With just 10 days left to the Democratic Party delegates’ conference in Mbale, there’s no indication that the bitter feud between senior officials of Uganda’s oldest party is about to abate.
Last week, Mathias Nsubuga, the disputed secretary general, affirmed that the conference shall go ahead between February 18 and 21, despite protests from a section of members.

“Nothing is going to derail us. We have made all the necessary preparations and we are ready to meet,” Nsubuga told The Observer.
“Any outstanding disagreements, Nsubuga said, shall be resolved at the conference and not through the media or other channels.”

Nsubuga’s comments came after a senior party member, John Baptist Kakooza, wrote a scathing opinion in The Observer last week predicting that the Mbale conference could plunge DP into a deeper crisis.

“The position in which DP is today is on all fours equal to the Biblical story of King Solomon and the two women who were fighting for a child. The woman who was not its mother was quick to agree to the proposal that the child be cut into two.

Real members, and owners of DP won’t go to Mbale to have it dismembered,” Kakooza wrote.
But Nsubuga has not taken kindly to Kakooza’s views.
“What has he (Kakooza) done to help us settle our problems apart from attacking other candidates in newspapers?” Nsubuga asked.

Last week, Nsubuga met with Erias Lukwago, DP’s legal secretary who remains opposed to the conference, to try and mend fences.
“Yes, I met Nsubuga like I would meet any MP at Parliament. And we talked, it wasn’t a secret meeting,” Lukwago told The Observer, refusing to divulge details of the meeting.

Yet it appears that the brief meeting did not yield any positive results. Lukwago, Kakooza and Lulume Bayiga, who claims to be the legitimate secretary general, as well as Betty Nambooze, the party spokesperson, want the Mbale conference postponed to another date so that any outstanding issues can be resolved. If this is not done, they have vowed to boycott it.

But Nsubuga argued that time is not on their side and even if some members want to boycott the conference, it will take place.
“All other parties are busy organising for the elections and it is only DP that is still disorganised,” Nsubuga said.

UNCERTAIN FUTURE

DP’s future, in the face of these problems, looks far from certain. Besides refusing to join the Inter Party Cooperation that brings together FDC, UPC, JEEMA and CP, it remains the only major opposition party that has not held a delegates’ conference over the last two years.

The current generation of the party leadership comprises mainly elderly people whose political ideals do not fit in well with today’s ever changing political landscape.

There have been calls for the party to give more leadership positions to the youth and for it to drop its conservative ways. So far, three people have expressed interest in replacing the ageing John Ssebaana Kizito as DP president general.

They include Norbert Mao, the Gulu LC-V chairman, who some say is the best candidate because of his eloquence and international exposure. Yet being from Acholi could do him in given the perception that DP is a Buganda bred and led party.

The other is Nasser Sebaggala, the Mayor of Kampala, who we have been told even proposed to fund the conference on condition that delegates’ pledge to elect him as DP president general. He might find it difficult to win over some delegates because of his lacklustre performance as mayor.

The third is Sam Lubega, a party activist who lives in the United Kingdom, who is said to have sizeable support from Baganda Catholics in the party. His major undoing is that he is regarded to be politically inexperienced to lead a party of DP’s stature.

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