What next for troubled FDC?

Less than a week after its messy special National Council meeting, the Forum for Democratic Change’s (FDC) country chairman has said he is reaching out to the party’s founding leader in a bid to reconcile warring factions.

Mr Wasswa Birigwa spoke to Monitor late on Monday evening in the face of the bitter falling-out between the Opposition group’s leaders, with the internal strife having intensified, leading to a mass boycott of the Friday, July 28 meeting.

The former diplomat said he hopes his efforts to reconcile Dr Kizza Besigye with the embattled faction currently in-charge at FDC headquarters in Najjanankumbi, Kampala, will restore some sort of unity to the party.

“We have just finished the National Council and, as the national chairman, I am still reviewing it. But as of now, we have to reconcile. We are planning to meet with several people, including our founding father [Dr Kizza Besigye] so that we reunite,” Mr Birigwa said.

It is not known whether his peace overtures will be enough to placate the faction that is vigorously opposed to the continued leadership of Mr Patrick Oboi Amuriat and Mr Nathan Nandala Mafabi.

In the meantime, the silence from Najjanankumbi has been deafening as both the party president, Mr Amurait and Secretary General Mafabi remained unreachable for comment by phone.

On Monday, party spokesman, Mr Ibrahim Ssemujju Nganda said their side “will soon hold a meeting to agree their actions, which could include abandoning the troubled FDC ship.

“The considerations of leaving the party, or any other action, will be decided after this planned meeting,” he said.

With all options on the table, the frontline in the battle for FDC’s soul has shifted to the disputed report of the party’s special elders’ committee.

The committee was set up in November 2022 after Dr Besigye asked about suspicious money coming into FDC reportedly from State House. He had also questioned how FDC managed to buy brand new pick-up trucks yet it was cash-strapped in the run-up to the January 2021 general elections.

Its findings, which cleared Mr Mafabi and Mr Amuriat of suspected corruption in the campaign finance mobilisation that year, have, however, been rejected by Mr Ssemujju and other senior members. 

Some say the elders committee did a shoddy job, with one such view being presented this week by party firebrand, Ms Doreen Nyanjura.

She published a highly critical 10-point response to the report in an angry online post, noting that: “Without any evidence of investigative effort made by the said committee, the report is not worth the paper on which it was printed and therefore must never have been submitted to the National Council”.

Her Monday rebuttal echoed earlier misgivings of FDC’s deputy leader in Buganda, Mr Erias Lukwago. On the eve of the ill-fated national council meeting, Mr Lukwago (also Kampala lord mayor) told a television political talkshow that the elders’ report was altered to exonerate the accused.

A deputy to Mr Lukwago at city hall, Ms Nyanjura is a member of FDC’s policy-making National Executive Committee and spoke with insights from that vantage position in her criticism, but the committee chairman, Dr Frank Nabwiso defended his team’s work yesterday.

“We did our work with credibility and a high degree of integrity. Whoever is saying that what we did is unsatisfactory, should go ahead and appoint a new committee to dig deeper and produce a report which will please them,” he said.

Dr Nabwiso said it is okay for a report to be challenged, but pushed back against attempts to paint him as corrupt.

“I have never said that I am too holy or too clever, but for as far as I know myself, I attended three universities in the world; I was a member of Parliament, I have worked in organisations… At least, I know I am credible, I have never been accused of anything in this country,” he said.

Boycotting the report
They might not have said it to his face, but the fact that Dr Besigye, Mr Ssemujju, Mr Lukwago and more than 150 delegates boycotted Dr Nabwiso’s presentation at last Friday’s meeting spoke volumes.

It was apparent that many members did not identify with the elders’ findings -- a reality which dawned on Mr Amuriat. The party president told journalists on Friday evening that his camp was reaching out to Dr Besigye to patch things up.

“Without him, we are nothing,” Mr Amuriat said.

It is now up to him and Mr Birigwa to show that they can restore calm through peace talks. The national chairman has also left the door open for dissatisfied members such as Ms Nyanjura to petition.

According to Ms Nyanjura, the Nabwiso report never provided details on the Shs7 billion ‘evil money’ that was allegedly sneaked into the party from State House during the 2021 election campaign.

