The race to replace Dr Kizza Besigye as president of the Forum for Democratic Change, Uganda’s biggest opposition party, has boiled down to an essentially two-man race between Maj-Gen (Rtd) Mugisha Muntu, its secretary for mobilisation, and Nandala Mafabi, MP Budadiri West and the Leader of Opposition in parliament.

The party’s secretary for finance, Geoffrey Ekanya, is understood to have only a slim chance.

Dr Besigye’s term is essentially supposed to end in 2016. He, however, informed the party last December that he wanted to step down much earlier.

He said he needed to allow his successor to reorganise the party as she/he felt fit and to consolidate early enough before the 2016 elections.
His replacement in the ongoing race will be elected on November 22.

On August 29, Research World International released results of a random telephonic poll where 335 delegates out of the 820 on the 2010 register said they would vote for Maj-Gen (Rtd) Muntu against 211 who said they would vote for Mr Mafabi if elections were held today; 27 per cent said they were undecided.

The two candidates represent what may be described as the moderate and radical wings of the movement.

“There are two dominant camps in the party. One believes that President Yoweri Museveni is the greatest enemy of Uganda and that the party needs someone who is able to oust him at the polls. This is the action-based group,” noted Dr Patrick Wakida, chief executive of Research World International.

“The second camp believe the party first needs to articulate an alternative vision to that of the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM), strengthen its structures and cultivate grassroots support, so that even if its doesn’t win the presidency straightaway, it wins a significant number of positions at the lower levels.

This is the incremental reformists’ group,” Dr Wakida added. Their position is informed by the fact that the FDC has in the seven years of its existence failed to articulate values or an ideology that are any different from the NRM, to which most of its founders and top members once belonged.

Maj-Gen (Rtd) Muntu is the face of the reformist group, while Mr Nandala represents the “action” group, going by the reasons the polled delegates gave to explain their choice of candidate.

Tensions between the two groups is rising, with some members in Team Nandala accusing Maj-Gen (Rtd) Muntu of not having totally broken ranks with the ruling party.

This is the reason, they say, why the state hasn’t targeted him for the kind of humiliation Dr Besigye, his army comrade, suffered.

This camp also fears that the FDC under his leadership will take ages to win power and that even if it does, it will be hard to tell it apart from the NRM.

Mwambutsya Ndebesa, a lecturer at Makerere University and a regular political commentator, said this acrimony is polarising the party and diverting attention from the opportunity the race provides to popularise the FDC and raise its leadership’s profile across the country.

Two other issues framing the contest between the two men – regionalism and a power shift from militarism to pure civilian rule.

Mr Mafabi comes from eastern Uganda and has never been a soldier — indeed, he tends to play up his lack of a military background.

Maj-Gen (Rtd) Muntu, on the other hand, is a former army commander from the west, which has had a stranglehold on power for a quarter-century, from the day President Museveni took power in 1986.

There are murmurs among party members that it about time the base of power moved to the eastern region, the only one to date that hasn’t produced a president in Uganda.

The race to lead the FDC, which in effect defines the race for the party’s representative in the 2016 presidential election, has not been helped by Dr Besigye’s silence on whether he intends to contest the presidency again.