On August 17, the interparty cooperation (IPC) nominated the long waited potential candidates to vie for the cooperation’s presidential candidate in the 2011 elections to compete with President Yoweri Museveni. The IPC brings together five opposition parties, the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), Uganda People’s Congress (UPC), Justice Forum (JEEMA), Conservative Party (CP) and the newly formed Social Democratic Party (SDP). Four of the five parties nominated their candidates except UPC. However, UPC, the third largest opposition party in parliament, did not attend the nominations at Kololo Airstrip, saying their leader Olara Otunnu had been constrained by the ongoing legal battles against sedition in court.

The nomination was extended to August 23 to give UPC time to nominate its candidate, but the deadline elapsed. This time Otunnu cited unresolved “contentious issues” under the IPC arrangement which must be sorted out first.

This means that it’s not the pending arrest of Otunnu that had prevented UPC from nominating its candidate to IPC at Kololo on August 17. It was a convenient cover for the growing conflicts within the IPC. The IPC will nominate the joint candidate on August 31 and UPC has up to that time to decide whether to field a candidate or pull out of the alliance.

Inside UPC there is strong feeling that the IPC is being run mainly by FDC and other parties are mere participants. The UPC says FDC is running IPC activities without involving the other participating parties.

Sources within UPC say that the party wants Otunnu to be the IPC joint candidate without being subjected to competition with candidates from other parties. They say that UPC supported DP’s Paul Ssemogerere in the first interparty coalition in 1996 and Kizza Besigye in 2001 and that this time its their turn to lead the coalition. According to information obtained by The Independent UPC will not settle for anything short of Otunnu being the automatic IPC flag bearer. They would rather quit the IPC arrangement and contest in 2011 as a party rather than an alliance. 

They say Otunnu’s cabinet is totally opposed to their leader participating in the ongoing nomination of the IPC joint presidential candidate. They accuse the FDC of hijacking the idea of rejecting the Electoral Commission (EC) yet it was originated by UPC.

 “The rejection of the Electoral Commission was advanced by Olara Otunnu in a meeting held on May 18 2010 in Entebbe. But the FDC has since hijacked it claiming it’s their idea. Why have they been participating in the elections when they knew the EC was pro-National Resistance Movement? Why didn’t they reject the EC in 2006?” the source asked.

This accusation seems strange. The UPC participated in the 2006 elections as well, which were presided over by the same Electoral Commission. Thus it sounds rather intriguing that UPC is questioning why FDC did not reject the EC in 2006 and waited until today, yet both parties fielded candidates in that election.       

From the foregoing, it’s clear that the IPC partnership was hurriedly entered without much thought to details of how it would work. Now the cooperating parties are paying the price for their gross oversight on critical issues that would have held the alliance together. For instance UPC claims that it never supported the idea of a joint candidate at this stage of the elections. “Our initial agreement in the IPC was that we jointly fight the political harassment and the election malpractices but each party field its own candidate with an aim of failing President Museveni from attaining a 50 % win. Without a 50% win Museveni would be forced to go for a re-run and it is here that we would front a single IPC candidate,” a UPC source said.

The UPC says the FDC has deviated from that position and is calling for an early nomination of a joint IPC presidential candidate.

It’s this simmering fallout mainly between the FDC and UPC that prompted the August 23 meeting of Otunnu, Kizza Besigye (FDC) and representatives of the other cooperating parties Asuman Basalirwa (JEEMA), Prof. James Kigongo and Ken Lukyamuzi (CP), Michael Mabikke (SDP), Mulwanyamuli Ssemmogerere (Ssuubi pressure group) at the IPC offices on Katonga Road.

However the meeting did not yield much and the critical  issues remained in balance. When the parties came out of the meeting Otunnu made an abstract statement that UPC has never said they would boycott elections in Uganda but that Ugandans deserve free and fair elections. He did not clarify whether he would submit himself for IPC nomination.

The suspense was made worse when Otunnu said he could not readily say he would be nominated by August 31.  “UPC will decide accordingly after they have reviewed the IPC decisions,” Otunnu told the waiting press.

He did not clearly answer the allegations that UPC was planning to pull out of IPC. “UPC has no problem whatsoever with the IPC processes taking their course,” Otunnu said.

Besigye, the IPC chairperson, said the standoff had been caused by poor communication between the cooperating parties. “There was a problem of communication that led to people coming up with different perceptions,” Dr Besigye said.

He said that with the ongoing meetings he hoped they would have resolved all the outstanding problems by August 31 when the IPC delegates meet to nominate the joint flag bearer for 2011. This means the contentious issues were not resolved in the meeting, which had been meant to bring UPC back on board.

However, Besigye insisted they had had cordial discussions and drawn up a road map to follow in choosing a presidential flag bearer on August 31.

He said that the meeting had found no merit in the accusations that FDC was excluding others on certain decisions for IPC.

The cooperating parties need to take these early disagreements as serious lessons of what might befall them in case they win and come to power. The power of state privileges can make such disagreements worse and more volatile when the players are in government than now when they are still in the opposition.

Additional reporting by Dicta Asiimwe

Comments (8)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.

Add Comment Preview