Jimmy Akena, the embattled Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC) president is set to eat big: under a new deal reached at with selected Congress party adherents, President Yoweri Museveni has reportedly set in motion a process that will ensure that the former first son becomes Third Deputy Prime Minister.
According to sources Akena, reached the understanding at a meeting held at State House in Entebbe which was attended by members loyal to the Akena faction of the UPC.
Further, the source said that long and winding Akena’s journey to the premiership had claimed the part of scalp of a senior government cadre that was on Mr Museveni’s ‘original ministerial list’.
However, the sources further intimated to the EagleOnline that Akena, the Lira Municipality MP elected on the UPC party ticket, was at first reluctant to take up the offer of a ministerial post in the National Resistance Movement (NRM) government, after his mother mama Miria Kalule Obote and some UPC stalwarts expressed doubts as to Mr Museveni’s ‘complete turnaround gesture’, which they argued, was aimed at ‘annihilating the UPC’.
Indeed, the former first son became the subject of mixed reactions following his brother’s castigation of the appointment of his wife Betty Amongi, as the Minister of Lands, Housing and Urban Development.
Recently, Akena’s elder brother Tony Akaki, lashed out the UPC ‘first couple’ of Mr Akena and Oyam South MP Amongi, saying the latter was a mole designated by the NRM to destroy the UPC, a party founded by Dr Apollo Milton Obote, the father of Akaki and Akena.
Indeed, for the better part of his regime that has spanned 30 years, Mr Museveni has chided Dr Obote for among other things, being responsible for the mess in post-independence Uganda, a development that drew parallel wedges between the two political families of Mr Museveni and Dr Obote.
“It is more complicated than that…but this man [Museveni] plays dirty. The fact is that she [Amongi] is exposed. People always misunderstood the whole thing but Jimmy was the target. We now know who the mole was,” the 53-year old Akaki who works with the United Nations in Sudan, is quoted as saying by local media. He reportedly added: “There is no way we can be happy that Betty [the wife to Jimmy] can serve in this dictatorship. It is an insult and he [Museveni] is doing it deliberately.”
But contacted at the time Akena said his brother’s rants were ‘just a family issue’, an indicator that he was in favour of his wife taking up the ministerial post.
Now, should Mr Akena also take up the Deputy Premiership, the Akena-Amongi couple will become only the second in Uganda’s history to have a ‘husband and wife’ presence in cabinet.
Previously, it is only Mr Museveni and his wife Janet Kataha Museveni, a former Minister in charge of Karamoja and now the Minister of Education designate, who have enjoyed that privilege.
Meanwhile, speculation is rife that President Yoweri Museveni is set to name 8 new ministers as part of the process to pave the way for Mr Akena’s entry into the cabinet.
Recently, President Yoweri Museveni appointed an 80-man cabinet, but overlooked naming a Third Deputy Prime Minister, a traditional ministerial post that dates back to the first NRM cabinet in 1986.
Between January 1986 and Jan 2007, Mr Museveni made 22 cabinet reshuffles in which 200 men and women served.
