The Forum for Democratic Change Party vice president for Eastern Uganda, Proscovia Salaamu Musumba, has described the current leadership of the National Unity Platform Party as “raw and misguided.”
She thanked the NRM government for grooming both national and local leaders at the National Leadership Institute (NALI) in Kyankwanzi District.
This comes after FDC called for all political parties to embrace their leadership training academy, which NUP has watered down.
While speaking at a Ntinda-based Ba political show, Musumba said the purpose of the academy, which FDC recently established, is to groom, nurture, and produce good future leaders.
“We recently launched the FDC Leadership Academy and flagged off the trainers, who are Ugandans, to gain leadership skills,” she said.
She stressed that it’s ahocking to fine some opposition parties against the idea.
Musumba narrated that as leaders, they came up with the idea of setting up an academy because the NRM party was always training and grooming its new leaders and cadres at the National Leadership Institute at Kyankwanzi, which has given them continuity.
She attacked the National Unity Platform’s (NUP) ideology of driving Ugandan politics as character assassination and hooliganism.
FDC Musumba said that there is an uncultured trend in opposition politics: if you happen not to follow Bob Wine and his gang, you will be called all sorts of names, and she strongly believes that the future of Uganda’s opposition has been buried.
According to her, if the opposition is to wipe out a big party like the NRM, which has been in power for more than 36 years, hooliganism and intolerance must be stopped.
“Right now, we have people in opposition who have become leaders due to luck, yet they lack leadership skills.They are not mentored at all from where they come from and have never been leaders at the foundation. They only used to see leaders on TV stations and hear them on radios. They are not nurtured or cooked at all, which is why they are very raw in the way they discuss and articulate national issues,” she said.
Salaamu added that if such raw fellows access public offices, they are a danger to a fragile society like Uganda. “You can look at how they walk and eat in public because they are too excited.”
Salaamu explained that this leadership academy has come at a time when there is a leadership deficit in the country.
“We need to groom leaders so that they are confident.FDC being a viable competitive party, we have to help other Ugandan parties produce products that can be sold and bought in other parts of the world,” she narrated.
She warned that the majority of Ugandans in opposition, with whom she has been for more than 25 years, pretend to be what they are not by posturing through wearing good suits when inside themselves they don’t share her ideologies.
Musumba noted that the quality of some leaders is lacking due to the lack of elaborate processes and mechanisms to help them grow politically adding that lack of mentorship, coaching, and inspiration is accountable for the poor leadership that we are grappling with at the local government level, in Parliament, at the party structure level, and at the national level.
She said FDC conducted extensive research about this leadership academy, looking at the organisation, the concept, and its sustainability. They benchmarked this from reputable leadership academies both local and international so as to get this hybrid product of the academy that suits the needs of the FDC and the country.
FDC looked at the setup of the Uganda Youth Network (UYONET), Programme for Young Politicians in Africa (PYPA), Friedrick Ebert Stiftung, Senator McCain Fellowship, Musalia Mudavadi Leadership Centre, and African National Congress (ANC) Leadership School, among others.
According to her, this has shaped the establishment of the FDC Leadership Academy, and they are proud to announce that this is the first Leadership Academy by an opposition political party in the whole of Africa.
“The academy is here to train leaders, harness them, and uplift their ambitions and intentions strategically, step by step. The academy will also act as a tool for mobilisation. The Party is in the final stages of undertaking targeted recruitment of members, among whom the Party will undertake leadership identification, and then the identified leaders will be trained under the leadership academy, and thereafter the trained leaders will be deployed to offer leadership at various stages,” Salaamu said.
She uttered that the FDC Leadership Academy provides an avenue for answering these leadership gaps and challenges so as to increase youth, women, and PWDs’ participation in leadership and governance.
The Leadership Academy is anchored in the recently launched FDC 5-year strategic plan under the strategic objective to “build a robust electoral infrastructure to compete, win, and defend victories.” “It’s against that background that the Party National leadership decided to actualize and implement this strategic directive,” she said.
Conclusively, she said the FDC Party Leadership decided that this academy be established henceforth with the training of the trainers, where 60 participants, three people representing each sub region, are gathered today here at the Party Headquarters for the pass out and to witness the launch of the academy after the inaugural training of the two days of intense training.
