Sometime in October 2019, Ugandan president Gen Yoweri Kaguta Tibuhaburwa Museveni announced that he had appointed self-styled ghetto president and singer Mark Bugembe aka Buchaman as his government’s and ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) party’s special envoy to the ghetto. Buchaman quickly told all and sundry that he had been appointed a senior presidential advisor.
Buchaman’s former ally singer-turned-politician Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu aka Bobi Wine had two years earlier emerged on the country’s political stage, and the ghetto was beginning to gain the attention of the president and those interested in the politics of Uganda.
So, fishing Buchaman, a Bobi Wine ally-turned-foe, was seen as a strategy for Museveni to counter Bobi Wine’s popularity among the hundreds of thousands of urban poor who looked at the youthful politician from Gomba as an inspiration and one who would liberate them from their misery.
Now, about four years after he was appointed Museveni’s envoy to the ghetto, Buchaman says he regrets his decision to join the ruling party and government.
Many believed that by openly joining Museveni’s team, Buchaman was pursuing money. But the ghetto envoy says he did not get the money he had thought he would get from the country’s longest serving president and NRM boss.
When Museveni announced Buchaman’s appointment as his ghetto envoy nearly four years ago at Kibuye, he promised to facilitate the singer so that he can properly mobilize for the ruling party. This was barely two years before Museveni faced off with Bobi Wine in one of Uganda’s most tense elections since independence.
Buchaman has told Sanyuka TV that he was yet to receive even a single coin from Museveni’s NRM even when he was appointed the party’s envoy to the ghetto.
The Tukumatira singer now says that because he has “never received a cent from NRM despite being appointed,” he has decided to quit the NRM. Admitting that he doesn’t even hold the ruling party’s card, he announced that he was “no longer a member!”
He added that he was planning to join Bobi Wine’s NUP but was just waiting for the pulinsipo (principal) to give him a call. Will Bobi Wine have mercy on Buchaman?
It should be remembered that Buchaman’s fellow ‘presidential advisor’ Catherine Kusasira has also been complaining that she has failed to get money from Museveni and that her house was almost taken by the bank over a loan she failed to pay back. Recently, Catherine Kusasira was blocked from meeting Museveni during an event in Masaka. (See Details Here, There and Over There).
You can also read about Museveni’s guys, the most powerful and influential presidential advisors in Uganda Here.
(For advertising or sponsored content, send us a Whatsapp message on +256 705 690 819 or E-mail us on pearltimesug@gmail.com).
