Vincent Nuwagaba
Uganda is a humorous country. Humorous indeed! That the first assignment from President Museveni for the 9th Parliament is pushing for a constitutional amendment to deny bail to “murder, treason, defilement, rape, rioting, and economic sabotage” suspects is something all of should be concerned about. A constitution is supposed to be a living document. The American constitution which has lasted for more than 200 years has had only twenty seven amendments. As for Uganda, I lose count of how many times our constitution has been amended since its promulgation in 1995. But also, I wonder whether we should call that amendment. My dictionary gives me the synonyms for amend as; improve, make improvements, make changes, adjust, modify and revise. This means any amendment to the constitution should necessarily produce positive effects. On the contrary, we have seen the amendments to our constitution for wrong reasons – i.e. for purposes of safeguarding the selfish interests of an individual or a section of individuals but not the entire nation. Accordingly, we have witnessed and continue to witness the desecration not amendment of our constitution.
Presumption of innocence is a legal right in criminal law. There also must be a fair and speedy trial. Sadly, the president is resorting to using the law to settle political questions. There must be political solutions to political questions. Many of us know well that politicians especially in Africa are susceptible to any if not all of the above mentioned charges. At least we know that in some East African country where a president had served twenty years in power, he had his opponent arrested on November 14, 2005 and charged with rape, treason and misprision of treason. This happened at a time when the election was around the corner and the president’s opponent was nominated from prison. In some offences, six months is a whole sentence. Thus, it looks like we intend to use the law to pronounce the targets of the law guilty and pass a six months sentence on them before they are tried even when the constitution in Article 28 states that one is innocent until proven guilty or until he/she pleads guilty.
We must beware of enacting draconian laws because they are untenable. No right thinking member of society can fathom a bad law. A bad law is detrimental and must be resisted at all odds. True, the walk-to-walk campaign has on some occasion morphed into riots. But who provoke the riots? It is the Police. In fact, nowadays we call the IGP the Inspector General of Provocation and all Police officers provocation officers. And this is because the Police Force is headed by a ruling party cadre according to the President’s confirmation recently. Ordinarily, political party cadres would be deployed at the party secretariat not in state institutions to avoid conflict of interests. The major preoccupation of a ruling party cadre is to ensure regime survival and that is many times antithetical to the interests of the state.
While the president also wants a legislation to deny bail to economic saboteurs, if the opposition were allowed chance they would also prove that the ruling party elements are also economic saboteurs. I don’t think there is anything that sabotages the economy more than corruption, greed and poor priority setting. I have heard Norbert Mao say parliament is a wheel barrow which the President pushes wherever he wants and that it’s a theatre where plays rehearsed from the NRM caucus are staged. I would call upon the 9th Parliament to prove us, the doubting Thomases wrong. You must remember that Grace Ibingira pushed for the enactment of the Preventive Detention Act and was eventually detained under the same law. Thus, passing a bad law is akin to riding a tiger and you need to know that a tiger eats last.
Mr. Nuwagaba is a human rights defender
vnuwagaba@gmail.com
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