Why NRM top officials don’t want VP job

John Adams, the pioneer vice-president of the United States of America, says the post he held between 1789 and 1797 is “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived”. 
If you are looking for a country where that quote could aptly apply, you don’t have to look beyond Uganda.  
Three years ago, Vice President Edward Kiwanuka Ssekandi was dispatched by his boss, President Museveni, to preside over the inaugural memorial lecture for Benedicto Kiwanuka, Uganda’s first black Chief Justice, who on September 21, 1972, was hauled out of his High Court chambers by Idi Amin’s henchmen - never to be seen again.  

READ: Museveni has not appointed a new vice president- State House

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Speakers, who included then Chief Justice Bart Katureebe and Samuel Wako Wambuzi, the three-time Chief Justice, warned government officials that there were ominous signs that Uganda was sliding back into the dark days of the Idi Amin era. 

Last on the podium was Mr Ssekandi.  He sent the gathering into rapture when he said he personally had no views in respect to the ensuing debate but rather he only came to the function “to deliver President Museveni’s speech”.  
It was on 19 pages and the former Bukoto Central MP, who was ousted from the House where he has been a mainstay for the last 25 years in the recently concluded general polls, read it verbatim and the half-day event was concluded.
For a decade he has been Vice President, Mr Ssekandi has been subjected to social media ridicule, with many young people wondering what specific role he does.  
They have not stopped at that; they have posted monthly reminders recapping to their followers how Mr Ssekandi, somehow, is still the Vice President.  
   
Nevertheless, if there was ever any doubt over how the position of Vice President has been watered down, the current battle over the Speakership, which has pitted current Speaker Rebecca Kadaga against her Deputy Jacob Oulanyah, has left nothing to imagination.
In 2011, when Mr Ssekandi was tapped by Mr Museveni for the vice presidency, having served as Speaker for 10 years, he took on that role without any qualms, giving way for Ms Kadaga, who had served as Deputy Speaker for the same period, to actualise her dream of becoming Uganda’s first female Speaker.  
But this time round, a suggestion that Ms Kadaga or Mr Oulanyah should take up the vice president role has triggered anger from both camps. 
 
Once it became clear that Mr Oulanya is not bowing out of the Speakership race as he had done in 2016, Ms Kadaga’s minions led by Asuman Basalirwa, the Bugiri Municipality MP, although have no such prerogative, gave the Deputy Speaker an alternative: Take up the vice presidency.   
Mr Oulanyah’s camp returned fire, saying it should be Ms Kadaga, like Mr Ssekandi did in 2011, to take up that role. 
In recent weeks, the rumour mill had it that Mr Museveni was seriously considering tapping Ms Kadaga as his deputy, an idea the Kamuli Woman MP has outrightly rebuffed, pointing to wanting to be her own boss.  
  
“Those who are proposing that I become the Vice President, let that position be given to others. There are many things we have achieved because of that chair (Speaker),” Ms Kadaga said on March 28, 2020, while soliciting votes from members of the Busoga Parliamentary Caucus at Hotel Africana in Kampala. 

“Being a Vice President, you deputise another person. Here, I head an arm of government. That is the difference,” she added.
Although Article 8 of the Constitution somehow doesn’t clearly define the role of the Vice President when it says he or she will deputise the President as and when the need arises; and (perform such other functions as may be assigned to him or her by the President, Prof Frederick Ssempebwa, who was a member of the 1995 Constitutional Commission which helped draft the current Constitution, says Mr Museveni’s governance style in which he micromanages everything is partially to blame. 

“That style doesn’t develop institutions,” Prof Ssempebwa says. “Because if the President does everything, leaving attending parties and funerals to the Vice President, then the Vice President becomes an assistant, he doesn’t carry out any executive powers. That’s because of the current practice of politics. Institutionally, the Vice President should be the one taking over.”   
Many constitutional lawyers and political scientists interviewed for this story admitted that the Constitution doesn’t help matters when it leaves the Vice President’s tenure at the mercy of the President. 

“A Vice President can be appointed and ‘disappointed’ by the President in a matter of a week,” Prof Ssempebwa says. 
“If you are there, you are not secure. You better have a position where you are secure. That is why you find that most vice presidents have been picked from Parliament. At least they are secure in their substantive roles as MPs.”  
The way Mr Museveni has unceremoniously fired his previous vice presidents could be a point of concern to many people who would have wanted the job.  
Having served as Mr Museveni’s first Prime Minister, Dr Samson Kisekka was appointed in 1991 as Mr Museveni’s first Vice President.   

When Prof Yusuf Lule died, Mr Museveni needed another high-ranking Muganda within his National Resistance Movement (NRM) party and Dr Kisekka filled that void.
Nevertheless, many political analysts believe that when Dr Kisekka started forging alliances with Buganda nationalists, who were demanding a federal system of governance, Buganda kingdom assets, inter-alia, Mr Museveni, it is said, smelt a rat.  The President consequently fired his deputy, infamously in a radio communiqué, while he was overseas on an official trip in 1994. 

