Basalirwa vs FDC: What are the real issues?

Disgruntled. Jeema president Asuman Basalirwa. PHOTO BY ABUBAKER LUBOWA

What you need to know:

  • Cause. The feud stems from FDC’s decision to announce on May 19 that Ms Eunice Namatende will be its candidate for the Bugiri Municipality parliamentary seat, which Jeema president, Mr Asuman Basalirwa, is also eying, writes ISAAC MUFUMBA.
  • The NRM candidate, Mr Baka Stephen Mugabi, who was at the time attached to the President’s Office took the seat with 17,010 votes, while Mr Patrick Mwondha (UPC) came second with 6,217 votes and Mr Basalirwa third with 3,630 votes.

As the former British prime minister Harold Wilson put it in the mid-1960s, a week is a long time in politics.
The Justice Forum party (Jeema) was about two and a half months ago in bed with the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC). Jeema supported Mr Paul Mwiru, the FDC candidate, in his battled against Mr Nathan Igeme Nabeta of the ruling National Resistance Movement for the Jinja East parliamentary seat, but Jeema is now up in arms against FDC, accusing it of betrayal.

The feud stems from FDC’s decision to announce on May 19 that Ms Eunice Namatende will be its candidate for the Bugiri Municipality parliamentary seat, which Jeema president, Mr Asuman Basalirwa, is also eying.
FDC president Patrick Oboi Amuriat made the announcement a day after the collapse of talks between FDC and Jeema. The talks had been held at the initiation of Jeema with the view of convincing FDC not to field a candidate.

Those in the know have since revealed that the talks were merely a public relations exercise for FDC.
Mr Amuriat, who is still reaching out to those who felt aggrieved by his shock victory over Maj Gen Mugisha Muntu late last year, was not about to risk further polarisation of FDC members by endorsing Mr Basalirwa over FDC’s own.
If a deal was ever going to be reached, it would have had to have been initiative by FDC and Jeema officials in Bugiri District, agreed to by the candidates, and then be endorsed by the party.

War of words
Officially, the talks collapsed because Jeema “absconded” from what was called the second round of talks. However, Jeema officials insist that FDC leaders had known that they would not be turning up on May 18 as a follow up to the initial talks that were held in Najjanankumbi on May 9.
However, those familiar with what transpired during the first meeting have since revealed that FDC had insisted that Mr Basalirwa subject himself to vetting which would have involved him competing with Ms Namatende for the flag bearer’s position.
“If he wants let him come and we subject him to the (vetting) processes of FDC. After all we are not the ones who went to Jeema (seeking an alliance). It came to us,” FDC secretary general Nandala Mafabi told Saturday Monitor on Wednesday.
FDC’s handling of the matter has rattled Jeema. In a video gone viral, the spokesperson of Jeema, Mr Abdnoor Kyamandu, described FDC officials as ‘selfish’ and ‘dishonest’.

“They don’t believe in Opposition unity except when it is in their favour. I think it is a waste of time dealing with dishonest people,” he says.
Mr Mafabi, however, says FDC is not bound to cooperate with any other local political party.
“We don’t have any cooperation agreement with Jeema or any other political party. Jeema was in The Democratic Alliance (TDA) along with the Democratic Party (DP) [backing former prime minister Amama Mbabazi in the 2016 election while FDC fronted Dr Kizza Besigye],” Mr Mafabi says.
He adds: “We never formed a party to give away our support. We formed a party to take power. We are building a strong party with structures. We are building a membership and leadership. You do not achieve that by unnecessarily ceding ground.”

Sharp contrast
What is going on contrasts sharply with what transpired in the run up to the March 15 parliamentary by-election when Opposition politicians put aside intra-party and inter-party differences in the interest of defeating the NRM.
Mr Amuriat was joined by his predecessors, Maj Gen Muntu and Dr Kizza Besigye, on the podium despite the obvious differences between the latter two over leadership style and the direction that the party should be taking.
Bugweri County MP Abdu Katuntu, who fell out with both Dr Besigye and Mr Nandala Mafabi, seemed to forget the points of departure. The trio shared a campaign podium.

At the same time, Mr Norbert Mao, the DP president, seemed to put the long held suspicions about FDC aside. Mr Mao had since the run up to the 2011 general elections when FDC joined the Inter Party Cooperation (IPC), a loose coalition that brought it together with the Conservative Party (CP) and the political pressure group Suubi 2011, been accusing FDC of trying to destabilise DP.
DP followed the example and tone set by FDC. Mr Mao, and the Lord Mayor of Kampala, Mr Erias Lukwago, and the Mukono Municipality MP, Ms Betty Nambooze, put aside their differences and they joined their FDC counterparts to campaign and protect the vote.
Jeema president Basalirwa also made two appearances at Mwiru’s rallies. The result was a victory for Mr Mwiru with a total of 6,654 votes while Mr Nabeta got 5,403 votes.

