{UAH} For enacting a law from hell, MPs’ brains need medical examination

For enacting a law from hell, MPs' brains need medical examination

SHARE BOOKMARKPRINTRATING

By Bernard Tabaire

Posted  Sunday, August 11  2013 at  01:00

To what end? 

Nobody can claim there is no democracy, at least of the harshly majoritarian type, in Uganda's Parliament. The majority always have it. Like they did last week in passing a patently obnoxious law.

If I were a believer, I would wish all those who passed into law the Public Order Management Bill to burn in hell. I am not and so I shall restrict myself to thinking of them as the single most naïve and most heedless group ever to sit inside Uganda's parliamentary chamber.

For it must be a politician of a particularly absurd sort who passes a law that will be used to hamstring him or her. The new law only benefits one man: Yoweri Kaguta Museveni. No police force will break up President Museveni's rally, at least for the foreseeable future. But the same police will readily break up the rally of any politician, opposition or NRM.

NRM members who voted to pass the new law think that because they are in the ruling party, they cannot be affected. Can't you see, they delude themselves, it is only the opposition bearing the brunt of the police and Kiboko Squad's brutality. For us we are safe.

It is true the opposition is on the receiving end. But that is no indicator that in the future President Museveni will not order the police and other security services to clamp down on NRM members if he feels they are becoming "a problem".

This law will come back to bite the backsides of those who passed it just like those who passed the detention without trial law under Obote I got their rear ends chewed up by the same law. Which is to say that Ugandan politicians who voted "aye" a few days ago are, if at all, appalling students of their country's political history.

The Constitution says Ugandans can organise together and advance a cause. It does not suggest in any way that we should only organise to feed abandoned babies. Politics is very much on the table. As it should be because politicians set the policy agenda.

Blow
The new law narrows further the space for citizens participation in deciding how they are governed. Uganda is strange like that. It is one of a handful of countries – alongside Eritrea, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe – in black Africa today that consistently pass stupid laws as the decades roll on.

The passing of time should bring light and wisdom. Not in Mr Museveni's Uganda. Witness the phone-tapping law and proposed legislation to deny bail to some offenders and to force newspapers to write only things that our dear rulers like.

The new law will go beyond messing up with the work of politicians. Civil society will suffer as well. If it's civil society that does not organise politically, all will be fine. This, however, has a pernicious result. It denies political groups a source of new leadership.

It has been commonplace in Africa in the last 20 years for new generations of talented politicians to emerge partly from civil society. From Zambia to Kenya to Sierra Leone. Even a number of independence era leaders came from the unions, a background that allowed them to hone their organisational and rhetorical skills. Those skills served them well when they crossed into active, elective politics.

If Mr Museveni's new law renders civil society tame and timid that it only has to busy itself with the immunisation of babies and not political depravity and government incompetence and why new leadership would be helpful, Ugandan society will suffer in the long-term.

Now that Mr Museveni has bagged this latest victory – enabled by a deputy Speaker of Parliament, who is doing everything to be worse than former Speaker Edward Ssekandi – he will want more. That is just the way it is. So here comes the codification of life presidency. There will be voters for that in The 9th Parliament of the Republic of Uganda. The pope should declare it a cardinal sin to acquiesce to evil schemes, I suggest.

In any event, any alien looking at our politics alone would think Uganda is made up of unserious people. But sitting in a Dar es Salaam nightclub last weekend and seeing Tanzanians sing along and groove to Chameleone, Juliana, Chandiru and Goodlyfe suggests the Ugandan spirit refuses to die despite the valiant attempts of its politicians.

Mr Tabaire is a media consultant with the African Centre for Media Excellence. bentab@hotmail.com

___________________________________

Gwokto La'Kitgum