Big Interview: "No one is bigger than NRM. Ask Kadaga if you doubt this," says Dombo

The biggest talking point since President Museveni was declared the winner of the January 2021 general election has been how he would deal with Buganda and Busoga, former bastions of NRM support that voted against him.

Museveni lost Buganda and Busoga to the National Unity Platform (NUP), led by musician turned politician Robert Kyagulanyi alias Bobi Wine. This week, the party started a campaign aimed at reclaiming its lost grip in the region.

The Nile Post spoke to Emmanuel Lumala Dombo, the NRM director information and publicity on a number of issues including internal democracy in NRM.

Excerpts below:

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Last week, President Museveni met the Kabaka of Buganda. Was it one way of strengthening the relationship between the kingdom and the government or was the meeting because of the ongoing debate regarding mailo land?

I think this was part of the routine engagement. Whenever there are issues either at personal level or in the kingdom, it just becomes imperative for the leadership of either the country or the kingdom that they meet and find out the feeling on either side because it is possible to react on the situation where you don’t have correct information.

So the best thing to do in any form of leadership be it at nation, be it at church, be it traditional is to get clear information about what the other colleague is saying. I think that is one of things the meeting was meant to address.

There have been new changes in the party that saw the unveiling of the new secretary general. Should we expect the party to perform much better this time?

All changes that are made within the party are intended to improve it, and our situation as party members and party leaders is to make the following day better than the previous day. So, all those changes that were made have already shown tremendous improvement on the way we do think in the NRM.

The right honourable Richard Todwong has already met the communication [department], the Parliamentary caucus and he has also met the members of staff of NRM something that has not happened for a very long while in order to streamline the administration of the staff.

So the party is making strides to act much better by building on what our previous boss did.

There has been a lot of intrigue and tension within NRM. Analysts claim that it has affected the growth of the party. How are you resolving this?

No, there has been a lot of individual merit which even saw the right honourable speaker contesting as an independent yet she is the vice national chairperson. Because of that it has brought a clash among the members either who are dissatisfied with the internal processes or who are just indisciplined by disregarding the party position but the outcome has demonstrated that the party is stronger and hopefully with time we shall be able to overcome some of these [challenges].

Given the size of party like NRM, those challenges will always emerge in one way or the other but it depends on the focus of the leadership in order not to divert the focus of the leaders.

Are there some of the disciplinary measures that have been taken against some of those members who are believed to have disregarded the party position?

According to the wise counsel of the party chairman, we usually begin from persuasion. Even when the disciplinary action is an alternative, it is usually the very last alternative and where members are persuaded and they see light, then there is no reason to resort to measures of disciplinary action. At times members are just cautioned and at times it may be a failure of the internal system.

Many People think that NRM is fused with the state in the way it conducts its activities. Do you hold the same view?

Ask them that question because they are the one saying so. They must substantiate because me who is at the secretariat I don’t have money and yet the state has money. If they were fused, then I wouldn’t be complaining. What I know is that the chairman of NRM is also the president of Uganda but that doesn’t lead to fusion at all.

Having spent 35 years in power, what is the future of NRM in the coming years? Can the party survive without President Museveni?

President Museveni is the founding chairman of NRM and like all founding members of organisations, they have unusual privilege to steer the organisation because their focus and orientation is far much different from that of other members but all people are mortal .

Time will come when they cease to be. Given what we have seen from other organisations’ like Chama Cha Mapinduzi(CCM), founded by Julius Nyerere, when he died CCM has even become stronger.

We believe that NRM also will be stronger while it is still enjoying the privilege of being nurtured by the founding chairman. Time will come [for him to leave] and that is why recently the president appointed a secretariat team with hardly any members from the historical field.

Recently, President Museveni said he has a good working relationship with the opposition .Do you think his comments were meant to discredit the opposition in the eyes of Ugandans?

Would you want him to have a bad working relationship with them? When we compete, does it make us enemies? It is the ideas that you put forward that you compete on. Who pays the opposition in Parliament? Aren’t they paid by the government?

In the January polls, NRM performed poorly in Buganda with several big shots voted out. In your view what could have been the cause of this and what is being done to change this ahead of the 2026 general election?

One of the causes of poor performance in Buganda is that the concentration of media houses is more in central region, so when people go to the media houses and tell lies, people take them for the gospel truth but soon the population is going to discover that after all they don’t have any better alternative to President Museveni and I believe NRM will reemerge. The other is at times the weakness of the leadership in the respective areas in supervising government programmes and also following up on the promises of government. When that happens, it infuriates the population.

The third reason has been the youth quake. There are so many young people who felt that perhaps they were disregarded or they were ignored by the party and this will make us revise our mobilisation strategy to ensure that we capture the young people.

How democratic is NRM internally because people claim that some organs are not democratic enough?

Different organs of a party like NRM make decisions at various levels differently and the biggest form of decision making at the Central Executive Committee ( CEC) is by consensus.

Decision in NRM Caucus is by voting, so democracy is not absolute because what is important is to build consensus and that is why when the right Honorable Rebecca Kadaga emerged and disregarded what happened in CEC, she could not succeed but also the CEC is an organisation that is tolerant and works with everybody.

They still respected and appointed Hon Kadaga as a senior person in the government because her contribution is not limited to being speaker of Parliament. She can still provide leadership wherever she can be .

So she is the second national vice chairperson of the party but she is also the First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for East African Affairs which require a person of her stature and experience in order to promote the agenda of the community.

Where does NRM get its funding because it is believed that the party uses funds from the state to run its activities?

That is true, NRM receives money from the government because the Political Parties and Organisation Act apportions specific funds to fund the political parties and NRM receives on quarterly basis money from the Electoral Commission and all the other parties that are represented in Parliament receive money from the government.

That is why you always see NRM members fighting hard to ensure that we get absolute numbers that will enable us to get a better share of our resources. The second is that during the electoral process, recently we raised almost Shs 20 billion from the electoral processes. This is money members paid as election fees.

Are you comfortable where you are or do we expect to see you return to elective politics come 2026?

My ambition is to be a very successful person of the party to ensure that the people who were not getting correct information about NRM can get it. When I was a Member of Parliament, I was mainly speaking for Butaleja, now I speak for the entire NRM and for the whole country. This is a new opportunity and a new challenge.

I was in elective politics for 20 years and I want to see where I can be after four years or five years serving the secretariat. For the person who is at the secretariat now to begin talking about elective politics, it becomes antagonistic and I wouldn’t wish to antagonise anybody because right now, I am very contented with being the spokesperson of the party.

The opposition has criticised the way the government has handled the second wave of Covid-19 in the country, what do you think would have been done better?

We have performed far much better than developed countries like America where the number of deaths far exceeded the numbers that happened in Uganda and many international magazines have given accolades to President Museveni as being the leading [person in the fight against Covid-19] in almost all of Africa. So the government has tried its best, the corrupt tendencies in the procurement of things in office of the Prime Minister and the Ministry of Health notwithstanding and other corruption tendencies.