Combo: Njeru Municipality MP Jimmy Lwanga (L) and Moses Lukanga Musanje (R), who is aspiring for the same seat. PHOTOS/COURTESY
For the entirety of the current term of the 11th Parliament, the National Unity Platform (NUP) has been obsessed with how Mr Jimmy Lwanga came to get a party’s card in the run-up to the 2021 polls. The reason is that no sooner had Mr Lwanga joined Parliament than he started hobnobbing with President Museveni’s son, Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba. At the time, Gen Muhoozi was jockeying with the idea of being on the presidential ballot in 2026. In 2022, rumours started to emerge that several NUP lawamakers, including Mr Lwanga and Mr Twaha Kagabo (Bukoto South), were having secret meetings with Gen Muhoozi and/or his surrogates. Mr Lwanga eventually publicly met Gen Muhoozi in 2023, but he denied ditching NUP. The Njeru Municipality lawmaker said he wanted the first son to connect him to President Museveni. Mr Lwanga, who calls himself mbwa ya ku kyaalo (i.e. a popular person in an area), insisted that he was so desperate to meet the President since 1986 because he wanted him to fulfil pledges made to his constituents over the years.
“My sole aim was for Gen Muhoozi to help me meet the President because he made so many pledges to the people of Njeru Municipality. It is those people who told me to go and remind the President,” Mr Lwanga said, adding, “I even brought the prime minister [Robinah Nabbanja] to Njeru, and she promised to take our complaints to the President, but never did. Our term is getting finished, and this is the chance I got to meet the first son. He said that he would help.” NUP leaders and supporters were not only shocked by Mr Lwanga’s meeting with Gen Muhoozi but also the reverence he gave both the first son and the President.
“Those [Muhoozi and Museveni] are our enemies. You can’t be fraternising with them, yet you are our member,” said Mr Muhammad Muwanga Kivumbi, the Butambala County lawmaker.
Ideological differences
To remove any shadow of doubt, Mr Lwanga was appointed by Gen Muhoozi to be the coordinator of his Patriotic League of Uganda (PLU) in what was called the Greater Mukono region. “I think I left NUP because ideologically we weren’t in agreement. I believe in competition ideology, not chicken fights of who met or who talked to whom. I represent over 180,000 people. They are from different political parties,” Mr Lwanga said.
Those who are familiar with NUP say choosing Mr Lwanga to be its flag bearer in 2021 was a mistake from the outset. This is because the vetting processes were corrupted to favour those with money, thus ignoring apparent red flags. “Many things are better left unsaid because the party has to move on since it has been recognised that giving Lwanga the card was a mistake from the beginning,” a source within NUP told Monitor.
Those who are interested in revisiting the whole scenario say that those who vetted NUP’s candidates ignored the fact that Mr Lwanga had for long been a National Resistance Movement (NRM) youth winger. They add that it was on the basis of such a history that Mr Lwanga went on to become a councillor and speaker of Njeru Municipality.
“His NRM roots were known by everyone. His mother is a known NRM supporter and financier. And on top of that, he wasn’t known within People Power, but still, for some reason, he was trusted to carry the party’s flags in Njeru,” a person familiar with NUP’s grassroots arrangements in Njeru told Monitor. On his part, Mr Lwanga retorted thus: “I joined NUP because of fights with the NRM, but I think Gen Muhoozi is God sent.”
The one that got away
Mr Moses Lukanga Musanje is the person whom NUP overlooked en route to giving Mr Lwanga the party flag in Njeru. He insists he had joined the People Power movement long before it morphed into NUP. “I’m the founder of People Power in Buikwe District. Right now, I’m the NUP chairperson in Buikwe District. I moved throughout Buikwe spreading the People Power gospel before anybody else,” Mr Musanje said.
Once he was overlooked by the NUP leadership, Mr Musanje decided to stand as an independent. “The reason why I stood as an independent was because Jimmy [Lwanga] came in one week to the vetting process. He had won the councillor seat in the municipality on an NRM ticket. I used to move around the constituency telling people about People Power, and he was one of the people who used to fight our message publicly.
