“A tiger does not brag about its tigritude. You only see the skeleton of an antelope and then you know that a tiger has emanated.” That was the philosophical tagline for the 22yr-old student of Social Sciences at Makerere University, currently in his second year, who trounced nine other candidates to win the 2015/2016 Makerere University Guild Presidential Election.
Mr. Bala’s extra ordinary victory has not come easy for a man who at one point in time got expelled from the University. It took court’s intervention to quash his expulsion. In a campaign where the rest of his competitors had almost three weeks to campaign, Mr. Bala had roughly a week. He had to first run to court, again, to seek for justice after the University’s Academic Registrar had unfairly nullified his candidature in the race on grounds of not being on normal academic progress.
Justice Yasin Nyanzi of the High Court held that the University was at fault, or as Bala puts it, “was not on normal progress” when it disqualified him from the race without giving him a fair hearing. He for that matter ordered that the institution’s Academic Registrar re-hear Bala’s case and decide whether to reinstate him on the candidate’s list or not.
On 12th March, the University finally reinstated Bala in the race and set 18th March as the voting date, giving him only six days to campaign in a race where his opponents had already campaigned for close to two weeks.
In no time, the news of Bala’s triumph over the University spread like a wild bush fire, something that endeared him even more to the students who already have a testy relationship with the University’s top administration.
In the late hours of Wednesday 18th March 2015, Bala David was announced as the winner of the Guild Presidency with over 43.3% of the total votes cast. He had an unassailable lead over the next best contestant who weighed in with just 20.9% of the total of over 12,000 votes cast.
