Taking stock of NRM’s performance on the eve of 2011 elections
As Uganda heads into another round of multi-party presidential and parliamentary elections, this is the right moment to take stock of what the governing NRM party has achieved since it came to power 25 years ago. The NRM under the leadership of Museveni launched a credible and well thought out development blue print compressed into the ten-point program subsequently expanded to fifteen. This program put Ugandans at the center of development. Therefore NRM’s performance must be assessed against this principal goal.
By contrast the development program was not matched by a cadre with sufficient expertise and experience. A large number of NRM cadres did not have the requisite qualifications much less experience. Afraid of being swamped by the experienced Ugandans who did not fight the guerrilla war from 1981 to 1985, the NRM government chose not to invite qualified and experienced Ugandans in the diaspora and marginalized those at home. To fill the gap while it learned on the job, the government invited a wide range of foreign experts most of them young, inexperienced and ignorant of Uganda’s overall environment.