By Mulengera Reporters
State Minister in charge of Water Aisha Ssekindi has declared she is done carrying the NRM flag and won’t be seeking reelection to remain Kalungu Woman MP on the rapidly shrinking ruling party ticket. During an interface with voters in the volatile highway township of Lukaya on Wednesday, Ssekindi made it clear that she wasn’t going to waste time seeking the NRM flag because she has credible information that the process has already been rigged against her.
She told a cheering crowd of mostly young people in the Lukaya township that a high level decision inside NRM had been taken to inflate the party membership register in Kalungu with over 7,000 ghost voters who will be used to rig the exercise against her in favor of Hellen Nakeya who is believed to be a political ally of ex-defense Minister Vincent Sempijja who isn’t on good terms with Ssekindi. This conflict escalated after the 2021 elections when the NUP candidate Francis Katabaazi Katongole defeated Sempijja and became the MP for Kalungu East.
There were claims that Ssekindi, who is the only NRM MP candidate who escaped the NUP wave in Kalungu, had connived with the umbrella to turn Sempijja into a sacrificial lamb of some sort. The Sempijja supporters have been counting down to 2026 as the year when they are going to successfully revenge against Ssekindi.
Ssekindi told supporters at the Lukaya meeting that she had come to the conclusion that taking part in a clearly rigged NRM primaries exercise will amount to digging one’s political grave. “The new guidelines require that once you participate in the primaries, you bind yourself not to stand as an independent after being rigged. I’m wiser than putting such a rope against my neck. I’m not going in those things and I’m here to inform you my people that I’m going to seek reelection as an independent. I’m not going to waste time with primaries because it has already been rigged using those 7,000 ghost voters that have been smuggled into the Kalungu register already,” Ssekindi declared, according to CBS radio.
Her supporters were very much excited with many of them making it clear that marketing her for reelection was going to be very easy among Kalungu voters since the political baggage of having to defend the failures of Gen Museveni and the NRM is finally off her shoulders.
The bitter truth, which even some of the former Ministers have lately been discussing on one of their WhatsApp forums, is that the prolonged incumbency (of roughly 40 years now) has made Gen Museveni hard brand to sale in many parts of Uganda because the young people (who resent him like a plague because of his indifferent failure to tackle corruption, impunity, land grabbing and rampant human rights violations by his security forces) are the majority everywhere. This problem of resentful young people who don’t like the political status quo is Uganda-wide and not merely a Kalungu or Buganda problem.
The elderly, who easily fell for the twebaka kutulo (at least he brough peace and we sleep at night) messaging are easily outnumbered and actually in most communities, many of them have died and villages and settlements are full of young people born post-1986. It’s common to find an LC1 chairman or the entire executive full of members who were born post-1986. This is common place and these are now the opinion leaders in their communities and very resentful of the Museveni status quo.
Many of the young people are angry, in Ssekindi’s Kalungu and elsewhere, because of poverty and hopelessness and they have nothing to hope for. They are also resentful of the fact that their parents, even when they religiously supported Gen Museveni and his NRM party, have died in total destitution and left them with nothing or very little, if at all. Many are jobless and actually unemployable because of the inappropriate education system into which Gen Museveni has been sinking hundreds of billions over the years.
Ministers like Ssekindi, who are simultaneously having to seek votes from such people, have to shoulder the burden of explaining things about which they don’t even have believable answers. In Kalungu, where she hails from, young people are angry that the government released billions to compensate their long gone parents for the loss and devastation they endured as a result of the past political instability which destroyed their once very vibrant Masaka Cooperative Union and the cash was merely stolen.
This is one issue that is angering many young people in Masaka and Gen Museveni has never gone there to publicly explain to the people why no appropriate compensation was made for the lost pride of the sub region that was Masaka Cooperative Union. Even there was never any genuine consultations to involve the affected cooperators’ families as the compensation figures were being arrived at.
People would only hear about all this in the media. There are many other grievances in the deeply Catholic Kalungu that are causing people to be aggrieved including the perceived maltreatment of Geraldine Ssali who hails from there. She is a daughter of the soil and has strong family links there. She has a lot of backing of Catholic clerics in the area who claim she was merely sacrificed as the cooperatives cash was eaten by some other actors and not her.
Ex-Premier Kintu Musoke hails from Kalungu but people like him, no longer have appetite nor even energy to go explaining stuff for the NRM. Actually, Kintu Musoke these days also grumbles about the political governance of the country and is actually more sympathetic to his Kabungo neighbor Erias Lukwago today than to the NRM cause. He mostly lives in Lungujja in Kampala where he freely speaks his mind among community members regarding what has gone wrong in Museveni’s Uganda. He complains of powerlessness and inability to have any audience with his former boss Gen YK Museveni.
So, by abandoning the NRM, knowledgeable sources say that Ssekindi is going to find life much easier while seeking reelection because she will simply be having to market herself for reelection as an individual as opposed to having to carry the entire NRM baggage that comprises of highly complex things.
In her reelection tool kit, she will simply have to carry her manifesto promises while referencing to what she has been able to do in the last five years and this will make her more acceptable to the Kalungu ordinary crowd that is largely NUP and for Robert Kyagulanyi.
Being independent lessens the obligation on her of having to market General Museveni who ought to know the amount of political fatigue millions of young people now have towards his incumbency in perpetuity.
Besides Ssekindi and Sempijja-backed Hellen Nakeya, there are five other young ladies menacingly looking at the Kalungu Woman MP Seat including Rotarian Susan Namata, a law student at Makerere University. She is coming on the NUP ticket which ex-DP Women leader Aisha Waliggo is also eyeing.
In 2021, Ssekindi won with 25,451 votes against NUP’s little known Fiona Mirembe Kiggundu who polled 21,668 and DP’s Aisha Nuluyati Waliggo’s 8,754 votes. In his case, Vincent Frerrio Bamulangaki Sempijja (whose favor before Museveni diminishes the moment Ssekindi emerges strong from the ballot box) polled 10,865 votes and that is how he lost his Kalungu East MP Seat to NUP’s Francis Katabaazi who got 12,198 votes.
Others in the race included Umar Lule Mawiya (6,427 votes) and Didas Mugooma (2,304 votes). The two independents were NRM-leaning and Sempijja only needed a half of their vote to overcome Katabaazi. That consensus of leaving one candidate to take on the opposition wasn’t possible because of the too much intrigue that remains rampant in NRM not just in Kalungu but in the whole country. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
