By KT Reporters
Those deployed to Kisoro to market the NUP candidate say they faced hard time having to sell Sultana Mukamkwaya to the reluctant electorate. One such campaigner Moses Kanala who is a NUP Councillor in Makindye Ssabagabo Municipality says voters made it clear that NUP fronted the wrong candidate because she doesn’t stay in Kisoro that much as she is always in Kampala.
Kanala says much as there was rigging, its not the reason the Candidate trailed getting only 900 votes in the whole district as others polled over 40,000. That not many people know her beyond Kisoro Municipality and she is rarely home.
But yet even the few people who know her do not know her for having a good reputation. That they generally perceive her as a mere wannabe who is generally aloof and indifferent to the community concerns. Even a few NUP adherents in Kisoro felt she was being imposed on them simply because she is Robert Kyagulanyi and Francis Zzake’s person.
Kisoro has a lot of ethnicity and religious sectarianism. You are either a protestant or Catholic and as a candidate, that gives you a belonging and a good starting point. Yet being Sultan, the NUP Kyotara candidate was neither of these, something that deprived her of the much needed political capital to begin with.
Being a kyotara, she couldn’t claim belonging to any of the ethnic groups that are dominant in Kisoro. Majority of the people in Kisoro proudly belong to an ethnic group: be they Bahutu or Batwa. In her case, Sultan doesn’t organically belong to any, a thing that made her a difficult brand to sell to the voters. Even the Catholics couldn’t feel any affinity to her just like the Protestants and yet religion was a big factor to the extent that some CoU Reverands openly campaigned for their choice candidate.
Even in 2021 when she stood for the newly created Kisoro Municipality, Sultana’s performance was lukewarm which demonstrated how insignificant she was and still is in the politics of Kisoro. In a race of four candidates, she trailed in the number three position. She polled only 106 votes compared to others namely NRM’s Paul Kwizera who got 3,568 votes, independent Paul Byibesho who polled 3,387 votes and Enock Mugisha, another independent who got 18 votes. Give us feedback on this story through our email: kamwokyatimes@gmail.com.
