feel that five decades after independence they still have never had the benefit of wielding real state power, the DP will always enjoy a minimal of popularity.

Two years before independence, the contest between the DP and UPC was over religion. After the fallout between the UPC and the Buganda government in 1966, ethnicity replaced the Catholic-Protestant divide between those two parties.

The DP now became the basic party of Baganda nationalism regardless of their Catholic or Protestant faith. For that reason, the DP will always start with some measure of appeal.

Its most important recent achievement was to snatch victory in the by-election for the Women's MP from the NRM in May 2014, won by Brenda Nabukenya.

This was not just any by-election but was for the seat in Luweero, the symbolic birthplace of the NRM.

The main DP was backed up by the DP-affiliated youth group, the Uganda Young Democrats, in organising the campaigns, also in conjunction with the pooled effort of the UPC and FDC.

However, it is currently embroiled in a contest of wills among its younger leaders like party president Norbert Mao and the Kampala Lord Mayor, Mr Erias Lukwago, making it unlikely that it will achieve the coordination it did during the Luweero by-election.

                                 

Moses Ocen Nekyon

Democracy is two Wolves and a Lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed Lamb disputing the results.

Benjamin Franklin

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