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NUP victories, failures one year later
Members of the National Unity Platform (NUP) during a meeting early last year. PHOTO | MICHAEL KAKUMIRIZI
What you need to know:
- After promising during their 2020-2021 election campaign that they were “removing a dictator”, the National Unity Platform one year later has settled into the familiar role of Opposition parties before it such as the FDC and DP.
The National Unity Platform (NUP) political party put on an impressive show during last year’s general election.
Led by the singer Bobi Wine, or Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, NUP, which was founded in August 2020, overtook established, decades-old parties like the Uganda Peoples Congress, the Democratic Party, and Forum for Democratic Change to become the second-largest party by the official number of presidential votes and number of parliamentary seats.
Masaka Municipality MP Mathias Mpuuga explained on UBC TV on January 20, 2021, a week after the general election, that “[We] had a very popular candidate [Bobi Wine]. This helped us to pick up low hanging political fruits in very many areas.”
Nearly all the NUP’s members of Parliament came from Buganda.
About 80 percent of Uganda’s economy is located in Buganda, and it’s also in Buganda that there has been the most land-grabbing, eviction of squatters, and the pressure of unemployment in the capital Kampala and other main towns.
NUP swept Buganda just by being perceived as an emergent and powerful voice representing collective Buganda frustration with the ruling NRM party and government.
This is the “low hanging fruit” that Mpuuga referred to. The NUP won Buganda without having to put in much effort.
For decades, Baganda had grown more and more despondent about their position in Ugandan politics.
They were perceived and perceived themselves as stepping stones for other regions to rise to power but once that goal was achieved, Buganda was forgotten.
Baganda presidential candidates like Paulo Ssemogerere (1980, 1996), Muhammad Kibirige Mayanja (1996), Abed Bwanika (2006) and John Ssebana Kizito (2006) were seen as gentlemanly but weak.
These Baganda candidates lacked the one quality that has become unstated as key to the Ugandan presidency: a military or militant image.
The military symbols used by People Power and NUP, from red berets to red overalls and military-style titles like “commander” energised Buganda into backing the People Power formation.
Here, at last, was a Baganda political group that was angry and militant, and did not apologise for being angry and militant.
In the 2021 general election, NUP all but wiped out the NRM from Buganda, including from NRM’s birthplace, Luweero District.
What has been the record and activity of the NUP as the main Opposition party, though?
The biggest achievement by the NUP since the election has been to remain largely intact as a party.
This might seem obvious, but it is no small feat. NUP’s sweep of Buganda was a body blow to NRM and there is nothing the NRM state has not thought about or tried out to disorganise NUP since the election.
Disinformation in the media, offers of bribes for NUP MPs to defect, police pressure and more have all been attempted but by and large NUP has remained close as a political unit.
NRM has managed to woo some local councillors away from NUP, but it would consider compromising an NUP Member of Parliament the real catch.
Most NUP MPs when they appear on radio or TV, still sound as defiant and determined as they did during the People Power days.
Having noted achievements, how about the NUP’s failures?
After promising during their 2020-2021 election campaign that they were “removing a dictator”, NUP one year later has settled into the familiar role of the Opposition parties before it such as the FDC and DP.
NUP critiques government policies and blunders, and condemns the continued detention of NUP supporters and MPs being held in prison.
It was formed mainly as a grassroots protest group against the excesses of the Museveni government, just as it was with the FDC.
Moving past the protest phase and on to the bureaucratic, secretariat phase of policy formulation has also proved difficult to achieve.
Many NUP members of Parliament come from economically deprived areas and in that wave of popularity that swept through Buganda, voters tended to elect MPs who were like them -- not too well-educated, lacking in administrative experience, and so not very well suited for the formal procedures of parliamentary debate, committee paperwork, and policy formulation.
One of the reasons many voters outside Buganda hesitated over electing NUP candidates was that the party had too much of a lowbrow image.
While that “ghetto” image was important for energising the grassroots, especially in Buganda and Busoga, an image of intellectual polish was important in expanding NUP’s appeal countrywide, but the party since the election has not achieved that yet.
The ruling UPC government in the 1960s and to a degree NRM in the years after 1986 had vibrant ideology departments, often publishing pamphlets, magazines and so forth stating their political views on various matters.
NUP has so far not shown this intellectual and ideologue side, either through concept papers published by its secretariat or on its various Internet channels.
It also has not organised and led a public protest action, such as the “Walk-to-Work” campaign of FDC in the wake of the 2011 general election.
The FDC’s four-time presidential candidate Col Kiiza Besigye warned the NUP that its belief that it could single-handedly achieve victory at the presidential poll would end in disappointment.
The structural hurdles facing FDC in previous general elections, that is, state machinery appointed by President Museveni would be the same standing in the way of NUP’s quest for State House.
NUP brushed off Besigye’s advice and in the end, Besigye was proved right.
In terms of inter-party cooperation, NUP also leaves much to be desired.
While there is an informal alliance between FDC and the Justice Forum or Jeema, NUP does not appear to be in an alliance or a working understanding with any other opposition party.
An open war of words has broken out between DP president Norbert Mao and NUP.
Although this is not necessarily about ethnicity, the NUP-Mao row will reinforce in some areas in northern Uganda the feeling that NUP is a Ganda nationalist party.
Therefore, while the NUP dominates the Opposition in terms of numbers and visibility, it is in a sense isolated not just from NRM but from the other Opposition groups and this makes it hard for the party to call up a general mass action by the public.
For NUP to become a truly national party, it needed during this first year to hold its dominant ground in Buganda, build on the momentum it gained in Busoga in 2020, and make inroads into at least the Bantu-speaking areas of eastern Uganda like Busia and Bugisu.
In the second year, 2022-2023, NUP would have begun to establish a foothold in northern and the non-Bantu areas of eastern Uganda where the political ground is ripe for change.
None of this has happened yet.
NUP has, instead, become a conventional political party in competition with the NRM for power and public influence, and is bogged down by squabbles with other Opposition parties, and Kampala and parliamentary politics.
In that regard, the spirit of People Power -- the mother umbrella group of NUP that originally was intended as an all-encompassing, national grassroots movement uniting Ugandans of all shades and walks of life is dead.
Overall, then, NUP has achieved a respectable amount, given the enormous pressure from the NRM state that it faced from its People Power stage to its acquisition of its name from Moses Kibalama, to participating in the 2021 election and becoming the second largest political party in Parliament.
To have remained intact through the last 12 months is a credit to the party too, given the amount of sabotage thrown its way by the NRM state.