On his return, Dr Kisekka, who had no idea of his dismissal, was informed by Entebbe International Airport staff how he couldn’t use the VIP lounge, and apparently, the deflated medical doctor had to take a taxi to his country home in Wakiso District.  
Dr Specioza Wandira Kazibwe, Dr Kisekka’s successor, besides being appointed as Vice President, was also later chosen as minister for Agriculture. But being the minister of Agriculture preoccupied her most and it landed her in trouble as in the late 1990s, she was ensnared in a grand corruption scandal. 

She was accused of mismanaging the valley dams project, leading government to lose Shs4 billion ($2 million), giving Mr Museveni a chance to fire her as a minister in 1999, but retained her as Vice President until 2003.  
Dr Gilbert Bukenya replaced Dr Kazibwe and served until 2011.  In his book, In the Corridors of Power, Dr Bukenya claimed the news of the end of his tenure as the country’s Number Two was delivered to him via a phone call he received from a State House staff, who merely said Mr Museveni had sent him regrets for not including him in the post-election Cabinet. 

Yet upon being appointed as Vice President, Dr Bukenya, although he is known for being jocular or cavalier in politics, had noticed that actually, the vice president had no clearly defined role.
Without involving the Ministry of Agriculture, Dr Bukenya started moving all over the country promoting the planting of Nerica upland rice, claiming it was to eliminate poverty among the rural poor. 
    
“Upland rice has received positive reception because it ensures food security and is a source of income to those who grow it,” Dr Bukenya, a former dean of the School of Medicine at Makerere University, explained.  
“There is no reason why Uganda should import rice from Asia. Asia’s simplest way of making money has been through selling rice to Africa. I saw this as an opportunity to get people out of poverty and I am glad that upland rice has spread countrywide.”

However, Mr Museveni and his NRM didn’t buy into Dr Bukenya’s story that he was fighting poverty using upland rice.  
The belief was that actually, Dr Bukenya, who had told the media that the government he was serving was full of “mafia”, wanted to be President and he was now under the guise of promoting upland rice constructing a parallel power structure, taking advantage of that fact he is a Muganda and Catholic; two of the most populous groups in Uganda. 

Dr Bukenya’s moment of humiliation came in June 2011, after he had been fired as Vice President when he was sent to Luzira prison after he was charged at the Ant-Corruption Court with superintending over the fraudulent obtaining of luxury cars used to transport dozens of heads of state during the 2007 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (Chogm). 
Although Dr Bukenya had cried upon being remanded to Luzira prison, he later obtained bail, and the charges were subsequently dropped by the Inspector Government of Government (IGG), in a move that was seen to be more political than legal.

In order to alter the balance of power between the President and the Vice President, Prof Ssempebwa, who headed the Constitutional review commission of the early 2000s, says they had recommended that Uganda should adopt the American system where the Vice President is not appointed but rather he is a running mate. 
“That system means that a president just cannot fire his or her deputy,” Prof Ssempebwa says. “It means they are on the ballots when people are voting them but our recommendations were ignored.”   

What Prof Ssempebwa is suggesting mirrors what Kenya did when following recent constitutional amendments. A Kenyan President cannot just whimsically fire his deputy like the case is in Uganda.  
The Kenyan Constitution gives the National Assembly and the Senate the power to impeach the deputy president. So the president has to work with the country’s two-tier parliamentary system if he or she wants to get rid of his deputy.

Away from politics, Prof Sabiti Makara, a lecturer at Makerere University’s Department of Political Science and Public Administration, insists that the vice presidency is not appealing because unlike the Speakership, it has no budget. 
“The Vice President is basically under the Office of the President,” Prof Makara says. “He or she does not have any influence. He has to take orders from the President on what to do, but the Speaker has a lot of influence. The office of the Speaker has a big budget.” 
     
According to the Daily Monitor of March 29, 2021, in the Financial Year 2019/2020, the Speaker’s office spent more than Shs3.7b. The exact amount [Shs3.7b] was maintained in the 2020/2021 budget. Apparently, the money is meant for the Speaker’s office and it facilitates Speaker’s travel in-land and abroad, among other commitments.

The law

Essentially, Article 98 of the Constitution, when plainly interpreted, makes the Vice President the second in command of the country, putting him ahead of the Speaker of Parliament and the Chief Justice, a power structure that has the President at the pinnacle. 
“The President shall take precedence over all persons in Uganda, and in descending order, the Vice President, the Speaker and the Chief Justice shall take
precedence over all other persons in Uganda,” Article 92(2) says.

Article 109 (1) also makes the Vice President’s office somehow enticing when it says: “If the President dies, resigns or is removed from office under this Constitution, the Vice President shall assume the office of President until fresh elections are held and the elected President assumes office in accordance with Article 103(8) of this Constitution.”
Section 4 of Article 109 says: “Whenever the President is for any reason unable to perform the functions of the office of President, the Vice President shall perform those functions until the President is able again to perform those functions.”