The report, she said, does not show any attempts to establish and follow the money trail by examining the party’s audited financial statements, bank statements, loan agreements, records of any collateral used to obtain credit, or through hiring a professional fraud examiner.

When asked about this apparent oversight, Dr Nabwiso said that their mandate was restricted to investigating the Shs300 million which Mr Nandala said he took to Dr Besigye’s residence for safe-keeping.

Dr Besigye is reported to have since paid back more than Shs224 million of that money.

Ms Nyanjura also questioned why the elders stopped short of establishing exactly how much “dirty money” found its way into FDC when they only referred to Shs2.7 billion, whose legitimate sources were not revealed.

Similarly, she wondered why they allowed the secretary general to get away with no explanation for where the money to buy two new pick-ups came from.

She accused them of not pressing for details about the cars, instead being comfortable with Mr Mafabi’s word that they were registered in the party’s names, which was diversionary.  The Nabwiso committee’s impartiality was also questioned by Ms Nyanjura. She observed that the committee was assisted in its work by headquarter staff who were under the supervision of the secretary general, who was himself a subject of the investigations.

“I am surprised that the elders did not see that this creates a contradiction that greatly impugns the outcome of their investigations and could easily be cited as the reason they produced such a shoddy, lop-sided report,” she wrote.

In the same vein, she wondered why the elders did not report the resignation of their committee vice chairperson, Mr Stanley Katembeya, who left in protest at the perceived partiality of other members towards the accused.

While Mr Birigwa is holding out hope for a settling of diferences, Ms Nyanjura poured cold water on the chances for reconciliation and tolerance, as recommended by the elders. She said the prevailing environment of “intimidation, mistrust, evasion of accountability, connivance, violence and deceit perpetuated by the party leadership”, undermines peace efforts.

“These vices have eaten up the soul of the party and since the opportunity to deal head-on with some of these ills through the Eeders’ committee has been lost, the party will only survive if these are addressed urgently … before the next delegates conference,” she wrote.

Yesterday, Dr Nabwiso maintained that the secretary general came clean, including confessing how he lent FDC money from personal resources.

“Somebody has told you and even presented statements of the transactions, what did they want us to do? On one side, you have Dr Besigye who is alleging without proof and on the other side there is Nandala defending himself with proof. If you are the one, what would you do?” he wondered.

“Dr Besigye while interacting with our committee said that this money was from State House but refused to tell us the person who told him so. In common sense law, if you make an accusation, it is you to prove. Even the Lord Mayor, a senior lawyer, knows this but Dr Besigye failed to prove it to us. Nandala proved to us, with documents, the source of the money,” he said.

Dr Nabwiso insisted that “the presented report was a summary of what the members told the committee and the evidence they gave us [because] we could not write each and everything there”.

He said the committee sat and agreed to move on three issues: the source of Shs300 million that was taken to Dr Besigye’s home by Mr Nandala; the management of the 2021 polls and the issue of elections versus activism.

“We moved with Katembeya during the entire investigation until the time of writing the report when he wanted us to implicate Nandala yet the evidence had exonerated him,” he said.

Is Nabwiso report valid?
During the Friday meeting, only 58 delegates inside Najjanankumbi voted to adopt the report. Eight voted against, while 14 abstained. At least 251 delegates had arrived earlier in the day but many left amidst the chaos, leaving less than 80 to discuss the report findings.

According to Ms Nyanjura, Article 20 of the FDC constitution says the National Council must have a minimum of 250 members although it is silent on the quorum for any meetings of the major party organs (National Council inclusive).

She said the omission suggests “utmost good faith is assumed on the part of the leaders to at least borrow from established best practices... These dictate that for a meeting of such an important organ … to be considered quorate and to take decisions that bind the party members, at least one third of the eligible and voting members ought to be present...”

With only 66 delegates voting, the assumed quorum threshold of one third remained unmet, she noted.

“With less than 30 percent of the eligible members voting, the outcome and all decisions of such a meeting become highly impugned and must not be left to bind other members of the party” Ms Nyanjura noted.