By Our Staff Writer – 2^nd-8^th Aug 2010

With the incremental fall out with Buganda that his government has had over the last few years, “…all signs are that President Yoweri Museveni will this time round look north for his next Vice President”; says a source within the NRM government.More than anything else, the source told Uganda Correspondent, “…Mengo’s belligerence with us [NRM government-Ed] will definitely cost Buganda the Vice Presidency”.  Museveni, he says, has been relatively happy to keep the Vice Presidency in Buganda as a symbolic reward for the help that Baganda gave his NRA rebels during the Luwero Triangle war that brought him to power in January 1986.

That “goodwill”, he says, has been “severely shaken” by two major things:  First of all, he argues that “our current Vice President Prof Gilbert Bukenya seems to be taking his job too seriously.  He wants to be a real Vice President”.  That, according to this NRM insider, “was never part of the deal”.

Secondly, he points the finger of blame at Mengo’s opposition to virtually everything that the NRM government has proposed and done over the last few years.

“They opposed our proposals to amend article 105[2] to remove term limits; they opposed the amendment of the Land Act; and they opposed the government’s proposal for a “Regional Tier” system of federalism. Museveni is a great political strategist.  He has read the mood in Buganda Kingdom and among ordinary Baganda very well and rightly concluded that Buganda is a lost cause”; the NRM insider reasoned.

According to this insider, the recent event that saw bared-handed Baganda youth attempting to block President Museveni from visiting the burnt out Kasubi Tombs was the clearest indication that Museveni was right to conclude that the NRM government has lost support in Buganda.

So to fill that block vote gap, the insider says, Museveni is already taking advantage of the relative peace that has returned to the north.  “He will probably raise the stakes for the north even higher by dangling the Vice Presidency of Uganda in their faces”; he says.  In his view, the most obvious choices [in order of preference] are Gulu LC5 boss and DP President Norbert Mao, International Affairs State Minister Henry Okello Oryem, and Lands Minister Daniel Omara Atubo.

While Okello Oryem and Daniel Omara Atubo are openly NRM and therefore legitimate candidates for the VP slot, Mao on the other hand, appears to be treading a path that is neither solid opposition nor NRM.  If Museveni indeed takes his pick from one of the three northern political heavy weights, then he surely will have gone some way in establishing a political relation with some gullible people from the north.