Butambala Woman Representative Aisha Nalule Kabanda, and Former Butambala Woman MP Lydia Daphine Mirembe. Photos | File
For many years, there was a notion that Butambala District was an Opposition stronghold. This was partially on the account that Mr Muhammad Muwanga Kivumbi of the National Unity Platform (NUP) has dominated the Butambala County Member of Parliament slot since 2012 when he won a by-election.
The Opposition, however, struggled to concretely turn its popularity into winning the Butambala District Woman Member of Parliament slot. That was until the so-called umbrella wave in 2021 catapulted Ms Aisha Kabanda, who decamped from the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) to NUP, to victory. Even if the Opposition had struggled to lay claim to the Butambala Woman MP slot, the NRM has struggled to claim this position ever since the district was carved out of Mpigi District in 2010.
When Butambala, a largely Muslim-dominated area, became a district, Ms Geraldine Namirembe Bitamazire, who held onto the Mpigi District Woman MP slot for two decades, decided to stand in Butambala for the same position. In Butambala, Ms Bitamazire, a non-Muslim, contested in the NRM primaries, where she beat Ms Mariam Nalubega, who had been a national youth female MP.
After Ms Nalubega vociferously voiced rigging claims, she decided to stand as an independent. “I’m not a rebel [against the NRM], but I was cheated. And the Constitution allows me to stand as an independent. The public will be the High Court,” Ms Nalubega said back then. But it should be noted that even during her stint as a Youth MP, Ms Nalubega’s political victories were as an independent. She nevertheless still sat on the NRM side in Parliament.
In fact, when Ms Nalubega decided to stand as an independent in the youth elections, which are normally dominated by candidates backed by the NRM because of the skewed Electoral College system, many concluded that she had committed political suicide. She, however, proved them wrong by trouncing her rivals. In 2011, she repeated the same feat as an independent, albeit allied to the NRM. Back then, she ended the political career of Ms Bitamazire, who was then also the Education and Sports minister. “We concentrated on guarding the ballot during the campaigns after seeing what we had seen in the primaries,” Ms Nalubega revealed.
Mirembe victorious
Ms Nalubega found herself on the losing end in 2016 after she was beaten by Ms Lydia Daphine Mirembe, who stood as an NRM-leaning independent. Ms Nalubega came third in the poll behind Ms Mirembe and Ms Kabanda, then an NRM member. Before venturing into elective politics, Ms Kabanda was famous on radio political shows. She passionately defended NRM positions on the aforementioned political shows, and it was not surprising when President Museveni tapped her to be the Kampala Resident City Commissioner (RCC). In 2015, per the law, she resigned from being an RCC and declared her intentions to stand in Butambala on the NRM ticket. “I’m tired of implementing what others have been deciding. I want to be part of the legislative process and be in a better position to lobby for my district, which is among the poorest in Uganda,” Ms Kabanda said.
Ms Kabanda, who cited bribery of voters, not only challenged Ms Mirembe’s victory at the High Court but also took the matter to the Court of Appeal. It would also rule against her. “We are satisfied that on the evidence available on record, the trial judge evaluated the evidence that was before him properly and reached the right decision. The burden was on the appellant to prove her case to the satisfaction of the court by adducing sufficient evidence to the end, but failed to do so,” Justices of the Court of Appeal, Steven Kavuma, Remmy Kasule and Kenneth Kakuru, ruled.
Former Mpigi Woman MP Geraldine Namirembe Bitamazire, and Former Youth Legislator Mariam Nalubega. Photos | File
Kabanda switch Yet in the years that followed the 2016 elections, Ms Kabanda, who is married to the Justice Forum or Jeema’s Omar Kalinge-Nyago, had joined the People Power bandwagon that later morphed into NUP. “I saw a group of soldiers shooting at young people just because they were supporting [Robert] Kyagulanyi, [the NUP principal], and I wondered how just liking a person can lead to your death. So anyone who is telling you a different story is telling you lies,” Ms Kabanda said. She later said she dumped NRM because it had, for a long time, reneged on its promises. “The NRM had taught me its agenda and its objectives, but after some time, I assessed and concluded that they never intended to fulfil their objectives. They said their objectives were people, but this was in theory, not in practice,” Ms Kabanda, who was once employed as one of Museveni’s political assistants, explained her move to the Opposition. Ms Kabanda’s decision to decamp to NUP around 2018 tore to shreds NRM’s plans in Butambala since they had counted on her to represent the party again in 2021.
