Two thousand seven hundred aspirants will today (Monday, October 26) tussle in the National Resistance Movement primaries, each hoping to be elected one of NRM’s 375 flag bearers for parliamentary seats in the 2016 election.
Each will be hoping to beat the odds to make it to Parliament, where an MP earns a consolidated Shs20 million monthly.
NRM’s primaries for aspirants for parliamentary seats come on the heels of its primaries to elect the flag bearers for lower local government seats.
Its primaries for the lower seats were marred by allegations of vote rigging, violence and general mayhem.
That chaos saw some of the more disgruntled supporters torching party offices in some areas and prompted the NRM’s electoral commission to suspend the subsequent primaries for a week.
What caused the chaos?
Crispy Kaheru, the project coordinator of the Citizens Coalition of Electoral Democracy in Uganda, traces it to incumbency.
Kaheru says there is a perception that if a party has been in power for long, it will retain power.
“Therefore, you will find many people seeking to run for elective office on the platform of the incumbent political party,” he says.
“Many interests within and outside the party structures raise the stakes for the primaries even at the lower levels. It is, therefore, not surprising that there was chaos.”
Kaheru warns that if NRM’s primaries for the aspirants for parliamentary seats are “not well managed, they are likely to be as volatile as the primaries for the lower positions and as the 2010 primaries”.
What will raise the stakes further, he says, is the perceived fight between the older and the younger generation in the NRM.
It is likely to be “a battle of the titans”, he adds, as each generation seeks to have its age bracket as flag bearers and as MPs in the 10th Parliament.
On the other hand, Luweero District chairperson, Mr Abdul Nadduli, blames the compilers of the NRM’s register for the chaos that ensued.
He says some of the compilers might be harbouring ill feeling towards the NRM and are, thus, sabotaging it from within.
“It was intended,” Nadduli told the Daily Monitor on Wednesday, October 21 in Kampala. “Why would someone lump the names from, say, Koboko with those from Luweero?”
He claims their intention is to “kill the party”.
Tanga Odoi, the party’s elections chief, who was preparing for today’sprimaries, refused to comment when contacted.
“Not now,” he said on Wednesday, as he hopped into his car and drove off.
Daily Monitor could not also get Odoi to say whether his office was overwhelmed by the scope of the exercise.
Mr Ofwono Opondo, NRM’s deputy spokesperson, blames the party’s opponents for the chaos, claiming they want to demoralise the NRM’s genuine supporters.
He refuses to name the opponents who are allegedly responsible for this mischief. Opondo, however, says the said opponents bought cards that look almost like the NRM’s and T–shirts, which they burnt, claiming they were displeased with way the party was conducting its primaries.
Whatever the causes of the chaos, Richard Todwong, NRM’s deputy secretary general, says the chaos was not unexpected – given that theirs is a large party.
“We were expecting worse. So it is fortunate that the incidents were in few areas,” says Todwong.
He says the NRM’s opponents who he also refused to name, printed cards and T–shirts, which they distributed to many people to sow confusion.
Nadduli says individual aspirants could be the losers since those who would be yelling out their aspirants’ names, saying ‘we will vote for you’ might not have been registered.
Others say NRM’s former secretary general, Amama Mbabazi, would reap from the chaos.
Inversely, it would weaken the NRM.
According to this school of thought, those who might lose in the NRM’s primaries are likely to worm their way into Mbabazi’s Go Forward group.
Odoi inadvertently lent credence to this possibility when he cautioned the NRM against acting in a way that it would “donate its supporters to Mbabazi”.
This was against the backdrop of reports that in Kanungu District in western Uganda, some overzealous party officials stopped their colleagues they accused of being Mbabazi’s supporters from contesting in the NRM’s lower local government primaries.
Disgruntled NRM supporters would not want to decamp to, say, the opposition Forum for Democratic Change, which, though popular, brings out the security services’ baser instincts of violence to ensure the regime’s survival.
Aware that in the immediate aftermath of the NRM primaries there might be at least 2, 000 disgruntled aspirants, and thousands of their supporters, the party is promising those who will lose that they will be taken care of.
“We are preparing to cushion them, to absorb them back in the system and to re-programme them to start their usual activities,” Todwong says.
What can NRM do to prevent a repeat of the 2010 chaos?
Many of those who are participating in this year’s NRM primaries were of age in 2010.
They witnessed or comprehended what happened then. Therefore, many expect them to work towards preventing, one way or another, a repeat of the debacle that happened in 2010 and last month.
Unfortunately, what has so far happened is anything but orderly.
Kaheru says at this moment there is little the NRM can do to avert a repeat of the 2010 scenario.
Still, he says it is incumbent upon the NRM’s electoral commission to ensure its primaries are orderly.
“Short of that, the primaries could end up being a replica of those in 2010 – fireworks,” Kaheru says.
Nadduli says the party has to “streamline the register”.
It is not clear if this has been done starting from when the party conducted its lower local council primaries and today’s primaries.
Also, an arbitration committee, headed by party number two, Moses Kigongo, has been going around the country, trying to establish what caused the chaos during the lower council primaries in some areas.
The Daily Monitor
UM– USEKE.RW
