Profile: Norbert Mao
Nov 07, 2020
Although he leads a heavily fractured, but oldest political party in Uganda, he brings in the presidential race a rare skill of speech, punctuated by idioms and proverbs.
PROFILE|DP|NOBERT MAO
Norbert Mao, a trained lawyer, has been president of the Democratic Party since 2010. He is seeking the presidency after an unsuccessful bid in 2011.
Although he leads a heavily fractured, but oldest political party in Uganda, he brings in the presidential race a rare skill of speech, punctuated by idioms and proverbs.
Early life and education
Mao was born on 12 March 1967. His father, Dusman Okee, who passed on in 2016 at the age of 74, was an Acholi who was married to a Munyankole.
Mao attended Mwiri Primary School in Jinja and briefly went to Wairaka College in Jinja district before attending Namilyango College, from 1982 until 1988.
He then attended Makerere University between 1988 until 1991, graduating with a law degree.
He served as the president of the Makerere University Students Guild between 1990 and 1991 after a hotly contested race with former Director of Military intelligence, the late Brig. Noble Mayombo.
He went on to obtain the Diploma in Legal Practice from the Law Development Center in 1992.
In 2003, Mao was admitted to Yale University, under the Yale World Fellows Program, where he spent one year at the New Haven, Connecticut campus.
From 1992 until 1994, Mao worked as an associate attorney in the offices of Kabugo and Company Advocates, a Kampala-based law firm.
Between 1994 and 1996, he worked as a legal counsel for the Legal Aid Project of the Uganda Law Society in their Gulu office.
In 1996, he was elected to the Parliament of Uganda, representing Gulu Municipality.
While in Parliament, he served on the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee and the Public Accounts Committee. In 2006, he opted to go to the local council and was elected chairman of the LC5 Gulu district.
Mao is chairman of the East African chapter of the Parliamentary Network on the World Bank and a member of its secretariat.
Also, he helped found the Great Lakes Parliamentary Forum on Peace (AMANI Forum).
He was instrumental in trying to bridge the gap between the Lord's Resistance Army rebels and the Ugandan government by lobbying for the passage of a general amnesty law aimed at bringing a peaceful resolution to armed conflict in northern Uganda.
He was elected as President of the Democratic Party on 20 February 2010 and ran for President of Uganda in the 2011 general election.
The DP faced a lot of challenges that led to a split and deep polarization at the height of the election. He attracted only a small share of the vote, and President Yoweri Museveni was elected to another term.
Mao and Inter Party Coalition presidential candidates Kizza Besigye and Olara Otunnu, among others, protested the election results in spite of its early approval by international observers and the United States as largely free and fair.
Mao was married to Naomi Achieng Odongo, and they have two sons together.
However, they divorced on 27 May 2019, after 16 years of marriage. He speaks Luo, Luganda, Runyankole, and English fluently.
Mao is a step-brother to Daniel Kidega, the former speaker of the East African Legislative Assembly.