In the immediate aftermath of Mr Mwiru’s victory, Mr Mao lavished praise on the Opposition for the unprecedented show of unity.
“Jinja is a watershed. It has spoken louder than any words that there is need for unity. People think that Mr Museveni will be pushed out with one big push, but no. It will be through a blow by blow account,” he says.
Back then Mr Mao was optimistic that the cooperation could evolve into something more cohesive, but he hastened to add that it would be dependent on whether the parties stuck to the principles that guided the way they cooperated in Jinja.

Misplaced optimism
Mr Mwambutsya Ndebesa, a lecturer of political history at Makerere University is, however, quick to point out that the optimism that came with what had transpired in Jinja was misplaced.
He argues that whereas Mr Mao had talked of principles that had guided the cooperation, those principles remained unspoken and that there was no undertaking by any of the parties to stick to them.

“The cooperation that we saw in Jinja was not based or guided by clear principles, values or norms. It wasn’t a unity of a clear purpose. There was no threat tying those parties. They never agreed on a direction or purpose,” Prof Ndebesa argues.
The circumstances too, he adds, seemed to favour such a level of cooperation as there was only one strong Opposition candidate in the race.
“In Jinja they didn’t really have a choice because the only strong Opposition candidate in the race was Mr Mwiru, but once there is more than one strong Opposition candidate, the parties are bound to disagree,” he says.

That seems to be the case in Bugiri Municipality where both Mr Basalirwa and Ms Namatende are very strong candidates, at least on paper.
Mr Basalirwa a former guild president of Makerere University, first contested for the Bukooli North parliamentary seat during a by-election that was called in March 2008 after court nullified Mr Abdul Balingirira Nakendo’s 2006 elections victory on grounds that he did not have the requisite academic qualifications.

The NRM candidate, Mr Baka Stephen Mugabi, who was at the time attached to the President’s Office took the seat with 17,010 votes, while Mr Patrick Mwondha (UPC) came second with 6,217 votes and Mr Basalirwa third with 3,630 votes.
In 2016 Mr Basalirwa returned to challenge Mr Baka Stephen Mugabi for the seat, but he came second with 8,319 votes against Mr Mugabi’s 21,675 votes.

However, in 2016 Mr Basalirwa’s fortunes nose-dived. He was relegated to fourth position with 2,942 votes, the lowest vote haul he had ever got since he started contesting for the Bukoli North seat.
The seat was taken by the NRM’s candidate, Mr Gaster Mugoya Kyawa, who got 19,877 votes. Mr Baka Stephen Mugabi who stood as an independent candidate after losing the NRM primaries came second with 16,568 votes while Mercelino Mangeni Egesa came third with 6,563 votes.
On the other hand, Ms Namatende has contested twice for the Bugiri Women’s parliamentary seat. The first time was in 2011 when she took on NRM’s Justine Kasule Lumumba. Namatende came third with 17,072. Ms Lumumba won the seat with 34,544 votes while Ms Bateganya Ancillia came second with 28,728.

Ms Namatende returned to the contest in 2016, but was beaten into second place garnering 40,817 votes while the winner, Ms Agnes Wejuli Taaka, of the NRM got 42,231 votes.
The February 19 declaration of Ms Taaka as the winner sparked off protests that left 11 people including a Senior Four Student, Mr Stephen Ssekayu, injured as police engaged rowdy FDC supporters in running battles in Bugiri Town.
While it is true that the two contested in different constituencies the argument is that Mr Basalirwa’s fortunes have been on the wane while those of Ms Namatende have been on the rise. The greater, they argue, cannot be giving way for the lesser.
“Figures do not lie. Though they contested for different seats, Namatende got 4,700 votes in Bugiri while Basalirwa got only 300 votes in the same town,” says Mr Latif Waiswa, the FDC’s publicity secretary in Bugiri Town.

“How long will it last?” was the question that many asked following the show of unity in Jinja. Well, it has not been for long. Now that the squabbling is back are there any prospects of ever seeing the Opposition cooperating again?
“Yes. We have agreed, but only in the area of vote protection because it is only one person, the NRM, who cheats all of us,” says Mr Mafabi.
So where do the events in Bugiri leave the prospects of a united Opposition?
Prof Ndebesa says those prospects remain, but a dream for as long as the rules of engagement remain undefined.
“They must formalise their relations and also develop a mechanism for managing conflicts that may arise amongst them. Short of that anything can disorganise them,” he says.
This is one way to look at it. The other way is considering whether it may be better for each party to concentrate on building its individual capacity.