Uganda’s corrupt despot Gen. Museveni. Photo: Facebook
To place a fig leaf of respectability over his naked greed for power, Uganda’s life-president Gen. Yoweri Museveni has always used the law to legitimize his rule. He does this by either amending the constitution or simply enacting laws through a hapless parliament filled to the rafters with ruling party National Resistance Movement (NRM) stooges.
Where does the dictator draw his lessons from? The racist and atavistic system of Apartheid—which means “apartness” in the language of Afrikaans—was predicated on laws and legislation that upheld segregationist policies against non-white citizens of South Africa.
Like Gen. Museveni, the racist Apartheid regime used legislation as a Trojan horse against good governance. As a consequence, the Apartheid regime rolled out the Population Registration Act, the Immorality Act, the Group Areas Act, the Riotous Assemblies and Suppression of Communism Amendment Act, The Pass Laws Act, the Separate Amenities Act, Criminal Law Amendment Act and the Public Safety Act to stamp out justice and set the tone for injustice on a monumental scale.
The official Apartheid regime lasted 48 years; Museveni has been in power for 35.
The NRM’S legislative sleights of hand are similar to the Apartheid regime’s and have also led to two constitutional amendments that were made at a time when Gen. Museveni was becoming ineligible to seek re-election.
The first amendment by Museveni was in 2005 when Parliament voted to remove presidential term limits in order to pave the way for Museveni to run again. Then in December 2017, Parliament again amended the Constitution, removing Article 102(b) and effectively lifting the country’s presidential age limit of 75 to once again pave the way for one candidate, dictator Museveni.
To ensure that nobody would protest against this constitutional rape, Museveni ushered in the Stalinist type Public Order Management Act, requiring permission from the police for any meeting of more than two people. To extend this “lawful” charade of the NRM further, Gen. Museveni is set to increase funding to the Judiciary to shillings 800 billion, or $224.7 million, up from about shillings 200 billion, or $56 million it received for this financial year. The new funding will see each of Kampala’s five divisions and every district outside Kampala receive a chief magistrate, while each constituency will get at least one Grade One Magistrate.
Again, on the surface, it gives the impression that justice will be more widely delivered. However, with Gen. Museveni’s deployment of “loyalist” judges, justice will be skewed in favor of the saying: “It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion.”
“We really need to have a strong judiciary…” as Prof. Fredrick Ssempebwa put it, “…when you have cadre judges; you are unlikely to have justice.”
The judiciary and legislature have been conflated with the vested interests of the executive in ways that will help Gen. Museveni hide behind the law in order to deny Ugandans justice; the same way Apartheid laws were used to insulate white minority rule against a non-white majority.
At the end of the day the Museveni dictatorship would not survive without the support of the foreign interests that the regime represents. Recently the U.S. announced sanctions on Gen. Abel Kandiho who commands the murderous secret police called the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI). This comes months after the first series of sanctions that included visa bans against undisclosed Ugandan officials.
If the U.S. is really serious the sanctions must go beyond targeting the men in uniform. The U.S., which has sustained the regime with almost $1 billion in annual financial and military support, must sanction those judges or legislators who rubber-stamp laws or legislation that are contrary to natural justice and the United Nations Resolutions and Declarations on crimes against international law.
If the U.S. freezes foreign assets of those officials blacklisted and bars Americans from dealing with them, the Ugandan legislators will think twice before supporting Gen. Museveni’s agenda to whitewash the evils of his regime.
The NRM junta’s polices would be exposed as flagrant denial of fundamental human rights and violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The NRM agenda emanates solely from the prejudices and injustices of a single, and for the time being, dominant individual: Gen. Yoweri Museveni.
Columnist Matogo can be reached via [email protected]
