By Mulengera Reporters
On Friday towards 4pm, Jenipher Nakangubi (aka Full Figure) received a phone call requiring her to urgently show up at NRM Electoral Commission headquarters along Kyadondo Road in Nakasero. She immediately set off and was there within minutes.
She says it was the defeated NRM CEC candidate Moses Karangwa Kariisa who rang demanding that she turns up. Nakangubi says she was told there was a dispute-resolution meeting NRM EC Chairman Tanga Odoi had convened and it was helpful for her to be there.
She had been a diehard supporter of Haruna Kasolo who eventually won the CEC race and became the Buganda region Vice Chairman for NRM last Thursday.
She was aware that Karangwa (against whom other candidates like Joseph Mukasa Sewava, Hakim Kyeswa and Godfrey Kiwanda) had ganged up, refused to accept defeat and was petitioning the party’s tribunal which shares office premises nearby.
Because Karangwa is a senior cadre, Nakangubi had no reason to suspect any mischief. Yet she was descended upon by kanyamas as soon as she disembarked from her car and arrived at the party’s EC offices. She says the guys, armed with knives and machetes, clobbered her like chicken thief until she couldn’t cry anymore.
Nakangubi, who left with a bruised face while profusely bleeding, says that the guys who assailed her were being commanded by Masaka City Woman MP candidate for the NRM, Justine Namere. She is currently an influential assistant to Karangwa for whom she has lately distinguished herself to be a spokesperson of some sort. Since Karangwa’s defeat at Kololo, Namere has been the one speaking out purporting to be articulating reasons why her Principal isn’t accepting defeat.
In defense of Karangwa, Namere has gone as far as verbally assaulting Odoi Tanga (who declared Kasolo the winner) and accusing him of all sorts of things. She has branded him a shameless forger who she claims falsified NIRA records to make his son, Collins Tanga, to seem young enough to qualify to stand for the post of NRM youth league national chairman.
Full Figure, on the other hand has been out in full swing to contradict the Namere narrative while defending Tanga and praising him for organizing such a clear electoral exercise at Kololo to enable Buganda region get a new Vice Chairperson for NRM. She has also made videos belittling Namere’s husband while castigating her for stampeding a young boy into what she calls some controversial marriage.
Full Figure has also been thanking ONC Manager Hadijah Namyalo, Godfrey Kiwanda, Hakim Kyeswa and Sewava Mukasa for pulling together to ensure that Haruna Kasolo, and not Karangwa, won to become the ruling party Chairman in Buganda. “What would we have reported to the Kabaka if someone else, like Karangwa, had won that race?” she has repeatedly been saying in her Tik Tok videos thanking delegates for choosing Kasolo. She says that it was Namyalo who reached out to the other CEC candidates and consolidated them into a coalition that delivered the Kasolo win, while helping to overcome Karangwa.
In one of her videos, Nakangubi must have angered Namere when she accused her of being an extortionist out to target Karangwa’s wallet. She claimed that Namere was as useless as her dad Vincent Sempijja. She went as far as wildly claiming that Namere is targeting Karangwa’s deep wallet in order to get money to rehabilitate her husband, who she contemptously refers to as “that pale broke young man.”
In another video, Nakangubi demanded to know what Sempijja, Namere and Lwengo LC5 Chairman Ibrahim Kitata had ever done for NRM compared to what Kasolo has accomplished in his capacity as the Minister in charge of Emyooga, SACCOs and Microfinance institutions. That trio is just full of envy against Haruna Kasolo even when they hail from Greater Masaka just like him. Nakangubi has also advised Karangwa to shun self-seekers and gold diggers like Namere and work towards reconciling with Kasolo so as to consolidate political mobilization for the NRM.
All this combined explains why by the time Nakangubi responded to the Karangwa phone call and rushed to Kyadondo, battle lines had already been drawn between her and Namere. She says that she isn’t surprised as to why members of the Namere squad could unleash so much physical violence against her.
Good Samaritans picked Full Figure, who was bleeding profusely, after the pro-Karangwa kanyamas thoroughly clobbering her, and rushed her to Nakasero Hospital where some stitching was done to her wounds. She had to be admitted there and her face remains swollen. She claims to have been pierced and stabbed using rusty blunt knives and objects that the pro-Karangwa kanyamas carried.
When you look at her now scary and swollen face, you imagine she was stung by a swarm of bees for a full night. The images of the bruised Full Figure are so disturbing; we can’t even publish them here on our platform. Knowledgeable sources say she will have to undergo several tests to rule out internal bleeding.
Her fellow NRM social media warriors have made so much online noise to the extent that the President, who is also the NRM chairman, has had to get involved-demanding comprehensive investigations into the failed assassination attempt. Many such online warriors have resorted to claiming that they had all along been warned about the Karangwa camp brutality, which they want the President to inquire into.
Yet fearing for further damage to his already bruised reputation, Karangwa has opted for a negotiated settlement. His emissaries have been reaching out imploring Full Figure to deescalate and accept some millions for compensation so that the case she has opened at CPS Kampala against Justine Namere gets withdrawn.
Karangwa is rightly fearful that the crude violence that was visited on Full Figure risks scandalizing and trivializing his anti-Haruna Kasolo victory appeal to the NRM tribunal. Some NRM cadres are characterizing what happened to Full Figure as an act of torture for which they want Justine Namere to be personally sanctioned under the provisions of the Prohibition of Torture Act. Full Figure has remained reluctant to the idea of a negotiated settlement and wants Namere to be held personally liable while requiring her to explain how she intended to benefit from her death had the assassination attempt succeeded.
The detectives at the Kampala CPS, where Namere filed her case (G.E.F 242/2025 of KMP CPS Kampala), are already investigating Namere, Karangwa & others still at large and the offence is recorded as that of “aggravated robbery” since the incident involved use of extreme physical violence on Full Figure.
As all this is happening, both Namere and Karangwa have continued to endure a lot of castigation and condemnation among NRM supporters, operating online, and many of them are saying this is unprecedented. The KMP Police publicist says that Namere, Karangwa and others implicated in Full Figure’s statement are going to be summoned and be required to explain themselves in response to the aggravated robbery complaint that has been lodged against them. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
