{UAH} How much do Ugandans know about JEEMA?

Written by YUSUF SERUNKUMA

In the wake of the 2001 presidential election, candidate Muhammad Kibirige Mayanja remarked that candidate Yoweri Museveni was terribly afraid of losing because he would be unemployed—and was actually unemployable—once out of the office of the presidency.

A management professional and educationist, Kibirige Mayanja was director of planning and development at Makerere University.

After losing the 1996 election, he had smoothly returned to his office, which had been under lock and key the entire time he moved across the country campaigning for president.

Ahead of the 2006 election, JEEMA or the Justice Forum was officially registered as a political party. All indications were that its president, Kibirige Mayanja, was going to stand. 

To punish him for impetuousness, but also offer to contain him, the government of Uganda enacted a law demanding that civil servants wishing to stand for political office had to resign their jobs. 

Were Kibirige Mayanja to stand in the 2006 election, he would have no job to return to were he to lose.  In effect, he would be punished and rendered penurious for not simply standing in an election, but also embarrassing Mr Museveni.

The selfishness of this enactment is not simply in the fact that it sought to massage the ego of one man, Yoweri Museveni, but that it also sought to hurt one other, Kibirige Mayanja.

Although Kibirige never stood for political office in 2006 – out of an earlier-on agreed position, not fear for his job – his rather miniature attack on a self-admiring Museveni had brought a terrible law into existence, which eternally changed the face of politics in Uganda: civil servants rarely take the gamble of resigning their jobs to contest in elections. 

Effectively, they have left politics to lowly unemployed dullards, or shady blokes in private dealerships.  The law also turned elections into a high-stakes game:  if one resigned their job to stand in an election, winning is a matter of life and death. 

Thus, the wild commercialisation, electoral violence, and destitution for many losing candidates. The election of present JEEMA president, Counsel Asuman Basalirwa into parliament for Bugiri municipality—an election which charitably took the form of a national election—has got the country talking about the Justice Forum in some favourable terms. 

However, not much is known about this 25-year-old party including a small fact that blue is actually JEEMA's registered colour, which the FDC grabbed with the endorsement of the Electoral Commission.

It might be the least decorated party in the country, but certainly the most audacious, straightforward and fearsome to the regime of President Museveni.  The men and women running JEEMA are known for the simplicity of their lives, and incorruptibility of their souls. 

Their living standards perfectly fit into their means. They are unexcited by material acquisition and simply inspired by the pursuit of justice and fairness. 

Professionals of the highest rank – academics, businessmen, religious scholars, public intellectuals and farmers – you would find them walking the streets of Kampala, riding in taxis or on motorbikes, and comfortably lunching in Kampala's dingy hangouts. 

President Museveni is recorded to have observed that all politicians in Uganda have a price – they are fortune hunters – as Ssemujju Ibrahim Nganda loves to say.  But not JEEMA politicians, who, by the way, have a sizeable constituency.

Started in 1993 – under the Movement omnibus – the Justice, Education, Economic Revitalization, Morality and African Unity (JEEMA) party is Uganda's oldest political party in modern times—actually older than the makeshift hostel of NRM. 

Men and women in their mid-thirties and early forties, most of them Muslims, Imam Kasozi, Abasi Kiyimba, Hussein Kyanjo, Khalid Lubega and several others, were first to dream of throwing the old guards out of office through peaceful means. 

Started as a discussion group, the movement quickly took a nationwide shade attracting party vice president Alex Ojok, and party vice chairman, Reverend Santos Okema.  Others persuaded included Apollo Kasule and Margaret Nalukenge who were driven by the desire for a just society.

For years, the government of President Museveni awkwardly tried to link JEEMA to rebels of the Allied Democratic Forces. Instead, the sophistication and consistency JEEMA elite continue to display is attracting them more elite and diverse membership.

The author is a PhD fellow at Makerere Institute of Social Research.

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Allaah gives the best to those who leave the choice to Him."And if Allah touches you with harm, none can remove it but He, and if He touches you with good, then He is Able to do all things." (6:17)

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