On the heels of his appointment as deputy ambassador at the weekend, Mohammed Baswari Kezaala, the former Mayor of Jinja municipality, has resigned as Democratic Party national chairman.
Kezaala told journalists on Monday night that he had written to the DP Secretary General notifying him of his resignation and is currently waiting to be approved by parliament’s Appointments Committee to take up his new post.
The appointment of Kezaala as deputy ambassador to an unnamed country last weekend drew a backlash from DP and other opposition party members.
Moses Mbeta, a member of the opposition Forum for Democratic Change in Jinja, said Kezaala’s appointment and his subsequent resignation shows that several opposition party members are moles for the ruling party.
Addressing journalists at the DP offices in Kampala yesterday, January 31, Norbert Mao, the party president, confirmed he had received Kezaala’s resignation letter that morning.
He announced that Dr Kiwanuka Mayambala, Kezaala’s deputy, had replaced him. On January 28, the party’s National Executive Committee decided to push Kezaala out of party leadership after he declined to reject the ambassadorial appointment.
“We didn’t want it to look like we had fired him; so, we asked him to resign his position because he can’t serve two masters at one go. People working in government only work for the interests of NRM,” Mao said.
He called for calm within the party and maintained that even with this turbulence, DP will bounce back stronger. He said DP cannot win power when its members are making informal alliances with NRM.
“No one should lie to Ugandans that he can fight [President] Museveni or NRM after joining them. When one is squeezed, he realises what he is made of, so what DP will realise after this turbulence is what it is made of,” Mao warned.
He called upon the entire opposition to join forces and stop Museveni from destroying the opposition since he took the oath of office on May 12 last year. Kezaala joined the Uganda Young Democrats (UYD), the youth arm of the Democratic Party, in 1995.
He was elected Mayor of Jinja Municipality in 2006, a position he served until 2016 when he lost to NRM’s Majid Batambuze. Kezaala is still challenging the election result in court.
Additional reporting by Jopnathan Kamoga.