How he came to win the NUP ticket is something I know, but I don’t want to disclose,” Mr Musanje, whose 513 votes saw him place seventh in the race that attracted 12 contestants, said. Last year, when NUP president, Me Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, alias Bobi Wine, had a mammoth rally in Njeru Municipality, he apologised for giving Mr Lwanga the ticket. Albeit without mentioning his name.
“There are some people here who used to be part of us, but because of their greed they joined the dictator [Museveni]. Please forgive us for trusting the wrong people,” Kyagulanyi said, adding, “We trusted them because of experience, age, and history, but as you know, greed kept on growing. As we were looking for a new Uganda, some were looking for cars; have they just started trusting the dictator or were they already working for him?”
Righting a wrong?
With Mr Lwanga no longer in NUP ranks, Mr Musanje feels that 2026 offers voters of Njeru Municipality a chance to rectify the “mistake” they committed in 2021. “Even after I was defeated in 2021, I reconciled with the party. I was accepted. I have been combing villages to ensure that we win next year. I don’t go into NUP just to get a party ticket. I’m ideologically driven. Some people are even in NRM, not because they like NRM, but because it’s the easiest way to get into Parliament. And if voters swing to the Opposition, he will leave the NRM and join NUP. I’m different,” he said.
Musanje insists that it will take an NRM miracle to win Njeru Municipality. “We are on the ground. This area is now a stronghold of NUP. We have been engaging people through physical meetings and the media.
The people of Njeru have not had an MP for the last five years, but we shall rectify that,” Mr Musanje said. For Mr Lwanga, it seems the gamble he took with Gen Muhoozi and his PLU vehicle did not quite pay off. He has since directed the group’s members to join the NRM. “PLU is a civic organisation, not a political party. You are absolutely free to contest. For now, I advise you to subscribe to the NRM. That’s the political party that’s politically aligned to our values,” Gen Muhoozi directed last year after it became apparent that his father will stand again in 2026.
Former NRM bastion
NRM can take confidence from the fact that until 2021, it had dominated the politics of Njeru Municipality or Buikwe North as it was known then. NRM’s dominance of this area started from 1996 when Mr Onyango Kakoba, then a Jinja-based New Vision Bureau chief, swapped the often-modest life of a journalist for a relatively more affluent one as a legislator. Mr Kakoba, who represented Buikwe North for four straight terms, gained fame when, in 1998, he questioned the government’s efforts to fight corruption after a parliamentary report implicated four ministers, including Sam Kutesa, the Attorney General and Solicitor General, in corruption.
Though he was an NRM member, Mr Kakoba famously dubbed the entire Executive ebicupuli, loosely translated as counterfeits. “Is the government really committed to fighting corruption? If it is committed to fighting corruption, is it possible yet we have so many people in the Executive who abet corruption? The whole Executive looks like it is bichupuli throughout,” Mr Kakoba said.
Mr Kakoba was replaced in 2016, when NRM’s Paul Musoke Ssebulime took the seat after defeating the Forum for Democratic Change’s Charles Kalazani with a difference of 5,879 votes. There is nothing to write about Mr Ssebulime’s tenure in Parliament apart from getting involved in a messy relationship with the then Buikwe District Woman Representative Judith Babirye. In 2020, Mr Ssebulime was defeated twice by Ms Diana Nyago in the heated NRM primaries, prompting him to stand as an independent in the 2021 parliamentary elections.
Mr Ssebulime said the NRM primaries lacked transparency. He insisted that all indicators had shown that he was leading the race, but he was surprised that when he reached the party offices, the NRM electoral boss, Mr Tanga Odoi, had instead declared Ms Nyago as NRM’s flagbearer for Njeru Municipality. In the eventual elections, Ms Nyago came second with 7,234 votes, Ssebulime came third with 6,736 votes, while Mr Lwanga emerged first with 13,676 votes. For 2026, NRM will now have to decide whether they give their flag to Lwanga or Nyago or even Ssebulime. Still, Mr Musanje doesn’t expect any serious threat from the NRM. “Buganda has heard enough of the NRM. They lost the ground and we shall not allow them to recover from the defeat they faced,” Mr Musanje said.
