The executive director of the Uganda Media Centre Ofwono Opondo has asked the youth of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) to focus their energies on understanding the party ideology to bridge the gap between the old and new.
Opondo fears that without ideological clarity among the young generation, the party is likely to find hard times in surviving generations to come,
He noted that in order to bridge the gap between the old and the new, young people have to understand what NRM does, including seeking for knowledge that the old have.
“As a liberation movement, our mission and vision should be to forge a way forward around our senior party leader and founding father, President Kaguta Museveni as well as the party senior leaders in causing harmony and consensus among all party members despite the demographic gap,” he said.
Opondo made the remarks while delivering a lecture on a topic; “Bridging the gap between the old and the new” to the NRM university leaders who were gathered at party headquarters in Kampala.
He said that NRM membership has always been multi-generational and multi-cultural and the young and old have always worked together.
“Bridging the gap between the old and young is a misnomer given the nature of our party’s methods of work which accommodate every demographic dividend. The NRM Party has always been a multi-generational organisation ever since it took over power in 1986,” he said.
Veteran journalist Tony Geoffrey Owana told the youth that being a youth is just temporary.
“We were also as young as you. Most of the liberators took over leadership positions in their youthful age. We only need to utilise our youthfulness like what these senior party cadres did,” Owana said.
He castigated young people for not listening to their seniors and for not reading deeply to understand the history of the party they support.
“Young people are fond of not getting interested in history, we are telling them. But it is history that informs the present,” Owana said.
The NRM party Secretary-General Richard Todwong told the students to understand the party’s methods of work, saying that “disagreeing openly is important in building party cohesion and consensus.”
