NUP to hold primaries in hotly-contested areas

The National Unity Platform (NUP) party has finally resolved the need to conduct party primaries in hotly contested areas.

This is one of the latest decisions the party leadership has made to avoid disagreements, which were likely to emerge from using other methods to choose flag-bearers. Speaking to New Vision, the NUP vice-president for the central region, Mathias Mpuuga, said they had a meeting with their regional coordinators and agreed on the various methods that will be used in choosing the party's flag-bearers.

"Where the other methods we intend to use will fail, the contenders will have to face the party members in that electoral area to choose the best candidate. That exercise will be based on registered membership of the party in every electoral area," he explained.

Mpuuga, who is also Masaka Municipality MP, elaborated that the other two methods they will use in determining flag-bearers include consensus-building and using a scorecard tool to give marks to contenders basing on various considerations.

Using the scorecard method, surveys done by the party coordinators in the respective electoral areas will also be used to gauge the popularity of each candidate.

NUP spokesperson Joel Ssenyonyi recently told journalists that using the scorecard tool they would not only look at a person's academic qualifications but also assess one's commitment to the struggle, value addition to the party, loyalty, self-confidence of the aspirant, ability of the candidate to finance his/ her own campaigns and the conduct of the candidate in public.

As for the consensus method, candidates will be required to discuss with area coordinators to agree on others pulling out of the race for the best candidate.

Reports indicate that the negotiations on consensus have been going on for a period of one month and the party is yet to unveil the different flag-bearers at different levels who have already been agreed upon.

"Our processes of choosing party flag-bearers will involve using various methods in various electoral areas," Mpuuga explained.

The NUP leader said the mechanism and tools to be used in determining flagbearers have been communicated to the districts and process of embarking on identifying flag-bearers.

Meanwhile, sources have also revealed that NUP would be reaching out to NRM aspirants who lost by a small margin to persuade them to carry the NUP flag as part of the party's strategy to win a big number of parliamentary seats.

A big number of independent MPs are politicians who lose in the NRM primaries and contest as independents.

Of the current 445 MPs in the 10th Parliament, all opposition parties combined have a total of 60 MPs (13.5%), 66 are independent MPs (14.8%), NRM MPs are 310 (69.6%) while 10 are army MPs.

With the recent creation of 82 new parliamentary seats, the next Parliament will have a total of 527 parliamentary seats.