Focus your energies on understanding the National Resistance Movement

Opondo says the young have to remove the scales from their eyes in order to appreciate the ideological clarity they require to understand what the NRM stands for. Anything short of that will lead to the downfall of the party when they, the youth, finally inherit it from the older generation.

Richard Todwong spoke at the event Pulse Live Uganda

This will require a unity of purpose between the old and the new members of NRM, which will involve the youth seeking counsel from the old in order to reinvent the NRM as a party which can stand the test of time.

“As a liberation movement, our mission and vision should be to forge a way forward around our senior party leader and founding father, President Kaguta Museveni as well as the party senior leaders in causing harmony and consensus among all party members despite the demographic gap,” he said.

Opondo made these remarks while delivering a lecture under the theme: “Bridging the gap between the old and the new” to the NRM student leaders who were assembled at party headquarters at Plot 10, Kyadondo road in Kampala.

He added that the youth are an integral part of the NRM since the party has always been a multi-generational and multi-cultural force for the development of Uganda. He said the NRM is broad based and allows entry to all kinds of Ugandans, regardless of age.

“Bridging the gap between the old and young is a misnomer given the nature of our party’s methods of work which accommodate every demographic dividend. The NRM Party has always been a multi-generational organisation ever since it took over power in 1986,” he said.

Another speaker on the speakers’ roster at this event was veteran journalist Tony Geoffrey Owana, who reminded the youth that being young, like being alive, is transitional and so they must make the most of the best years of their lives.

“We were also as young as you. Most of the liberators took over leadership positions in their youthful age. We only need to utilise our youthfulness like what these senior party cadres did,” Owana said.

Alluding to the saying “youth is often wasted on the young”, he appealed to the young ladies and gentlemen assembled for the lecture to live to their true potential, He added that this potential is fashioned in the image of the old since they have been through the furnace of experience.

He also chided the young people assembled for not seeking counsel from the elders and also for not reading deeply to understand the history of the party they support.

Tony Owana Pulse Live Uganda

“Young people are fond of not getting interested in history, we are telling them. But it is history that informs the present,” Owana said.

The NRM party Secretary General Richard Todwong told the students to understand the party’s methods of work, adding that “disagreeing openly is important in building party cohesion and consensus.”

He added that a difference of opinion is important to NRM’s belief in democratic centralism, a practice in which political decisions reached by voting processes are binding upon all members of the political party.