The feud between President Yoweri Museveni’s Permanent Private Secretary Molly Kamukama and the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) Secretary General Justine Kasule Lumumba has reached boiling point.
The latest in the corridors of power reveals that it almost time to have Ms Lumumba kicked out of the party headquarters in Kampala after Museveni criticized her NRM secretariat team while on a radio talk show in Fort Portal.
On Friday, Museveni was furious when he complained that his views on the contentious subjects like land wouldn’t be understood by the population if the leaders at Kyaddondo had done their work of politically explaining the government programmes. In retaliation, the leader of Lumumba’s camp in the NRM attacked PPS Kamukama, accusing her of using her office to exaggerate the weakness of Lumumba’s team to Museveni for whom she is chief secretary. Kabanda insists that Kamukama hates Lumumba because of her close ties with former PPS Maj. Edith Nakalema.
State House sources say that Museveni recently got an intelligence report that purportedly informed him about what has gone wrong at Kyaddondo under Lumumba’s watch including stealing funds meant to cater for NRM candidates during the recently by elections. Now the president has instructed Molly Kamukama and her State House team to go ahead and directly distribute the NRM money to their candidates especially in the district elections, stifling Lumumba’s people at Kyaddondo Road.
The president reportedly refused to have a one by one meeting with embattled Lumumba last Friday after the Cabinet meeting in Entebbe. This was a few days after Mr Museveni summoned Ms Lumumba and her senior management team to State House Entebbe and the matter of restructuring the secretariat and forthcoming grassroots elections are said to have been top on the agenda. “There are negative forces that are looking at this as sending away our people, which is not true. The actual thing that is going to happen is putting people in the right positions; hiring new ones where needed and retiring others who want to leave,” said NRM’s communications officer Rogers Mulindwa .
It is understood that State House spies also informed President Museveni that some top clerics in the Catholic Church were fronting the woman from Busoga to upstage Museveni by calling a press conference to resign her job as SG. Lumumba’s deputy Richard Todwong is set to replace her at Kyaddondo Road in the interim as as a more suitable person is being identified.
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