We are all NRM now; UPC and DP have gone into voluntary liquidation!

By Sam Akaki

"There are the few who make things happen, the many more who watch things happen, and the overwhelming majority who have no notion of what happens", wrote the former president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler. You could be forgiven for thinking that Mr Butler was referring to the few movers and shakers in Ugandan politics, who have caused the UPC and DP to go into voluntary liquidation, while many Ugandans are watching and the vast majority of us are not even aware this is happening.

Incidentally, "voluntary liquidation" is a situation in which a company chooses to voluntarily bring its business to an end by selling off assets for cash, usually well below market price because of unsustainable loses due to mismanagement.

The first stage of the UPC and DP's voluntary-liquidation occurred in December 1980 when UPC founder member Adoko Nekyon dramatically announced on the BBC that his cousin president Milton Obote had rigged the election, sending many DP members and supporters to join the NRA bush war of liquidation against the UPC.

The second stage of the joint voluntary-liquidation occurred after the liberation war when several heavy-weight UPC and DP leaders including Adoko Nekyon, Paul Ssemwogerere and many others took up senior ministerial positions in the first NRM/A administration in 1986. The following twenty years saw a mass exodus of UPC and DP leaders to the NRM.

We are now witnessing the third and final stage of the two parties' voluntary-liquidation.  The splits that had always been there intensified in late in 2015, when Jimmy Akena took control of one wing of the UPC while Olara Otunnu retained the other wing. The same thing occurred in DP Norbert Mao took part of the party and Erias Lukwago the other. It did not end there

And, as if by a prior mutual suicide agreement, the UPC and DP splinters stunned their members and the country by deciding not to field their own presidential candidates.  Instead, they supported three different varieties of the NRM headed by President Yoweri Museveni the Chairman, former NRM Secretary General Amama Mbabazi and former NRM Political Commissar Dr Kizza Besigye. If this is voluntary liquidation, then what other name can we call it?

Will Jimmy Akena, Olara Otunnu, Norbet Mao and Lukwaro have the audacity or idiocy to speak for their respective parties and criticise the NRM, having actively supported three different NRM leaders in the 2016 presidential election?

But if few Ugandan have recognised that both UP and DP have gone into voluntary liquidation, even fewer still are aware that they have done so legally, according to the constitution. Where is the evidence?

The 2005 Constitutional amendment, which ushered in ‘multi-party political system' in Article 71 also left ‘The Movement political system' intact in Article 70 of the same Constitution.

It is part 1 (d) of the later constitutional proviso, which underpins one of the most important tenets of the Movement system, which is the principle of "individual merit as a basis for election to political offices". That is why Amama Mbabazi, a card-carrying member of the NRM has stood as an independent presidential candidate.  That is also why we have also seen the unprecedented number of independent parliamentary candidates in 2016.

Who thought thirty years ago when the NRM came to power, that it would become sole political party fielding three presidential candidates, each supported leading UPC and members? And who thought ten years ago, when Uganda returned to multi-party politics that the majority of aspiring legislators would abandon parties and to stand on their "individual merit" according to the Movement political system?

To be fair, UPC and DP are not the first post independence political parties in Africa to go into voluntary liquidation. In the neighbouring Kenya, few people in Uganda and Kenya itself would remember there was once a ruling political party called the Kenya African National Union (KANU), and an opposition called the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU).

Even president Uhuru Kenyatta, the son of the former president Jomo Kenyatta, who founded KANU, abandoned KANU party and formed the Jubilee Alliance, which led him to power in March 2013.  It seems to be only a matter of time before UPC and DP follow KANU and KADU's into the history books. 

Already, it was recently reported that a mysterious fire had started at the basement of the Uganda House, the supposed eternal monument of the UPC. Sooner or later, like a crazed wife of husband who says ‘if I cannot have you no one will', some UPC faction is likely to reduce the last vestige of the party to assess!

Meanwhile, the NRM would be justified in celebrating their total takeover of the UPC and DP by re-wording president Milton Obote's crowd rousing song - "everyone, UPC" to become "Everyone NRM, even UPC and DP, NRM!".  That is exactly what is happening, and if you have not noticed it then you are neither one of the few who make things happen, nor one of many more who watch things happen; but one the overwhelming majority who have no notion of what happens.

The writer is a former FDC international envoy to the UK and European Union, also former independent Parliamentary Candidate in the UK, now executive director — Africa-European relations.