Top city lawyer Julius Galisonga has joined the race for the Bugweri County parliamentary seat, with analysts tipping him as the frontrunner to occupy this traditional constituency in the Eleventh Parliament.
Mr Galisonga was yesterday duly nominated to contest in the primaries of the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) party and has been tipped to win the nomination of the country’s largest opposition party, giving him an edge to win the parliamentary race.
The young, articulate lawyer, who is a founding partner of Galisonga and Co Advocates, will tussle it out with incumbent MP Abdu Katuntu for the FDC flag when the party holds its primary elections.
Analysts familiar with the political terrain in the Busoga sub-region have tipped Mr Galisonga to floor Mr Katuntu in the FDC primaries and proceed to secure a landslide in the General election because the latter is viewed as an inconsistent politician.
Having declared that he would not be seeking re-election, voters in Bugweri County are furious that Mr Katuntu made a last-minute U-turn and decided to contest, without justifying why he had changed his mind.
Voters suspect that Katuntu made a U-turn after a government job he was banking on failed to come through, further underlining suspicion that he has one leg in the opposition and the other in the National Resistance Movement (NRM).
In FDC, Katuntu belongs to the camp of former President Maj Gen Mugisha Muntu, who lost the presidency to Patrick Amuriat in 2017.
Katuntu has since been hobnobbing with Muntu’s Alliance for National Transformation (ANT), leaving card-holding FDC members in Bugweri wondering why he does not fully join ANT and leave FDC.
In the 2016 elections, Katuntu retained his seat by a whisker, after polling 23,596 votes against 23,195 votes of Eng Dan Ibaale, the NRM candidate.
Eng Ibaale petitioned both the High Court and Court of Appeal detailing how Mr Katuntu flouted electoral laws but the latter used his connections in the Judiciary to secure rulings in his favour.
