TDA fail to choose flag bearer again

A long awaited decision of the Opposition coalition, The Democratic Alliance, to name a joint presidential flag bearer remained in balance yesterday as more hurdles seemed to crop up along the way.

A section of FDC Members of Parliament yesterday petitioned the TDA summit after reports of a proposal to amend the alliance protocol to allow for voting instead of consensus as earlier envisaged.

The MPs led by Rukungiri Municipality MP Roland Kaginda, want the summit to stick to the original idea of building consensus to find a joint presidential candidate.

“As FDC Members of Parliament, we have put down our signatures to remind them that they should not change. We are about 15 members and others are going to sign,” Mr Kaginda said. However, Tororo County MP Geoffrey Ekanya, who leads the Kizza Besigye campaign team and one of the people alleged to have signed denied such a petition.

“I am not aware of such a petition. As chairperson of the KB taskforce, we agreed that as members of the FDC taskforce, we commit ourselves to the protocol we ratified in the delegates conference committing ourselves to the TDA processes.”
Ekanya equated the said petition to a campaign he said was meant to portray some members in FDC as opposed to the TDA process. “In the event that there is an amendment, it should go through the organs of the parties that ratified the document. You cannot just sit and make amendments yet there are parties that signed up to the protocol.”

The question of building consensus to come up with a joint candidate is what the summit has had to grapple with prompting them to extend the deadlines to announce the candidate on more than two occassions. Yesterday, the two contenders for the joint presidential candidate made presentations to the summit about their candidature and by press time, they had left while the rest of the members of the summit remained in the meeting.

Like Dr Besigye, Mr Amama Mbabazi remained tight-lipped on the presentation he had made before the summit but promised to speak about it in detail on Friday.

While he said the matter of amending the protocol had not come to his attention, Mr Mbabazi said it was up to the summit to make pronouncement on the matter. “I think the protocol is adequate and where the summit finds that the protocol needs some amendment, then I think they should do it,” Mr Mbabazi said.

Dr Besigye assured his supporters to have faith in the TDA process. “White smoke will be in my favour because we are looking for a TDA candidate not my candidature,” Dr Besigye said