Why the marriage between People Power, DP bloc is falling apart

There was some secrecy in 2020 when Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, popularly known as Bobi Wine, and his close associates, including his brother Fred Nyanzi, decided to turn the People Power Movement into a political party now known as National Unity Platform (NUP).

Those who were locked out of the conservations to have NUP formed were Kyagulanyi’s allies from what was known as Democratic Party (DP)  bloc – Mr Mathias Mpuuga, (Nyendo-Mukungwe), Mr Medard Lubega Sseggona (Busiro East), Ms Betty Nambooze (Mukono Municipality), and Mr Muwanga Kivumbi (Butambala County), among others.

Sources say these veteran politicians came to know about NUP a few days before the party could be launched, with an umbrella as its symbol.

The idea by these veteran politicians was to retain DP tickets and then run under the People Power coalition, but Kyagulanyi told them they were either with him, in NUP, or they were out.  

“We all decided to join NUP since it had gained traction in Buganda,” one of the former DP bloc members said on condition of anonymity.  

Even after NUP swept Buganda in the 2021 General Election with Mpuuga as the party’s deputy president and later appointed Leader of Opposition in Parliament (LoP) – suspicion and mistrust have continued to define the relationship between the former DP bloc members and Kyagulanyi’s inner circle in NUP.

Most of these tensions have been reverberating underneath the scandal in which NUP leadership asked Mpuuga, who at the end of last year was dumped as LoP, to resign from his position as Parliamentary Commissioner, on account of accepting Shs500 million from Parliament as “service award”. 

NUP, which interpreted the award as some form of corruption, claimed that Mpuuga had admitted to wrongdoing and has since apologised and “was strongly advised that the moral thing to do in the circumstances is to step down from his role as a parliamentary commissioner with immediate effect”.

Once Mpuuga refused to resign, Kyagulanyi released a dossier, among other things, saying there is no law which provides for a ‘service award’ to a LoP and other parliamentary commissioners. 

“…the so-called ‘service award’ was an extreme case of greed not rooted under any law. The citizens of Uganda would want to know where that money came from. We are speaking of a collective amount of Shs1.7 billion! Under what vote was this money spent? Because Parliament, like every other institution, must spend per the approved budget. In addition, the law provides that the LoP is at the same level as a Cabinet minister, and no Cabinet minister is entitled to a service award during or after their term of office,” Kyagulanyi said.    

Politically, Kyagulanyi cast doubt on the role of Mpuuga’s exceptionalism as LoP.   

“As all former Leaders of the Opposition have confirmed, none of them ever received a ‘service award’. What was special about the service of Hon Mpuuga to warrant a service award that was never given to his predecessors?” Kyagulanyi asked.  

But Mpuuga has framed this latest standoff as the final phase in Kamwokya’s efforts to get rid of him politically under the guise of holding him accountable for corruption.   

“The campaign to character assassinate me is deliberate and I am perfectly aware. It’s well-orchestrated and well-funded. I am ready for the worst if it takes this sacrifice to return sanity and common sense to our politics,” Mpuuga said. 

To understand the relationship between Mpuuga and Kyagulanyi, one has to go back to 2021 when NUP had leapfrogged the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) as the biggest Opposition party, thus it had to select the LoP.  

Sources say though the experienced trio of Mpuuga, Sseggona, and Nambooze had thrown their hats in the ring, Kyagulanyi had a preference for Manjiya County Member of Parliament (MP) John Baptist Nambeshe, who had just crossed from the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) and his right-hand man, the Nakawa West MP, Joel Ssenyonyi.  

Ssenyonyi, the former journalist who was backed on the account of a DNA of People Power, would fail on the account of being a novice and Nambeshe was new to Opposition politics.  

After hesitation, Kyagulanyi picked Mpuuga because as NUP’s deputy president for Buganda region, he had played a key role in ensuring that NRM was defeated in Buganda.  

Though it was never openly admitted, the DP bloc members, Mpuuga inclusive, have been seen within NUP as journeymen who might not be committed to the party, but they are there because of circumstances.  

In 2011, Muwanga, Mpuuga, Nambooze, and Sseggona, though DP members, reinvented themselves as members of  Ssuubi 2011, a pressure group that made Buganda Kingdoms’ interests key to its objectives, and they supported FDC’s Kizza Besigye’s presidential campaign.

