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By Mariam Nakalema
After two decades as Museveni’s number two
in the Movement, Haji Musa Kigongo has decided to call it a day.
“In two to three months, I am giving up my post of vice chairman.
I am not standing again; enough is enough,” he said in an exclusive
interview.
To explain why he was quitting, he used a Luganda
proverb: “Ekita ekitava ku sengejjero kifuuka wankindo.” (The calabash
that doesn’t leave the brewery gets many stitches) meaning that if you
overstay at the scene of action, you sustain injuries.
“Look at my
head, there is hardly any hair left!” Kigongo said as he rubbed his bald.
Movement leaders are already establishing an organisation, the
NRM, which will contest in the 2006 elections. Kigongo and
recently-dropped minister Bidandi Ssali are in charge of getting the NRM
registered.
Kigongo is Uganda’s longest serving Speaker of
Parliament, having served as Chairman of the interim legislature, the NRC,
from 1986 to 1995.
He presided over the legal transformation of
Uganda from a revolutionary state to a constitutional democracy.
Under Kigongo’s tenure, the NRC, initially made of 38 unelected
members, was expanded through the 1989 general elections. It also
formulated the laws that enabled Uganda’s political transition and created
the framework for making the 1995 Constitution.
Kigongo told
Sunday Vision he was going to concentrate on his business — modernising
his Mosa Courts apartments, and looking after his family.
“It is
long since I last ate supper with my children, or saw them going to bed,”
he added.
On the third term, Kigongo said whether President
Museveni wants it or not, it is not in his powers to grant himself a third
term.
“Parliament has the mandate to lift the clause on
presidential terms,” he said. “Since the Movement recommendations are
already with the Constitutional Review Commission, we need to be patient
and wait for the decisions of Cabinet and Parliament,” he said.
He
advised that those for or against the third term should only concentrate
on lobbying parliament.
“This should not take up much of our
time,” said the bush veteran.
But Kigongo was apprehensive about the
president’s attitude toward dissenters telling them to quit the Movement.
“That is wrong, we need each other,” he said adding that members
should not be expelled but should quit on their own.
He advised
federalists to lobby Parliament which, he said, is scheduled to debate the
CRC’s report.
On Museveni’s successor, he said that the Movement
has enough presidential material from whom to pick a successor at the
right time.
Published on: Sunday, 1st June,
2003 |
