New NRM leadership has an opportunity to build a sustainable party

By Brenda Namukuta

As the clock ticks towards the 2026 polls, the new leadership at the NRM secretariat has an opportunity to build a strong, vibrant, people-centered, and sustainable NRM party, ready to wither storms and establish a strong democracy in Uganda.

Mid this year, President Yoweri Museveni shuffled the NRM Secretariat leadership, bringing in a new vibrant, young, and charismatic secretary-general, deputy, and treasurer. This team consists of people who have spent donkey years learning how the NRM works, and we expect them to deliver a strong, vibrant, and sustainable party.

The mandate of the new team is well cut out: top on the agenda is to revive the recruitment drive that the party thrived on around 2006. According to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, it is projected that Uganda’s population will be about 49.72 million people in 2026, and more than 25 million people will be eligible to vote in the 2026 polls. The new team at the secretariat must strive at recruiting about 20 million new NRM members from this population.

To achieve this, the new team headed by the charismatic secretary general Richard Todwong must adopt the bottom-up approach of recruitment. This should involve the team camping in different villages of Uganda to teach, sensitize and explain the NRM ideology to the populous.

In this drive, the party must make sure that it registers and maintains an updated electronic register of all its members, and members given a copy of the registration to avoid the confusion that marred the 2021 elections, where the party ended up having no register.

The new team also has an opportunity to train and re-orient all members into party cadres, who understand the ideologies and values of NRM, right from training them about the 10-point programme that brought the NRM into power in 1996 to the expanded 17-point programme.

This will help the party to stump out corruption and eliminate unpatriotic people from Uganda.

As a routine, the party must mobilise itself into an entrepreneurship entity to develop businesses and ideas to generate the financial resources to drive the party forward. The NRM must turn itself into a businessman to own and build businesses to give it strong financial muscles. The party can start real estate, run and operate contracts to survive in this world.

As a beginner, the party must make it mandatory for all the members to contribute an annual membership fee to kick start its road towards owning and operating businesses to survive.

This money can be used to build the headquarters of the party and also help the party to run its programmes such as holding party elections, mobilization, and development agenda of Uganda.

When the party owns and operates businesses, it will operate sustainably and survive the challenges faced by Africa’s post-independence parties such as UPC of Uganda and KANU of Kenya.

To maintain and sustain power, the NRM secretariat should lead the drive in explaining and educating the populous about the programmes of government.

Since it came to power in 1986, the NRM has achieved a lot; including, the introduction of the Universal education, in 1997, where over 9 million new children who had never had a day at school joined the school, adding over 1,000 megawatts of power to the national grid, constructing over 10,000 kilometers of tarmac roads, and maintaining total peace in every corner of Uganda.

All these achievements must be explained to the people of Uganda, and the NRM secretariat must take the lead, and replicate the process to the local council I representatives. This will help the people know the achievements of the NRM, and the populous will maintain NRM in power.

The writer is the Kaliro District Woman MP and Member of the NRM