In the 2016 General Election, they shifted allegiance and backed former prime minister Amama Mbabazi, who had broken ranks with his ally President Museveni.

With such history, they joined NUP and Mpuuga has made it clear that no sooner had he entered office of the LoP than Kamwokya laid strategies to undermine him.

The first standoff was on the staff that should work in Mpuuga’s office that was to be nominated from NUP’s secretariat. The staff nominated by NUP were given contracts that were bound to expire at the same time as Mpuuga’s tenure. 

However, by parliamentary policy, Mpuuga wanted to make them permanent staff but when he sought an opinion from NUP’s secretariat it never came.  

Mpuuga’s tours across the country, which he framed as monitoring and evaluating services provided by the government, were interpreted by Kamwokya as an attempt to create a power base that he would use to challenge Kyagulanyi’s hold onto NUP. 

“The LoP’s office is well facilitated and that caused alarm in Kamwokya because they thought Mpuuga would use that as a launch pad for NUP’s presidency or presidential flag bearer,” a Kampala City Authority (KCCA) councillor, who is close to Mpuuga, said.

“We now think all of us who are close to Mpuuga are under threat and in politics you never know what happens next,” added the councillor who was part of the DP bloc.

Indeed, when Mpuuga was touring NUP stronghold Mityana last year, he was accompanied by only Joyce Bagala, the Mityana District Woman MP.  

Mr Francis Zaake, the Mityana Municipality MP, who is deemed to be a close ally of Kyagulanyi, was a no-show.    

“They [Kamwokya] have been shouting at me everywhere I go. I was caught between [Prime Minister Robinah] Nabbanja and my people who didn’t like what I had been doing. They have been threatening MPs who accompanied me,” Mpuuga said when he appeared on Buganda Kingdom-owned Central Broadcasting Services (CBS) recently.   

In the Opposition reshuffle that saw Mpuuga dropped as LoP, Bagala who was seen as a close ally of Mpuuga, was also dropped from her Information and Anti-Corruption docket. 

“You would see that they have been trying to eliminate people who are close to Mpuuga, but we are going to see how to handle it politically,” an NUP member said.

Some of Kyagulanyi’s allies such as Derrick Nyeko, the Makindye East MP, have come out openly to back efforts by NUP to cast Mpuuga as corrupt.

Nyeko said on June 16, 2022, when he and a few other colleagues made public the alleged Shs40 million doled out to MPs from the supplementary budget, Mpuuga acted as if he was unaware of what was happening until undeniable evidence caught the attention of Kyagulanyi.  

“More details will be unveiled in the future, and if I remember correctly, during a shadow cabinet meeting, when members asked for guidance regarding that money, our leader dismissed us by saying we were all grown-ups capable of making our judgments individually. He did not provide the expected political leadership as the Leader of the Opposition at that time, which tempted people like Hon Kagabo [Bukoto South] and others,” Nyeko claimed.

Such utterances have predictably not gone down well with Mpuuga’s supporters around the Greater Masaka region who have made their opinions clear.

“We shall not accept undermining and mudslinging of our leaders we have been with for many years,” a communication authored by Masaka NUP leadership said in part. 

In his statement, Mpuuga opened a can of worms when he said he can’t be “deterred by small-group-family interests being peddled to blur the bigger picture of how the party is being managed without transparency”.

In essence, Mpuuga became the first NUP leader to openly accuse Kyagulanyi of running a party like his personal estate. 

Kyagulanyi’s brother Nyanzi, is NUP’s mobilisation chief and for months accusations have mounted that Kyagulanyi is using him as a proxy to undermine Mpuuga.

This is an accusation that has been denied but with lines drawn, the feeling is that more accusations are going to surface.  

Of the former DP bloc members, Sseggona has come out strongly accusing Kamwokya of mismanaging the entire debacle.  

“As a party, we need counselling on how institutions are run. We have our inexperienced colleagues who aren’t good at that, but they think they are clever. We need to put in place a committee for such issues. If we don’t do that we shall surrender the party to our captors. I hope our party will be able to survive this,” Sseggona said.

Nambooze preferred being cagey, saying the debacle between Mpuuga and NUP had history. 

“The meeting had a background that I can’t mention here since some things were meant to be confidential,” she said.