A year after he controversially lost his fourth presidential bid, Dr Kizza Besigye is laying ground for a fifth attempt in 2021.
According to former FDC spokesman Phillip Wafula Oguttu, the team is laying strategies to win the 2021 election. Oguttu is a member of Besigye's defiance government. The strategies include a clandestine recruitment drive for civil servants into their defiance campaign against the NRM government.
"We are preparing with our people for 2021 so that when we get into power, we will not go to every department and use an NRM cadre as our civil servant. We are going to have our own cadres, and we are recruiting them," Oguttu said in an interview with The Observer at the weekend.
"We have been recruiting them [the civil servants] so that when there is change of government, they know what to do," he added.
Oguttu is the defiance cabinet's minister for the presidency. He said civil servants so far recruited have been instrumental in leaking vital information the opposition has used so far to expose corruption and theft in government.
Oguttu cited his own Bukooli Central constituency in Bugiri. He claims that his FDC agents were given Shs 50,000 each to allow ballot stuffing. Discontented with the election result, Besigye launched his defiance campaign.
The party announced several activities, which included the wearing of blue clothes every Friday, a stay home and prayer call on Thursdays and Tuesdays respectively and a call for an international audit of the results.
One year on, the activities seem to have died out and triggered a rift within the biggest opposition party. Some members look at the defiance campaign as a tool tailored to undermine Maj Gen Mugusha Muntu's party leadership, a suggestion Oguttu roundly denies.
"Ever since FDC began, defiance has always been [part of our activities]. We have always done things against what we think is wrong. But this time round, we said we shall defy and even form a government of defiance," Oguttu said.
However, he admitted the campaign has had a change of strategy from direct confrontation with police to clandestine methods.
"It will come back soon; you will see it everywhere across the country. I can tell you; networks are being built [and] are waiting. What we are not going to do is to take up a gun. What we don't believe in is violence," he said.
The networks, he said, are not entirely composed of FDC supporters but people from other political parties, public servants and professionals who want to see a change in government.
"I am telling you that even NRM is doing that. They don't have a right to recruit clandestinely and build cadreship right from the village and we can't," he said.
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Interviewed separately, the executive director of the Uganda Media Centre, Ofwono Opondo, said government cannot be worried about Besigye's activities.
"His defiance campaign simply hit a dead end because the security was capable of preventing many of his physical defiance activities but most important is that the big group of FDC did not join him. The most important group, that is the MPs and local government leaders, could not forfeit their seats because they found it awkward," he argued.
Once the government succeeded in deflating the defiance campaign, Opondo reasoned, the FDC strongman turned to non-political approaches which still don't worry government.
"They have been working with civil servants all along, for example, some of the alarmist corruption reports that are coming to parliament are by civil servants because they want to paint government in a bad image," Opondo said.
"By the way this is not going to be the first time they are dealing with civil servants, Nandala-Mafabi [FDC secretary general] was working in ministry of finance, Betty Aol [Gulu Woman MP] and [former Kaberamaido MP Florence] Ibi were government teachers and many others. If he is recruiting them for purposes of undermining effective implementation of government programs or diverting resources to his activities, then we will get worried," Opondo added.
Oguttu's full interview will be published in The Observer on Wednesday.
