OFWONO OPONDO: Estranged Mathias Nsamba Mpuuga flees NUP in a leaking vessel

In the end there was no fight as had been anticipated, at least going by the public rhetoric’s, living up to the old adage, “When you can’t stand the heat, leave the kitchen”. Like the sudden collapse of Bashar al-Assad, the former president of Syria for thirty-four years, who fled without the tough fight many expected particularly for the capital Damascus, Mathias Nsamba Mpuuga last week fled from the National Unity Platform (NUP) party and announced intentions to found his own political ensemble, Democratic Alliance (DA).

Mpuuga, recently estranged from the NUP, an opposition political party he says he helped form in 2020, and has been its vice president for Buganda, launched DA, a new party many see as tribal and a stillbirth, with a journey to nowhere. But hard as it might be, we can still give Mpuuga and his new crew of Lubega Mukaaku, Michael Mabbikke and Dr Abed Bwanika, all checkered political journeymen, a slight benefit of the doubt although for now they are crowded out by the noises from the ongoing melodrama over Kizza Besigye’s trial at the Military Court Martial.

With a dejected demeanor, Mpuuga rumbled on while castigating the Robert Kyagulanyi NUP leadership for exhibiting dictatorial and undemocratic tendencies of not permitting the freedom of independent thought and initiatives, where only the boss’s views, perhaps more like a drug lord, takes the day without debate. He also accused Kyagulanyi and his close crew of being mere opportunists and economic fortune hunters not interested in broader democratic rights.

The choice of venue, a little-known Malibu Gardens in Bakuli, Lubaga Division, for the launch of the so-called Democratic Alliance, an imitation of what failed John Patrick Amama Mbabazi’s presidential bid in 2016 didn’t help lift its profile in the media. Mpuuga’s fallout with NUP stems from the controversial 500 million he received as then Leader of Opposition in Parliament (LoP) hardly a year into office which his colleagues saw as irregular, if fact called it a bribe, and demanded he returns but he clung to it forcing them to evict him as LoP and also got suspended as vice president for Buganda region.

Since then Mpuuga has faced a barrage of bad publicity getting rolled in political mud and his attempts to win favour with his so-called Electoral Reform Bill fell on scotched ground and its life in parliament is uncertain after NUP publicly distanced itself from seeing it as a fishing expedition in a leaking vessel.

Already, NUP, PPF a runaway outfit from FDC led by Erias Lukwago and a host of other minor parties have taken a Buganda tribal slant, and it is hard to see how DA with Mpuuga, Mukaaku, Mabbikke and Bwanika by their own political and ideological outlooks as we know them, will cobble a working formula beyond the Buganda enclave. While it is still early, it remains unlikely that Mpuuga and TDA can inflict much damage on NUP even within its current wave-like hold in Buganda or indeed cause any significant political realignment in Uganda as we head to the 2026 general elections.

And rather than join the other existing opposition parties of DP, UPC, FDC, ANT, that all claim to seek the removal of NRM and President Yoweri Museveni, Mpuuga has instead chosen to give them a vote of no confidence. How much cream, and dregs, DA will gather along its path is hard to tell for now. He, together with Mabbikke, Medard Segona, Lulume Bayiga and Lukwago were among the former ‘Young Democrats’ and later Suubi, a Ganda ethnocentric outfit linked to Mengo that tried in futility to wrestle DP from Norbert Mao but fled into different political camps towards the 2021 elections.