The NRM is the only party confident of its strength
Jul 05, 2010
ANYONE who saw press pictures of President Museveni addressing the National Resistance Movement (NRM) National Conference at Kololo could have been forgiven to think he was at a public rally because 30,000-odd people showed up.
ANYONE who saw press pictures of President Museveni addressing the National Resistance Movement (NRM) National Conference at Kololo could have been forgiven to think he was at a public rally because 30,000-odd people showed up.
And we have not even talked about the National Delegates Conference in September (to elect the party’s flagbearers for the 2011 elections) which is expected to host a much bigger number!
This is only part of the encouraging statistics flowing in from the NRM that suggest that the party is well positioned to sweep the forthcoming elections. News just in from the NRM headquarters indicates that the party has nine million registered members, going by the party register, which will be used to conduct the party primaries to be held next month through adult suffrage.
Of these, one million members will be significant in the long-term rather than the short- term because they will not be eligible to vote in both party and national elections since they are below 18 years of age.
However exciting these numbers are, the party is still on the trail, drumming up support for itself on various platforms in a bid to win even more members.
The key objective is to enlist at least 10 million members, or better still something in the region of 13 or 14 million; which we expect should compare well with the mainstream National Voters Register which is estimated to have some 14 million people.
The significance of this is that the NRM can now talk with authority about confirmed support rather than dabbling in the abstract about imaginary support or trying to guess whose body runs with yellow blood. This should now facilitate our election planning and preparation, because we now know our supporters by name and place of origin and even down to details like which polling station they are going to vote from. That means we can now predict our performance in the elections with a reasonable degree of certainty at all levels – presidential, parliamentary and local government.
It is becoming much easier now to predict even the voting patterns across the country and determine where we are strong and where we are weak. This is something that will enable the party’s strategic planners to see where we need to simply consolidate and in which areas we need to urgently map out ways of improving our support.
Our focus can now turn to finding out who the best candidates are to field in which constituency and what factors make them worthy to be selected as flagbearers of the party at whatever level and constituency they will be contesting in. One would have indeed wanted to compare notes with other political parties and ascertain their level of support among the electorate. But if one considers that already we have eight million registered members who are also registered voters makes such an indulgence unnecessary because it means we so far have the lion’s share of the voters’ roll.
We now know our strength so far and we have a good entandiikwa for the forthcoming polls. Our key challenge now is to make sure that we translate this strong membership into actual votes on polling day. This is critical because when you consider our past elections, the turn-up on polling day has always been around 70 percent.
In a country with about half of its population registered to vote this becomes critical because you are never sure how many of your supporters and members are in the 30 percent that did not turn up to vote.
Aware of this possibility, the party is pre-empting all such eventualities by embarking on a sensitisation and mobilisation drive all over the country between now and election time, encouraging its members to turn up and vote. With our numbers already assured, we surely cannot go wrong. Press reports – and a casual look around – all suggest the NRM is the only party that has taken trouble to ascertain how many members it has in order to calculate its weight accurately when the time of reckoning comes.
The other parties seem to have adopted a different strategy – if any, that is. For now it is only the NRM that can provide accurate records of who its supporters are and what structures they are under, all over the country.
We can confidently talk of at least 50,000 branches across the country, each with a five-member committee which leads to 250,000 branch leaders. The party also has 4,000 parish committees, each with five members, adding up to 20,000 party leaders at the parish level. It also has 1,000 sub-county committees, each with five members, which puts them at 5,000 party leaders at that level. All this is evidence that despite NRM’s credentials as the only mass party in Uganda and its dominance of the national politics, the party is certainly not resting on its laurels and hoping that ‘as usual’ the voters will renew its mandate at the various electoral levels.
It is also a high credit to the party’s planners that the NRM has set an incredible pace in election planning and is setting a precedent in how a modern party should be run.
Now that our overwhelming majority is already clear, this should pre-empt the usual complaints by losing opposition candidates whenever the election results are announced – that they were cheated out of victory.
And we have not even talked about the National Delegates Conference in September (to elect the party’s flagbearers for the 2011 elections) which is expected to host a much bigger number!
This is only part of the encouraging statistics flowing in from the NRM that suggest that the party is well positioned to sweep the forthcoming elections. News just in from the NRM headquarters indicates that the party has nine million registered members, going by the party register, which will be used to conduct the party primaries to be held next month through adult suffrage.
Of these, one million members will be significant in the long-term rather than the short- term because they will not be eligible to vote in both party and national elections since they are below 18 years of age.
However exciting these numbers are, the party is still on the trail, drumming up support for itself on various platforms in a bid to win even more members.
The key objective is to enlist at least 10 million members, or better still something in the region of 13 or 14 million; which we expect should compare well with the mainstream National Voters Register which is estimated to have some 14 million people.
The significance of this is that the NRM can now talk with authority about confirmed support rather than dabbling in the abstract about imaginary support or trying to guess whose body runs with yellow blood. This should now facilitate our election planning and preparation, because we now know our supporters by name and place of origin and even down to details like which polling station they are going to vote from. That means we can now predict our performance in the elections with a reasonable degree of certainty at all levels – presidential, parliamentary and local government.
It is becoming much easier now to predict even the voting patterns across the country and determine where we are strong and where we are weak. This is something that will enable the party’s strategic planners to see where we need to simply consolidate and in which areas we need to urgently map out ways of improving our support.
Our focus can now turn to finding out who the best candidates are to field in which constituency and what factors make them worthy to be selected as flagbearers of the party at whatever level and constituency they will be contesting in. One would have indeed wanted to compare notes with other political parties and ascertain their level of support among the electorate. But if one considers that already we have eight million registered members who are also registered voters makes such an indulgence unnecessary because it means we so far have the lion’s share of the voters’ roll.
We now know our strength so far and we have a good entandiikwa for the forthcoming polls. Our key challenge now is to make sure that we translate this strong membership into actual votes on polling day. This is critical because when you consider our past elections, the turn-up on polling day has always been around 70 percent.
In a country with about half of its population registered to vote this becomes critical because you are never sure how many of your supporters and members are in the 30 percent that did not turn up to vote.
Aware of this possibility, the party is pre-empting all such eventualities by embarking on a sensitisation and mobilisation drive all over the country between now and election time, encouraging its members to turn up and vote. With our numbers already assured, we surely cannot go wrong. Press reports – and a casual look around – all suggest the NRM is the only party that has taken trouble to ascertain how many members it has in order to calculate its weight accurately when the time of reckoning comes.
The other parties seem to have adopted a different strategy – if any, that is. For now it is only the NRM that can provide accurate records of who its supporters are and what structures they are under, all over the country.
We can confidently talk of at least 50,000 branches across the country, each with a five-member committee which leads to 250,000 branch leaders. The party also has 4,000 parish committees, each with five members, adding up to 20,000 party leaders at the parish level. It also has 1,000 sub-county committees, each with five members, which puts them at 5,000 party leaders at that level. All this is evidence that despite NRM’s credentials as the only mass party in Uganda and its dominance of the national politics, the party is certainly not resting on its laurels and hoping that ‘as usual’ the voters will renew its mandate at the various electoral levels.
It is also a high credit to the party’s planners that the NRM has set an incredible pace in election planning and is setting a precedent in how a modern party should be run.
Now that our overwhelming majority is already clear, this should pre-empt the usual complaints by losing opposition candidates whenever the election results are announced – that they were cheated out of victory.