Only thirty days left to the general election polling day, and retired UPDF Maj. Gen. and former army commander for nine years, 1989-1998 Gregory Mugisha Muntu has still failed to gain visible traction on the campaign trail. If he was a tree in a plantation, many would be right to describe him as the laggard. And yet from the visual demeanor, and a clean-slate career background, of the bee-line candidates, you are perhaps the next best to President Yoweri Museveni, also the ruling NRM presidential candidate.

You Mugisha Muntu, what for really. One true bill is a point when in the last election you got only 67,574 votes ( 0.65%) in the national presidential vote. You have come back again but the signs are clearly ominous for you. Second attempt makes a line and that line points to another very poor performance, after which you should hang it up after strike two rather than go down swinging the bat like your friend, and former UPDF comrade Kizza Besigye.

Your looming unprecedented rejection makes it even clearer that your return should never have seen the light of day. It may now point to evidence of your vindictiveness against President Yoweri Museveni, the man who propped you up to become his army commander at just 29 years old in 1989 when many people believed you did not possess qualities or expertise to become one. He jumped you in career and professional ladders becoming so far, the only army commander to hold the rank of colonel for only two months, was skipped that of Brigadier, straight a Maj. Gen. and then appointed army commander, which caused murmurs, with Kampala shops closing at midday. I remember, Museveni warning, rumoured coup plotters, that they go ‘six feet underground.’

Muntu, you are now like that prosecutor who tries to return to the same case with the same facts and evidence even when the jury repeatedly declines to endorse a trial. But we should wish him good luck. But listening to the man who was Chief of Military Intelligence, Commander 5th Infantry Division based in Lira, Chief Political Commissar (CPC), and eventually the Army Commander for nine years, and couldn’t end the wars, now speaking so casually as if running government is so easy, baffles me. A steely authoritarian, under whose watch corruption in NRA/UPDF was commonplace, and indisciplinados thrived leading to the terminology of kateebe, Muntu isn’t exceptional. Although Muntu singings of building ‘systems’ but as the Organising Secretary, and later president of FDC, the party stalled and degenerated. And today, we are all witnessing how the Alliance for National Transformation (ANT), the party he founded in 2017 is almost a stillbirth. Ugandans do not want Uganda to go that direction. Surely, Muntu, with that record, shouldn’t be so dismissive of Museveni’s overall performance in delivering Uganda from the abyss to security, stability, rebuilding the state, country and socio-economic transformation underway.

Watching his public rallies, or rather a gatherings of a few people surrounding him at these sojourns appear not to touch his sides. Muntu is not in competition with any other candidate over crowd sizes or media coverage. A few people who do not know his tour of duty within the NRM, hailing him as ‘disciplined and uncorrupt’ are tempted to suggest that he should possibly be the president Uganda ought to have after President Museveni, but only if, he could return to the NRM.

Unfortunately, the cruelty of Uganda’s shallow democratic politics is birthing the kinds, that going by opinion polls, ought not to have been on the ballot paper in the first place, and should be an embarrassment to NRM’s flagship mantra of clean and quality politics.