The ruling party’s top leadership, led by Mr Moses Kigongo, who was considered to be one of the opinion leaders in the district, resorted to courting Ms Mirembe. With NRM ratings in Butambala proving to be low, Ms Mirembe wanted to retain a mask of being an independent whilst allied to the ruling party. Those who knew her said Ms Mirembe had told her supporters and campaign agents that she had her fair share of political problems and wouldn’t want to carry the NRM cross in a district where voters, mostly young people, were increasingly becoming hostile to it, mainly protesting President Museveni’s long stay in power.
“The truth is that despite being home to many NRM heavyweights, people in Butambala are lately very hostile to NRM to the extent that carrying its flag would automatically make any candidate unpopular. This is why we can’t allow madam to abandon being independent and carry the NRM cross. She indeed has her problems but which are easier to explain away than the NRM fatigue,” Ms Mirembe’s agents said in the run-up to the 2021 polls.
Togikwatako backlash
But it seems Ms Mirembe’s decision to vote with the NRM to edit out the presidential age limit from the Constitution, thus allowing Mr Museveni to rule until death ended her political career. It is said that when she was traversing Butambala seeking opinions from her constituents, Ms Mirembe was told by crowds in unambiguous terms that she shouldn’t vote to remove the age limit caps from the Constitution. Yet when she went to the floor of Parliament, Ms Mirembe made clear that her constituents had instructed her to remove the age limit caps. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t go down with voters in Butambala. It’s against that backdrop that NRM insisted and fronted Ms Mirembe as its candidate for the 2021 elections. For the first time, the district voted for a Woman MP who wasn’t allied with the ruling party—Ms Kabanda. Her transformation from being an auxiliary mouthpiece of Museveni’s regime to being a NUP cadre has been quick to the extent that Mr Kyagulanyi quickly tapped her as NUP’s deputy secretary general.
Even when there was a simmering revolt in NUP’s influential diaspora, Mr Kyagulanyi tapped Ms Kabanda to head the committee charged to put out the fires. Though some of the people within the diaspora wanted Mr Kyagulanyi’s power to be checked, Ms Kabanda’s committee recommended that the NUP principal, who will be running again for the presidency, should continue wielding unchecked powers, something that some party members in the diaspora have rejected and warned that it could potentially foment more divisions. “In light of this, therefore, the committee recommends that in order to keep the NUP diaspora strong and insulated from infiltration by the dictatorship, the president [Kyagulanyi] continues to appoint the top diaspora leadership, which would, in turn, recommend to him persons to be appointed to lead the different regions and chapters.
This will give the people opportunity to participate, but at the same time, the secretariat shall have the opportunity to vet the nominations before the president finally appoints them,” Ms Kabanda’s report reads in part. Whilst NUP will send Ms Kabanda again to stand in Butambala, it’s not clear who will carry NRM’s flag in the district woman MP race. Ms Mirembe has signalled her intent to be the NRM flag bearer again but it remains to be seen if she will win the party’s ticket.
ABOUT BUTAMBALA
Butambala is one of the districts which were carved out of the Greater Mpigi. The others are Gomba and Wakiso. Butambala came into being in 2010. It is bordered by Mpigi District in the north, Gomba in the south, Mityana in the west and Kalungu in the south. The district has two town councils and four sub-counties. The main activity in the district is agriculture, with ginger as the main cash crop. Coffee is starting to catch up. The district has 25 parishes and 142 villages.
Source: Butambala District Local Government website
