Habits Uganda Police should leave in 2018
It is now cliché. Whenever a year is coming to an end, trendy people come up with habits that they implore others to abandon in the old year as they enter a new one.
We will pick on this for this year, and address the Uganda Police Force. Police officers are recruited from among Ugandans, to serve Ugandans. The Force’s motto, after all, is “Protect and serve”. As the police serve people, both Ugandans and non-Ugandans living in Uganda, they are enjoined to be politically colour blind and follow the law to the letter.
But what we have seen this year, akin to what has happened in the years before, is that the Uganda Police Force sometimes appears to forget their calling and seem to serve the interests of those in power, or to work against the interests of those fighting to get into power.
The most recent example of this was on Boxing Day when musician Robert Kyagulanyi, aka Bobi Wine, was stopped from holding a musical concert at his own One Love Beach in Busabala, near Kampala.
The police argued that Mr Kyagulanyi, the Kyadondo East MP who has expressed intentions to challenge President Museveni for the leadership of the country, did not comply with provisions of the Public Order Management Act as he prepared for the show.
Mr Kyagulanyi, however, had made it a public secret that he was seeking police clearance for the show so many weeks before D-day. The police did not indicate at all that there were situations that could lead to the blocking of Mr Kyagulanyi’s concert until the evening before the event was to take place.
In the months and weeks leading to this event, the police had blocked Mr Kyagulanyi from holding musical concerts in different parts of the country in a similar fashion.
Mr Kyagulanyi is an artiste who happens to have political ambitions, and clearly it is because of his political ambitions that he is being targeted. Before him, different political players, especially Dr Kizza Besigye, had their activities sabotaged by the police without clear cause.
The police’s principal job is to keep law and order. For the police, therefore, to intervene in any situation, they have to be able to single out a provision/s of the law that backs their actions. Sadly, on a number of occasions police spokespeople will speak only generally when asked for legal justification for their actions regarding political actors on the Opposition side.
If the police bosses have not yet had their end of year evaluation meeting, may they resolve to leave such behaviour in the year 2018!
