Are Ugandans ready for self-government?

Regardless of the age-limit petition outcome, the Constitutional Court has stepped on several landmines that have stunted Uganda’s political growth since independence. First is questioning the misuse of political power to entrench incumbents in power.
Of course, 2017 was the first time the Legislature misused its power to entrench the incumbent, the Legislature and local governments in a matter where they clearly had a direct conflict of interest. Such was an abrogation, not an amendment of the Constitution.
Second was a dangerous notion that vested with the tools to cause violence, the State had a monopoly to “physically” dictate the outcome of disputes among the citizenry. I sleep well knowing that the continuous beatings administered by State security and police and promoted directly by police leadership and indirectly by the courts starting from the Supreme Court could be a practice frowned upon as an affront to the rule of law. It is time for Uganda to give birth to more liberal and civilised practices that are moral and humane.
For the financial experts, the scrutiny of allocation of funds and its impact on politics there may yet be an invisible line in a new national priority that politics trumps everything. It may not be the same again doling out money on priorities that may be personal rather than national.
In Mbale, the Court of Appeal has set a certain standard below which it should not be allowed to fall. Hearings in open court have allowed Ugandans to interact with their Justices, the good ones, and the not so good ones. That sense of balance is important, but it also constrained the tendency to clothe the law in mystery. There were a few moments where the personal took over, the acknowledgment by Justice Barishaki Cheborion that the details of Nambooze’s affidavit contained a rather calamitous state of affairs on the floor of Parliament.
In the proceedings, the polished and not so polished flourished. Obviously, the Clerk to Parliament struggled with issues above her literary competence. The Deputy Chief Justice came up with a way to cool down legal volleys in the court room with a translation of a Luganda adage, “Tommegga n’oluma” (you don’t attack your enemy when he is down).
In the aftermath of the adjudication of the Kenyan election petition, there have been poorly reasoned sentiments expressed in the Judiciary, that the courts should avoid colliding with the tiger. This reasoning over a decade has watered down to footnotes, the Supreme Court’s important precedents set by the Wambuzi and Odoki courts between 1999 and 2005.
Oddly, the restraint by the Judiciary has neither improved our politics nor our prosperity.
The Executive branch, perhaps on the cue, has interpreted the meekness of the courts to test more areas touching on more and more of the basic structure of the Constitution.
Officers of the court like the DPP have gotten away with improper exercise of their discretionary powers like condoning re-arrest of suspects in court premises without a whimper from the Judiciary. Where concern has been raised, the very courts supposed to protect individuals have stated that unless you beat up someone to smithereens, it doesn’t count.
There was once a diplomat from our mission in Washington D.C. who was hired by KCCA to manage their PR shop. One time he got a call at 5am. He wondered what PR calamity could have befallen his boss. Still in his 90s, he asked what the emergency was. He was being asked to witness an enforcement exercise that kind where KCC officers beat the hell out of people, chase them with their goods and sometimes worse.
The middle aged man whose father lowered the Union Jack in 1962, hung up the phone and typed out his resignation by email. His conscience shocked. His former bosses kept asking him what was wrong with him oblivious to the fact that this particular exercise of force by the state was illegal and immoral.

Mr Ssemogerere is an Attorney-at-Law and an Advocate. [email protected]