NUP just gave Museveni reason to push the hate button harder

The National Unity Platform (NUP) unveiled its headquarters in Kawempe Division on the outskirts of Kampala, becoming the first Ugandan political party that has not been in power to secure a modern, well-furnished home.

The home consists of four recently bought buildings, including a little storied structure that has been under renovation over the past few months and is painted, as you would expect, in the party’s trademark colours of blue and red.

Anyone who does not live in rented accommodation knows how great and liberating it feels to own a home. In many countries, people spend decades repaying mortgages just so they can have a place they call home.

For the NUP, this achievement seems much bigger than it really is, considering that it has come at a huge cost. Everyone who has been following political developments in Uganda knows that President Museveni’s government has been doing everything in its power to eliminate the NUP.

Photos of the party’s head office shared on social media showed walls covered with portraits of several NUP supporters killed by security forces. 

Two of those supporters, Ritah Nabukenya and Francis Ssenteza Kalibbala, sustained fatal injuries after security forces deliberately drove into them.

And there is a National Geographic documentary entitled Bobi Wine: The People’s President, which lays bare the full extent of the atrocities committed by the regime in its quest to annihilate the NUP. The NUP is the only Opposition political party whose supporters continue to be arrested illegally and held incommunicado.

But now that the party is demonstrating it is becoming well established and is on course to achieving more, it has given Mr Museveni another reason to press the hate button even harder. He will try to do all that is humanly possible to bring it down.

The NUP has to attract Mr Museveni’s attention for obvious reasons. It is the only party that seems organised; nearly all political parties have been disorganised, driven by infighting and control for power. 

The Democratic Party, derisively called the ‘Dead Party’ by its critics, is a moribund political organisation with almost nothing to show for its being the oldest party in Uganda. It has never completed its own home.

The Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC) managed to build Uganda House, where it is based, but that is largely because it was in power in the 1960s and early 1980s. Even then, it is now a shadow of its former self — and its chances of ever regaining state power are very slim if not zero.

The mess in the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) shocked Ugandans and has been grabbing the headlines for weeks on end; the Alliance for National Transformation (ANT) is barely known despite being headed by a respected leader, Maj-Gen Mugisha Muntu; Jeema and the Conservative Party (CP) seem like briefcase political parties.

As for the governing NRM, the least said the better. The party is shockingly dysfunctional, and when it rented office space in Nakasero, it sometimes failed to pay rent. In 2013 and 2014, newspapers reported this embarrassing failure, saying the landlord had been forced to resort to legal action.

The NRM has since bought the premises it was renting, but the fact that it could not build its own home, could not pay rent, yet it uses State resources, just shows it is not fit to lead Ugandans.

The NUP’s journey to state power is only beginning, of course, and no one knows if it will end in success. The party faces an avalanche of problems, the vast majority coming from the State. That said, the beginning is impressive.

Mr Musaazi Namiti is a journalist and former
Al Jazeera digital editor in charge of the Africa desk
[email protected]    @kazbuk