NUP: A gathering danger that govt, NRM shouldn't ignore

By Ofwono Opondo 

The National Unity Platform (NUP) opposition party, essentially a tribal outfit, riding on a largely false social discontent, has threatened to make Buganda, ‘a no-go area’ for President Yoweri Museveni and the National Resistance Movement (NRM) in the forthcoming general election. 

Probably it is not clear to them if, NRM too, was to make its very broad strongholds a ‘no-go area’ to NUP and its boisterous leaders. 

It appears, that having been left to physically torment and assault NRM supporters during the aftermath of the constitutional changes of removing the presidential age-limit in 2017, NUP leaders and activists have got emboldened to do as they like. 

It is the law, that every Ugandan as long as is law-abiding, is free to traverse and indeed live in any part of Uganda and so, NUP leaders who think that politics in ‘Buganda’ should exclusively be theirs, ought to be decisively confronted and rejected both through law enforcement measures and democratic civil political mobilisation led by the NRM. 

While publicly crying and shedding tears of a victim, NUP leaders, especially Robert Kyagulanyi, MP Muwanga Kivumbi and Joel Besekezi Ssenyonyi, currently the Leader of Opposition in Parliament (LoP); are turning into a present and increasingly a gathering grave danger for a pluralistic democracy and society. 

It is important and necessary, for these NUP leaders, to perhaps step back and engage in self-introspection before they travel down this slippery road, or indeed climb up a greasy pole from which they could fall with a heavy thud. 

The demise and evident limbo in which UPC, DP and, very recently FDC, all previously troublesome riding rough shoulders find themselves in today, ought to be good lessons to those with good listening ears and political eye sights. 

NUP, with its so-called ‘foot soldiers’ that foment trouble at the slightest, is akin to UPC’s ‘youth-wingers’, DP-mobilisers and Uganda Young Democrats, and FDC’s aggregators of the walk-to-work, defiance and civil disobedience. 

Listening to the verbal violent rhetoric and observing the body language of NUP lead activists, one cannot fail to notice a group hell-bent on sowing hate politics of tribal and sectarian chauvinism and actual physical violence against those they perceive to be ‘enemies’.

Ofwono Opondo

On social media, NUP activists are prowling, taking advantage of the technology of artificial intelligence to generate and spread false rumours, incite hate, conjure fake news, disinformation, photoshops and even announcing the death of those they see as their, and Uganda’s ‘problems’. On the ground, on roads, streets and at public gatherings, they tout and provoke ill-feelings and unnecessary confrontations, completely unbothered of the larger ramifications of their actions in the long-run to Uganda’s body politick. 

And, unfortunately, the truncated opposition groups, that pass for opposition political parties — FDC, UPC and DP — are completely out of form to face up this growing threat posturing as an alternative. 

The rise and growing adversarial, anarchist, fearsome NUP-style gang politics, is an indictment on the NRM, which came as a revolutionary and national liberation vanguard organisation to infuse fresh life in Uganda that had been traumatised by the two-and-a-half decades of Milton Obote, Idi Amin Dada, and the short-lived illiterate military of Gen. Tito Okello Lutwa and Bazilio Olara Okello.

Even in the remotest possibility of NUP, in its current form and style, let alone the evident shallowness, as a possible alternative to lead Uganda, should frighten most Ugandans and ought to accorded the same treatment given to the former FDC. 

In that sense, NRM, using its leverage in government and society, has an urgent obligation to Ugandans to recalibrate its own and Uganda’s politics to generate freshness, hope, and a new consensus towards truly harmonious political engagements. 

The politics of war-war and jaw-jaw cannot create a conducive environment for an inclusive and shared socio-economic transformation that Uganda so much desire.