Do we need Nina-Mbabazi register anyway?
Oct 02, 2014
The Media has been awash with Nina Mbabazi’s accumulated debt accruing from the alleged loan she borrowed to compile the NRM register in 2010. One newspaper carried the headline “Pay my girl or be sued”. That was in reference to Amama Mbabazi’s remarks to the NRM caucus that sat in Entebbe State Ho
By James Katongana
The Media has been awash with Nina Mbabazi’s accumulated debt accruing from the alleged loan she borrowed to compile the NRM register in 2010. One newspaper carried the headline “Pay my girl or be sued”. That was in reference to Amama Mbabazi’s remarks to the NRM caucus that sat in Entebbe State House last month.
The caucus sitting in Entebbe had a stalemate on the way forward on the discussion of the 2010 primary election and, therefore, postponed the meeting. In the meeting, it is alleged, Amama Mbabazi warned that whether they prepare a new register or not, they will have to clear Nina’s debt. The meeting was to study the report on the 2010 NRM primaries that were marred by irregularities so as to avoid the repeat of the same.
Nina’s debt aside, the issue is whether we need the Nina Mbabazi register!
In a situation where the incumbent is the contestant and is the organiser of the election and the family members are the voters and registrars in charge of the electoral register and accreditation of the delegates, do you expect the playing field to be level? The answer is as good as mine.
Secondly, as of now there is no election calendar and yet we are remaining with few months to the primary elections. In fact, we are still debating structural changes and by the time we finalise, the necessary requirements that is, the registers, data analysis, verification will not be there.
Once Franklin Benjamin said “you may delay, but time will not”. We need to behave like the prime minister of Japan when he came into office. He promised his people that he would not tolerate the politics of indecision and said “A propensity to delay difficulty and weighty decisions has been hurting our country. It is detrimental to our economy, society and future, and it cannot be allowed to continue”.
At this moment what we need is to have village registrars and train them on electioneering. Then dispatch the yellow books to those registrars and begin the exercise immediately. A calendar and deadline should be set to submit the data to their respective sub counties then to the district and finally to the secretariat. Here, we shall have registered the old, the new and those that will have lost the membership cards.
The Nina register will have lost relevancy because even now there are those that were not of voting age that are now 16 and above and need to be included in the register.
The writer is a Pan –Africanist and NRM card holder