Kampala — THAT he has always been at loggerheads with the Government is nothing new. There is hardly any love lost between him and the President of Uganda whose framed portrait he once took down from his office wall. What is interesting is that this time this vocal legislator is at war with his own party president.

John Livingstone Okello Okello, the Member of Parliament for Chua County in Kitgum District, accused the Uganda People's Congress (UPC) president, Mira Obote, of dividing the party. Miria is the widow of the revered UPC founder and former two-time president, Apollo Milton Obote.

Over the years, a number of UPC politicians have had problems with the party over their defiance of Obote's wishes. The former head of the UPC Presidential Policy Commission (PPC), Dr. James Rwanyarare, even sued Okello Okello among others, when Obote disbanded the PPC and replaced it with a Constitutional Steering Committee, of which Okello Okello was part. In 2005 after Obote's death, his widow took over from him and his son was fronted for the Lira parliamentary seat in place of UPC strongwoman Cecilia Ogwal. During these turbulent times, several UPC members abandoned ship, but Okello Okello was comfortable as vice-president.

However, when it emerged that Obote's son, Jimmy Akena, wants to be party president, the makings of a family dynasty became obvious. Okello Okello and two other MPs met with the exiled former foreign affairs minister and UN official, Olara Otunnu, to convince him to return to Uganda and vie for UPC's presidency.

But Miria Obote nipped their plans in the bud by firing Okello Okello and some others in a mini-reshuffle.

This is what made Okello Okello sound alarm bells about the party's future. The MP, who incidentally does not like his Christian names, has never been one to mince his words. This is how he came to be a thorn in the flesh of the Government on issues regarding the Acholi region and northern Uganda.

In the late 1990s, he battled the Government's preference for military means of ending the LRA conflict. He complained of the miserable life in the IDP camps and said that the Government intentionally kept them there, while maintaining the war as a cash cow.

Okello Okello has vocally fought off attempts to appropriate land in Acholi, right from when Divinity Union, owned by General Salim Saleh, wanted to start agricultural projects in Acholiland. He has continued a similar hue and cry of the Government wanting to steal Acholi land through the Land Act Amendment Bill and sugarcane growing by the Madhvani group of companies. He felt vindicated when oil reserves were discovered in Amuru.

Clearly, he is a political force to reckon with and UPC would lose a lot by alienating one who has supported the party practically all his life.

Okello Okello's entry into UPC was by default as a youth, having experienced the political frenzy when he participated in the 1962 elections campaigns. He was a political animal in his university days at University of Nairobi, where he was elected a students' guild representative and guild minister. He was employed in the Ministry of Lands from 1970 to 1995, when he resigned to pursue politics. He was MP for Chua from 1996 until 2001, when he was ousted by Henry Okello Oryem.

But he bounced back in 2006 to continue opposing government policy - or lack of it, according to him - in the north. As chairman of the Acholi Parliamentary Group (APG), Okello continues to be one of the Government's fiercest critics.

When the army bombed LRA camps in Garamba forest in the DRC, Okello Okello and other APG MPs were not happy with the action.

They said the army had bombed empty camps, then that the Government was killing innocent people whom it had failed to protect from abduction in the first place. President Yoweri Museveni was riled by the statements that he said they were signing their political death warrants. Well, the 66-year-old Okello Okello lived to die another day, but was it to die politically at the hands of his own party?