Bukenya is an outsider, says top NRM leader
By John Stephen Katende
13th Sept 2010
An outsider?
A flamboyant and wealthy NRM leader has said Vice President Prof. Gilbert Bukenya is an outsider who doesn’t know and will never be allowed to know how the NRM actually works.
Sitting comfortably by the pool-side at a posh Hotel buried in the middle of Bugolobi’s up market residential area with the evening breeze blowing over his greying head, this top NRM ideologue who spoke to Uganda Correspondent on condition of anonymity, also said VP Bukenya is a very naïve Professor.
“Our VP is a very naïve Professor, I am sorry to say. He has completely forgotten who he is and how he became VP. He never fought. That makes him an outsider who will never be allowed to know how the NRM machine really works. How else do you explain his vow to remove Mbabazi”, the NRM leader wondered.
Already in his late fifties, perhaps even early sixties, this NRM leader had responded to Uganda Correspondent’s request for comment on the news that Prof. Gilbert Bukenya had vowed to unseat the all powerful Security Minister Amama Mbabazi from the post of NRM Secretary General.
Last week, in its report about Bukenya’s vow to unseat Mbabazi, a daily newspaper quoted Bukenya saying, “…at the moment, decision making for the party is a preserve of the secretariat. I want to stop that by running a people-based party. This mess has been created by a highly centralised system that knows everything others do not know. The NRM is a mass political party which cannot be managed well with the current centralised secretariat”.
The NRM secretariat is headed by Security Minister Amama Mbabazi. As Secretary General, he is also responsible for all the party’s internal operations. That makes him one of the most powerful people in the NRM; probably only second to the NRM national party Chairman Yoweri Museveni.
“Even some of us who have sacrificed our reputations for the party but happened to have been born in the wrong place know very little about Museveni’s plans for both party and country. So who is Bukenya to say he wants to change the way the NRM works”, he wondered.
While addressing journalist at his home in Ntinda before the party’s Delegates Conference last weekend, Prof. Bukenya had said he would, if elected, want to see massive changes in the way the NRM is run. “I want to recommend that the party’s electoral commission be made independent of the secretariat, made bigger, and given enough resources to effectively manage the party’s polls”, Bukenya said.
He had earlier attributed the national chaos, violence, vote rigging, and intimidation that characterised the party’s primaries to having an NRM secretariat that is highly centralised and ineffective. That, by anyone’s interpretation, could be seen as a direct attack on the powerful NRM Secretary General Amama Mbabazi.
In a fresh twist to this saga that emerged after our interview with this top NRM leader, the government owned New Vision newspaper, quoting an undisclosed source, reported on Saturday 11th September that Vice President Bukenya had been “…urged to stand down for Security Minister Amama Mbabazi in the race for the position of Secretary General in the National Resistance Movement party”.
If that turns out to be case, then clearly, you have to admit that this NRM cadre, although out of the influential ruling circle, still had his fingers firmly on the NRM pulse; even if he seemed to deny it. END. If it’s Monday, it’s Uganda Correspondent. Never miss out again!
