Sebaggala’s highs and lows in the fight for greater democracy 

Very little was known about his political views and ambitions as the curtain was about to be drawn on his life. Late in September Seya announced that he had joined Mr Robert Kyagulanyi’s People Power Movement and that he would be returning to run for Kampala Lord Mayor, but the announcement did not generate as much excitement as it would have perhaps done in say 2009.

What is mostly remembered about the man are the events of 2010 when Seya quit the Democratic Party (DP) where he had been a life member and in whose service he had been for a good 30 years, to form his own party, the Liberal Democratic Transparent Party (LDTP) before hobnobbing with President Museveni and the NRM.

Defining moment
The announcement on September 23, 2010, that he would be backing Mr Museveni in the 2011 general election was perhaps the most defining moment of Seya’s political career.

Less than 24 hours after his declaration, 83 LDTP supporters led by his personal assistant, Mulyanyama Nganda Kasirye, ditched him and returned to DP.

He had apparently not involved the group in his negotiations with Mr Museveni. He instead issued them with an ultimatum to either follow him or quit the LDTP offices. They were offended because it suddenly looked like he was treating them like bunches of matooke which he could carry around from one vehicle to another as he wished. That was the beginning of the dip in Seya’s fortunes.

Loss of DP hot seat
By February 2010 when he lost the race for the DP presidency to Mr Norbert Mao, many a party member had become uncomfortable with the cosiness between him and Mr Museveni.

On November 11, 2006, a few months after he had regained his seat as mayor of Kampala, Sebaggala and Mr Museveni put up a public show of camaraderie during the launch of a safe water project for the poor in Rubaga Division.

Mr Museveni was to later show up at the Kampala Serena Hotel for the December 20, 2008, wedding of Sebaggala’s son, Sulaimain Cobra. During the function, Mr Museveni lavished praise on Seya, describing him as “astute politician who never allows divergent views to translate into enmity”.

Six months before the DP Mbale delegates’ conference, his campaign tagline was changed to “We shall change where necessary”, which suggested that he was open to working with the NRM and his private discussions with some of the party members suggested that he was intent on hammering out a power sharing deal with Mr Museveni. All this made the delegates very suspicious.

Lost opportunities?
Mr Muhammad Baswari Kezaala, a former member of the Uganda Young Democrats (UYD), who was to serve as vice chairman of DP in charge of eastern Uganda and later national chairman of the party and was one of the many young politicians that Seya mentored believes it is unfair for anyone to judge Seya based on the events of 2010.

Mr Kezaala thinks that his mentor was largely misunderstood by both friends and foes.

Like many people who had earlier worked with the former DP president general, Dr Paul Kawanga Ssemogerere, a proponent of proportional representation and power sharing, Seya had come to appreciate and advocate it.

“In 2010 he wanted to be president of DP so he could use the position to convince other political parties to form a joint political formation to take on the NRM. He felt that there would be a provision for sharing power if the formation won and even if it did not win, it would still be strong enough to pressurise the victor into forming a government of national unity,” Mr Kezaala says.

Arguing that the only thing that one cannot change unless one’s mother suddenly makes a revelation about one’s parentage should be the clan, Seya believed that there was no need for Ugandans to worship political parties in the way they do.

He thought that it was time for Ugandans to form political formations depending on conditions and circumstances pertaining at the time.
That explains why he was in the run up to the Mbale delegates’ conference talking about doing business with Mr Museveni if he failed to get a 51 per cent majority. He seemed to have started counting his eggs before they hatched. Some, including his closest associates, were reading mischief in his ambitions.

“Hon Matia Nsubuga was, for example, very close to Hajj Sebaggala and instrumental in all his campaigns, but had misgivings about placing the party in his hands. There was a thinking that DP borrows a leaf from FDC and amends its constitution to allow for a party president and a presidential flag bearer so that he could have a chance to run for president on the party’s ticket even if he was not the leader of the party, but time never allowed,” Mr Kezaala says.

Now one of the biggest talking around the relations between the ruling NRM and the Opposition has been the ruling party’s refusal to facilitate a process that would have created a structured way of engaging and cooperating. The NRM prefers to strike deals with individuals in the Opposition and not with the parties to which they belong.

The deputy director of Media Centre, Mr Shaban Bantariza, has previously defended personal deals between Museveni and some people in the Opposition.
“One doesn’t have to have a structured engagement. That would require the parties to nominate who the President includes in his Cabinet. What if the President does not believe in that person’s competence?” he argues.

Now in light of the complaints around the insistence by Mr Museveni and the NRM to deal with individuals and not the institutions to which they are affiliated, it would appear that Seya had by 2010 started looking farther than any of his cohort and fellow DP members were doing. That would perhaps mark him out as a visionary that was never appreciated.

