By Kazibwe Jamil
As Uganda inches closer to the 2025 general elections, many National Resistance Movement (NRM) supporters are growing increasingly anxious about the state of the party’s internal elections. Concerns are mounting over two critical issues: the quality of the party register and the long-standing incompetence of the NRM Electoral Commission under the leadership of Dr. Tanga Odoi.
The party register, for example, is the backbone of any credible election process. It serves four essential purposes including; Verification of voters – Ensuring individuals casting votes are who they claim to be, Confirming voter eligibility – Guaranteeing only legitimate members participate, Preventing manipulation – Ensuring accurate representation of the electorate and Transparency and accountability – Building trust in the electoral process.
However, despite recent efforts to digitize the register, its quality remains alarmingly poor. Even after significant financial investments by the party chairman, the register is riddled with inaccuracies. For instance, how credible is a village claiming 4,000 registered NRM members? Such inflated figures are laughable, yet they represent a deeper problem.
When the register booklets were retrieved from villages and stored at party offices, they became easy prey for unscrupulous agents. These individuals—often working for prospective candidates—illegally accessed the booklets and manipulated them to include ghost voters favorable to their sponsors. The result? A digitized register grossly inflated with questionable entries!!!
This manipulation is evident in the party’s claim of having 18 million registered members—nearly equal to Uganda’s entire voting population. Such figures defy logic and cast doubt on the integrity of the registration process.
The proposal to weed out illegal entries through repeated display exercises is not only impractical but also irresponsible. Those behind the tampering are unlikely to allow meaningful corrections, ensuring the cycle of inflation and manipulation continues.
Additionally, these endless verification exercises are unsustainable, both financially and logistically, reducing the process to a mere cash grab for implementers rather than a meaningful reform.
A Commission Out of Its Depth
The NRM Electoral Commission has demonstrated time and again that it is incapable of conducting free and fair elections. The recent Kisoro by-elections are a testament to this failure. Despite years of experience, Dr. Tanga Odoi and his team have shown little improvement in handling electoral processes. Their inefficiency threatens to turn the 2025 elections into a national-scale disaster akin to Kisoro’s chaos.
Rhetoric and fluency are no substitutes for effective electoral management. Without urgent intervention, the NRM is likely to face widespread dissatisfaction, leading to an unprecedented rise in independent candidates as members lose faith in the party’s ability to conduct credible primaries.
This partially tells why cadres like Hon. Naome Kabasharira have been vocal in raising the alarm, urging the party leadership to address these crises before it’s too late. Their concerns deserve immediate attention if the NRM is to avoid further erosion of its credibility.
The writer is a senior NRM cadre and the National Coordinator of the Abekyawakyawa Association.
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