So what if Bbumba joined  NRM before it was formed?

Syda Bbumba’s claims that she joined the National Resistance Movement (NRM) at the age of 14 has made people speak in acrid tongues. Now even a whole national daily has gone about fact-checking Bbumba’s claims based on her birthdate and of that party’s founding.

When will Ugandans ever learn the NRM way of doing things? For compassion’s sake, the poor 69-year-old lost her constituency of 20 years to some upstart and possible riffraff. She was 14 in 1966, a time in Uganda and Buganda best known for the Mengo Crisis. These alone could cause a lot of memory lapses but that’s not really what happened.

According to the records, Bbumba was born in 1952. This means that at the time she clocked 14, the NRM calendar had still yet to be founded so it was 1966 and not the 1980s.
At least Bbumba did not go around poking a fat index finger onto a church baptismal record book to claim her birthdate here. She spoke naturally and she meant everything.

A true NRM cadre is supposed to espouse the values of Number One. You cannot go around claiming that you are one of the people with whom the dear leader founded the party and fail to demonstrate utmost vision in this.
Yes, there is only one man with a vision for and in this country but those who fall to his feet will always be allowed some semblance of vision, too. And Bbumba is one such. 

What the former minister did not say explicitly is that by 1966, she was already seeing things. She saw the founding of the Movement and saw it morph into a party that would play Ugandans for decades, with her help, of course.
By 1966, Bbumba knew she would be defeated in January 2021 but typical of the politician she had become, she tried to defeat fate even where Oedipus failed miserably.

I tried to goad her into doing what politicians do best after such articles are published by the media but she                 refused to claim that she was misquoted.
“So what if Bbumba joined the NRM before it was founded?” she asked in the fictional interview. 
“A party is not like a panty that you just walk into a supermarket and pick  up from the stalls on impulse.”

I replied with this emoji that only women know what it means. The one with huge eyes looking sideways-up as if in shock, as if in surprise, as if in awe… True to the woman in her, she quickly noted my apprehension.
“Ah! I didn’t mean that Uchumi thing. You journalists and your minds, can’t you let that matter rest? The supermarket is long dead,” she joked.

Bbumba went on to explain that a good party like NRM is fermented for years from an idea so that it stands strong with deep roots.
“Even Bbumba myself, I wasn’t born just like that. I was an idea I had formed for many years before my mother conceived me,” she said. 

“If I had been born just like that, on impulse, like these many funny parties being formed around… ha, you know how most of these parties end, no? Do you remember Prof Barya’s party, for instance? I don’t. Why? Because it was formed just like that.”

Bbumba said political statements are not “mathematical measures that should be subjected to 1952-plus-14” because at some point of necessity, “that 1952 can become an indisputable 1972 with evidence neatly availed.”
Politics, she added, is politics and mathematics is mathematics and that the two only meet in economic figures.