By Our Reporters
The EC Secretary Sam Rwakojo has revealed that Gen Mugisha Muntu’s process to form a new party is on course having overcome the original hurdles the former FDC leader faced. Speaking to online media publishers earlier in the week, Rwakojo said the signatures Gen Muntu had initially submitted were found to have some inadequacies upon verification by the EC teams whereby they weren’t representative of the entire country’s electoral regions in a manner considered ideal by the EC. He said on being told of the challenge, Muntu went back and corrected the mistake by bringing signatures from the required geographical electoral regions of the country and what is now going on is the final verification process by the EC top management. Rwakojo says the process will “soon” be completed and Muntu will be free to politically cruise around the country while canvassing for support. He said the necessary procedures have to be followed by whoever seeks to register a new party “regardless of whether you are a general or not.” Rwakojo vehemently denied claims that the EC was being used by the ruling party or any other political grouping to frustrate Muntu’s new ANT party which critics insist has already suffered a still birth with all the original momentum and excitement gone.
MABIKKE DP FATE
In a related development, Rwakojo explained the futility of party leaders Mike Mabikke (SDP) and Abed Bwanika (PDP) announcing their defection to DP. He said ideally any party leader who is serious about dissolving his or her party to defect to another writes to the EC formally informing them of his exit from the party he/she founded and the deregistration process commences. Rwakojo explained that short of that, the EC will still officially consider and continue recognizing such actors as leaders of parties to which they previously belonged. In the instant case since Mabikke and Bwanika haven’t written to the EC instructing it to deregister SDP and PDP, the two parties legally still exist and to the EC, their claimed defection to DP is of no consequence. The EC still recognizes them as leaders of parties to which they previously belonged. Rwakojo implied that if the two leaders were serious about flocking with DP at the expense of their own parties, they are very much aware of what ought to be done. “We saw what you also saw on TV and that’s all. To us as EC that doesn’t mean anything until they officially write to us to deregister their parties which they haven’t done implying they are still interested in running their old parties. We can’t just assume things. That is not how the law operates and they know better than anyone else as to the procedure that is supposed to be followed,” Rwakojo said. This simply means, like they have done before in the case of Gilbert Bukenya’s PNU, the SDP leaders can walk out of DP and rejoin their party in case things don’t work out as initially expected. The same applies for Abed Bwanika whose little known PDP party remains dully registered. The two leaders Mabikke and Bwanika have previously been reluctant to discuss this ambiguity (regarding their reluctance to show commitment to DP by deregistering their parties) and they are understood to be eyeing top executive positions at the DP upcoming delegates’ conference where Bukomansimbi MP Deo Kiyingi has indicated readiness to challenge President General Norbert Mao.
