By Our Reporters
In a bid to overcome credibility problems that have affected their party primaries in the past leading to countless petitions, the NRM party CEC members are pondering abolishing secret ballot so that MPs and other level flag bearers are elected by way of lining up for the electors to publicly show who they like. They now resent secret ballot saying it can easily be manipulated leading to problems. During a recent retreat at Igongo Cultural Center Mbarara, NRM CEC bosses voted for this method of flag bearer identification saying it worked well with the LC1 elections which didn’t attract many petitions challenging the outcome. On February 12th the CEC bosses will retreat again at Chobe Safaris in Murchison Falls to finalize a range of reforms they intend to table in Parliament as part of electoral reforms. According to SG Kasule Lumumba, NRM will be holding its primaries in May 2020 to enable electoral commission conducts it’s Presidential and MP nominations between July and August 2020 just in time for the general elections slated for early 2021. The Chobe retreat will also consider proposals that a presidential candidate who wins in getting the highest number of votes in a given constituency gets the opportunity to select who becomes MP on that particular party’s ticket for that constituency in consultation with the party leadership. This is similar to what happens in Rwanda. The other proposal is to stop holding MP and Presidential elections on the same day so that after getting reelected as President, Museveni has enough time to decampaign the MP and LC5 candidates he dislikes.
