Kiggundu will organise 2011 polls, says Museveni

President Museveni says the Eng. Badru Kiggundu-led Electoral Commission will not be disbanded as demanded by the opposition and some donors.

“Someone says unless you get rid of Kiggundu, there will be no elections. There will be elections. No one will intimidate us. This speech is deliberate; there’s nothing accidental in here,” he says in a State of the Nation address, marking the beginning of the last session of the Eighth Parliament.

Mr Museveni says he knew Eng. Kiggundu, then President of the Uganda Institute of Professional Engineers, when he invited him to attend one of their professional gatherings in Kyambogo, a Kampala suburb.

He says Eng. Kiggundu was never a first choice to head the EC but he was picked only after some former government officials, now in the opposition, resisted the nomination of Mr Ssebunya, Uganda’s current Ambassador to Libya.
“This is not part of Scotland or Britain. This is the Republic of Uganda and we shall never be intimidated,” he says.

Turning to the unresolved question of the marauding Lord’s Resistance Army insurgents, the President maintains the rebels have been “degraded” and their leader, Joseph Kony, will soon be “accounted for.”

“We have captured fifty-eight of those terrorists; killed 380 of them and rescued 630 abductees,” he says, chronicling successes registered since the launch of Operation Lightning Thunder in December 2008.

According to Mr Museveni, 118 of the rebel fighters have surrendered, nearly 400 of various collection of weapons recovered together with 11 lap top computers and as many as 44 military radios.

Only “a few” of the LRA rebels are remaining in the bushes, he says.
Mr Museveni welcomes President Barack Obama’s recent signing into law of the ‘Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009 passed by Congress, requiring US to commit more resources and lead multilateral efforts to protect civilians and end the LRA menace.