Skilled mobiliser
It was mostly members of the Opposition who celebrated the rejection in June 2011 by Parliament’s appointments committee, of his nomination as minister without portfolio. He, along with Mr Saleh Kamba, Hajj Mbabali Muyanja, who had been nominated for Bunyoro Affairs and Investment respectively, were rejected because members of the committee felt that their qualifications were of featherweight.

But even prior to that most of Seya’s former allies had already turned into some of his most virulent critics.

“They (NRM) caught a dead fish. It has already been killed by a weed,” said one of his former protégés, Mr Michael Mabikke.

Mr Mabikke argued back then that those who were describing Seya as one with “massive mobilisation skills,” were overestimating his abilities, adding that he was long past his sell-by date, at least politically. 

The desertion by Mulyanyama and other top commanders obviously suggested that he was losing his grip, but that did not in any way suggest that he had lost the art, skill and power of mobilisation. It also did not whittle down what he had achieved before.

Prof Paul Wangoola, a former member of DP who contested and beat the secretary general of UPC, Dr John Luwuriza Kirunda to the Busoga North East seat during the 1980 general election before he was hounded into exile, says one cannot run away from the fact that Sebaggala was a great mobiliser in his own right.

“He was a phenomenon. He was not fluent in the English language, but I think that he was always able to address issues that touched the common man. For once people forgot about languages and focused on issues affecting them. You cannot achieve that unless you have immense communication and mobilisation skills,” Prof Wangoola says.

One of his biggest assets was the ability to reach out to the urban poor, mostly unemployed and uneducated youths who seemed to be very loyal to him.
 For example, in 2000 hundreds of people pitched camp at his home in Bugolobi as a meeting of DP elders deliberated on the possibility of backing the Reform Agenda candidate, Col Dr Kizza Besigye, in the 2001 general election. 

After the DP chairman of Masaka, Mr Leo Mugambe, moved the motion which was adopted, a message was sent to Seya, telling him that Dr Besigye and not him, was the preferred candidate.

“After receiving the elders’ decision, he went outside and immediately addressed the gathering. No sooner had he finished than the group hit the road to the DP headquarters at City House amid chants of ‘Hajj agambye, agambye tuwe Besigye obululu’ (Haji has said we give our votes to Besigye),” Mr Kezaala revealed.

That chant was to later resonate across the country as Besigye campaigned.
Given that there was very little time for Dr Besigye to comb the country, the country was zoned into two. Dr Besigye took the western and northern axis leaving Seya who had been appointed special campaigner to take the central and eastern axis.

Fighting for democracy
Though political parties were not banned after the NRM shot its way to power, the National Resistance Council (NRC) adopted a resolution in August 1992 to suspend their activities “in the interim”.

The screws were further tightened during debate on the Constituent Assembly (CA) statute of 1993, when parties were barred from fielding candidates in the March 1994 CA elections with emphasis being laid on candidates contesting on “individual merit”.

During the CA 199 delegates voted in favour of a continuation of “no party rule”. Then 68 people voted against no party rule and two abstained. The result was Article 269, which barred parties from engaging in “any activities that may interfere with the Movement Political System” and operating branches, holding rallies or sponsoring candidates for political office was included in the Constitution.

Seya was one of those who rose up to challenge the status quo. Between 1996 and 1997 he sponsored meetings of youthful members of the DP, under what was to later become the Uganda Young Democrats (UYD). 

What appeared to be monthly fish eating get-together at KK Beach in Ggaba were actually meetings that drew up strategies and involved many personalities including Kezaala, Mabikke, Kenneth Paul Kakande, Joseph Luzige, John Mary Ssebuufu, Godfrey Ntale, Dr Lulume Bayiga and Lyandro Komakech, among others. Some of those people that he partially mentored are still politically active. 

“It was in one of those meetings that we floated the idea of forming the UYD students unions in all higher institutions of learning as the beginning of a plan to capture the students’ community countrywide. We started with Makerere University where Hon Odonga Otto (MP Aruu County) became the first UYD student’s union leader,” Mr Kezaala explains.

Besides work in the student’s movement, Seya either sponsored or personally led forays into the major towns like Jinja, Mbarara and Mbale where UYD attempted to organise politically amid running battles with the police.

 The ugliest confrontation was perhaps in September 2002 when the police used live ammunition and tear gas to disband a DP assembly at St Jude Social Centre in Jinja.

Much as it had for a long time looked like he and his UYD friends were trying to use knives to chop down a giant mvule tree, Prof Wangoola believes that it could have contributed to the change of heart on the part of the NRM to campaign for a return to political pluralism in the July 28, 2005, referendum.

Yes, there are still gaps in the political pluralism as seen from the lack of electoral reforms and an unfair political landscape, but as a country we are going somewhere, thanks in part to Seya’s effort. 
That marks him out an unheralded hero in the fight for greater democracy.