The passage of the Public Order
Management Bill by the ninth parliament has killed the hitherto remaining semblance
of constitutionalism and democracy that in Uganda. I have watched on Television
and read in papers Uganda’s premier John Patrick Amama Mbabazi call opposition
MPs who openly decried the passage of the bill as wild beasts who should have
known that in a democracy, the majority takes the lead. I am now fully
convinced that our rulers (read misrulers) either don’t understand what
democracy means or deliberately want to dupe us that democracy means mob rule.
It doesn’t call for an expert in political science to comprehend that while
democracy entails majority rule, minority interests and rights cannot be
overridden.
We never gave MPs a licence to
gag us and deprive us of our God-given rights. We voted them to be a voice of
the voiceless not to use and misuse the law to suppress dissent. We voted
Members of Parliament to uphold the constitution and not to abuse it. We never
voted MPs to legalise dictatorship. With the passage of the public order
management bill, we now have parliamentary mobocracy,
dictatorship, oppression, repression and suppression made legal!
We cannot for heaven’s sake obey
a law that empowers the partisan police to grant or deny permission to anyone
intending to hold a meeting to discuss issues of public concern. The law will
inevitably burry the opposition political parties and critical civil society
organizations. It will bury all our constitutional and God-given rights. I have often implored
Ugandans of goodwill to read Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from Birmingham
Jail” to understand what he says about just and unjust laws.
With this law in place, even
people in taxis fear talking politics, people from my home area Bitereko and
Kanyabwanga cannot complain about absence of drugs in their health centre IIIs,
unemployed graduates will not air their grievances, the police officers’ wives
will not protest the wretched conditions they,
their husbands and children are subjected to; security guards whose
money is deducted but never remitted to NSSF will never organize to raise these
issues; I will not be allowed to host Norbert Mao for my function in Ruhinda;
teachers, medical workers and university lecturers will not sit to demand a pay raise; traders
will not talk about tax injustice but most importantly all of us will be
disenfranchised. Clearly, this one is a law that we must all defy. Personally,
I am ready to die in jail than live in a society where I am legally (of course
not legitimately) deprived of all my rights, all my liberties and all my
freedoms.
I am not ready to live in a country that dehumanizes me. I am not
ready to live in a country where I depend on someone’s discretion to exercise
or not to exercise my rights. Even if
the penalty for defiance of such a law was death, I would gladly accept it. And
I must state that I will plead guilty if I am charged with contravention of the
soon to be Public Order Management Act. I am not ready to live in Uganda as a
subject for I know I am a citizen.
I am currently organizing
protests over several issues and I must confess for selfish reasons. These
include but are not limited to; the sick healthcare system that can’t cure my
ailing mother; exorbitant fees in private universities which in 2009 were hiked
by 126 percent leading to my relatives dropping out of school; the miserable
pay and wretched living conditions to which my paternal uncle is subjected to; the huge sums of money for VIP treatment which
renders me less human; the employment of mediocre “graduates” in public bodies
that have rendered us redundant and a parliament that passes obnoxious and
poisonous laws. I would expect my area MP to show cause why we should continue
paying him. I will be glad if all of us selfishly opposed injustice since
selflessness no longer makes sense to the majority. The sum total of selfish
opposition to injustice is the highest level of patriotism.
The writer is a human rights
defender
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