The Leadership of Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) must reflect on the outcomes of the major survey released on Wednesday revealing the public perception on 2021 elections, experts have advised.
The opinion poll conducted by Research World International (RWI) indicated that the FDC founder Col Kizza Besigye’s support has waned after garnering 17% out of 2300 samples interviewed across the country.
Besigye, the poll suggests has lost his position as powerful opposition heavyweight to Robert Kyagulanyi aka Bobi Wine who scored 22%.
Whereas the two leaders’ obtained 39%, the survey put their biggest political adversary Yoweri Museveni on 46%.
Compared to the survey carried in 2015, President Museveni has lost incredible support.
RWI is headed by Dr Patrick Wakida, a former Personal Assistant to Kizza Besigye.
His reports however, have drawn ire among the top brass of FDC who insist the polls are always skewed and aiming at portraying FDC and Besigye as weak while serving the interests of the regime.
A couple of FDC radical supporters touted the poll as “quack” while Kizza Besigye in a veiled statement wondered why his support keeps stunted at 17%, the same percent he was awarded by Wakida in 2015.
Whereas his closest opposition opponent Amama Mbabazi was given 13%, the pollsters were quoted as saying that Mbabazi had not campaigned and if he did his support was likely to shoot up only to garner 1.4% and Besigye scored 33% in a general election.
Godber Advises
Godber Tumushabe, the director of The Great Lakes institute for Strategic Studies (GLISS) an NGO that has partly funded these opinion polls cautioned FDC to stop whining and focus on rebuilding the party to be able to take power in 2021.
Speaking to this website, Godber one of the pro-change seeking Ugandans said the poll was subjected to various stages of verification to establish where the samples interviewed weren’t fake.
“This poll was conducted before COVID-19. When COVID-19 entered it was stopped. And at a time of compiling data we had to call the people interviewed to confirm that they were interviewed and also to confirm if they responded same way,” Godber said.
He appealed to opposition leaders who were infuriated by the report to instead reenergize themselves into rebuilding the party and seeking more support as the country prepares for an election.
Godber and Besigye fell out in 2015 when the former supported the idea of fronting Amama Mbabazi as the joint opposition candidate under The Democratic Alliance (TDA) following a narrative that Kizza Besigye’s support had waned.
Godber was the architecture of TDA.
This website reported a few weeks ago, that Godber has been contemplating resurrecting this bloc which was branded a cult in 2015 before it crumbled.
