NRM and Museveni: A dictatorship that oils the opposition

By Ofwono Opondo 

Galatians 3:13 says, “Cursed is everyone who’s hanged on a tree”. Five years since the 2021 general elections, pointers show that opposition political serpents in the National Unity Platform (NUP), Democratic Party (DP), Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) and infertile Alliance for National Transformation (ANT) are in disarray from within and outside. 

The infant so-called Popular People's Front (PPF), formed by political crybabies Erias Lukwago, Kizza Besigye, Wasswa Birigwa and Ibrahim Ssemujju Nganda, is most likely a stillbirth, and yet a spider’s web has only caught flies. 

The cards in NUP, DP, FDC and UPC are collapsing in spectacular ways because of internal intrigue, conspiracies, sabotage, open hostilities and apparent infiltration, that their centres cannot hold under the evolving explosive fallouts as the cavalcades draw down.

In a metaphorical sense, these forthcoming general elections are actually for the National Resistance Movement (NRM) to lose if it doesn’t tidy up its many blatant careless acts. 

Even if voters don’t transfer their anger against NRM for lack of better alternatives, as in 2021, and recently Kawempe North, they could just stay away from the ballot boxes. 

All opposition groups have been driving an old cliché and false narrative conjured by former humiliated UPC ‘Iron lady’ Cecilia Atim Ogwal between 1986 and 2005, and may she continue to rest in peace, that the NRM and Museveni were a ‘monolithic dictatorship’. 

Now, most have seen that each opposition group or leader since Milton Obote, Ogwal, Tiberio Okeny Atwoma, Michael Kaggwa of DP-Mobilisers Group, Paul Ssemogerere, Aggrey Awori, James Rwanyarare, Yonasani Kanyomozi, Besigye and Patrick Amuriat, among others, have each, one by one, fallen. 

It is still hard to tell for how long the current opposition will stand.

NRM and Yoweri Museveni are a ‘dictatorship’ that majorly on its own enacted a law that recognises political parties opposed to them, including having the Leader of Opposition in Parliament (LOP), and all opposition parties in Parliament heavily funded from state coffers, commensurate to their numerical strength — and they utilise the money given in ways they deem fit. NRM, certainly, should be a benevolent dictatorship, not the worst kind. 

Ofwono Opondo

NRM is also a ‘dictatorship’ that permits the Opposition in Parliament to present annually an alternative State of the Nation Address (SONA) and Budget, following the government ones, and both are actually discussed on the floor of Parliament. 

NRM is a ‘dictatorship’ that has ceded the leadership, management and control of all accountability committees like PAC, COSASE and government assurances, among others in Parliament, to the obtusely shallow opposition parties which have turned them into financial and other forms of aggrandisement. 

And let us be charitable, for lack of a better word, NRM and Museveni is a ‘dictatorship’ in which the leaders of opposition parties are hands-in-glove with government, including for DP president Norbert Mao and Betty Amongi of UPC as cabinet ministers. 

To be magnanimous, looking at the physical appearances of the most vocal, even virulent opposition leaders like Robert Kyagulanyi (NUP), Joel Ssenyonyi (LOP), Lewis Rubongoya (NUP-SG), Mao, Jimmy Akena (UPC), Nandala Mafabi (FDC), Lukwago, Ssemujju Nganda, sneering Medard Segona, ever frothing Muwanga Kivumbi or Mathias Mpuuga now in near limbo, and their many sidekicks, you cannot say they are not round-faced, oily and shiny in well-polished suits, neckties and shoes to match. 

A ‘dictatorship’ usually drives its political opponents underground, stifles their physical presence, commercial businesses, forces them into unsafe exile and, in some cases, assassination. 

NRM must make opposition groups own up to their many contradictions, so as to beat them politically in the next elections — and NRM should not panic in fear and retreat that it is getting past time to explain, defend its record and what it truly stands for. 

Procrastination and vacillating in trepidation in the face of opposition propaganda cannot make NRM win this battle in 2026.