JB Kakooza, together with Elia Lukwago and lawyer Joseph Balikudembe, played a leading role in registering the present-day Democratic Party.
At that time, the party was deeply divided. There were attempts by the late Alhaj Nasser Ssebagala, along with the party’s former Secretary General, Marino Drametu, and Francis Bwengye, to register the DP under their own leadership.
Because Marino Drametu was aligned with the Bwengye and Ssebagala faction, Paul Kawanga Ssemogerere dismissed him, and JB Kakooza was subsequently appointed Secretary General of the party. He then took on the entire task of registering the DP.
When he was alive, JB Kakooza shared with Uganda Radio Network that registering the DP was an extremely challenging process. He explained, “It was very challenging because the party did not have its own resources. There was controversy because the other groups were still fighting. We were in court; I appeared in court several times.”
He died while passionately pleading for the survival of political parties. One of the key lessons JB Kakooza learned from his brief tenure as Acting Secretary General of the DP was that running a political party without proper financing is an arduous task—especially in a country like Uganda where the members are often unable to fully fund their party.
He once directed URN to Paul Kawanga Ssemogerere’s book titled Political Party Financing, published under the aegis of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, noting, “It is a wonderful book. It examines how parties are financed all over the world.”
As friends and relatives were preparing to bid farewell to JB Kakooza, the Parliament of Uganda was in the process of passing the Political Parties and Organisations (Amendment) Bill, 2025, which touched on issues of political party financing. UPC’s Jimmy Akena commented that the bill was riddled with mischief, and another member of Parliament had even suggested that the government should not fund parties.
Had JB Kakooza been alive, that latter suggestion would have deeply unsettled him, as he had always maintained that “political parties are supposed to be financed by the state regardless of their numerical strength in parliament or elsewhere.”
He explained, “There are many reasons. The most important reason is that political parties must be helped to structure themselves so well that, if they take power, they can run the country properly, ethically, democratically, and responsibly in terms of accountability.” He further opined that the current model under the Political Parties and Organisations Act is unsustainable because the ruling NRM continues to take the lion’s share of the allocations.
Don’t Kill Political Parties JB Kakooza declared, “The NRM has been trying to kill political parties. The danger is that they believe if you kill political parties, you keep power. That is what Amin thought when he suggested banning political parties, and that is what Obote believed in 1969 when he insisted that banning political parties would allow him to remain in power. Eventually, a force not aligned with the DP or any political party came and removed him.”
He firmly believed that ceding power to a firmly rooted political party would secure the future of the country. Reflecting on past leadership, he recalled, “When Benedicto Kiwanuka was in power for at least one year, he treated Obote with respect as the Leader of the Opposition. For example, when Ben was distributing scholarships, he didn’t do it unilaterally at the statehouse. Instead, he formed a committee and invited Obote to nominate people to it.”
