Uganda’s biggest tragedy: The rise of NRM and death of conscience, shame

Last week, the General Court Martial (GCM) at Makindye, Kampala, for the third time, refused to grant bail to 28 prisoners; young men and women of the National Unity Platform (NUP).

Their only crime, as everybody knows, was to oppose the current government. That, in Uganda, is worse than aggravated robbery and murder combined; even with a violent rape thrown in somewhere in the mix!

The ruling completely ignored the law and the facts. How can there be “no merit” (as the GCM ruled) in a bail application where we are talking about young people, who everyone knows are being framed, and have been in jail for three years now?

Do the members of the GCM still feel able to eat their food with full appetite, and go to bed and sleep soundly, even though they are perpetrating a manifest injustice against helpless young people?

With all such known injustices typical of the military courts, how was the Supreme Court able to issue a stay of execution against the Constitutional Court order, which barred the military from trying civilians in military courts? Wasn’t the honourable court alive to the fact that it was in effect, giving licence to the military to continue this manifest violation of human rights?

Again, you ask yourself, how are our leaders able to pick up fellow humans, take them to dungeons run by military and intelligence agencies and torture them for extended periods, without caring what the public thinks or says?

And how does a judicial officer, who looks at an accused person, all battered and bleeding, because the military detained him for weeks and tortured him to the point of death, still feel able to remand such a person to prison, like was the case of our poor Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, rejecting his pleas that he had been tortured?

How did we get to a level where the military quells a demonstration of unarmed civilians by fatally shooting them, even as cameras are rolling, and the killers who are known, walk scot-free?

How are our leaders able to gather at a “National Prayer Breakfast”, apparently to pray to the Almighty God, and yet people are groaning and weeping helplessly as they are tortured? How do they manage to clap and dance as they sing praise to God – while helpless detainees spend years in jail without trial, because they dared to support a rival of the President? 

How can people live at peace with themselves even as they commit these grave injustices? The answer is that it takes the death of conscience. And shame. 

God gave each of us a conscience, as a moral compass to regulate human behaviour, so that one is able to clearly tell right from wrong; and stay on the right path thereby. You hear that gentle and tender inner voice, telling you that what you are doing is not right and guiding you on what the right option is. But it is possible to silence the voice of conscience and what’s more, it is even possible to kill the conscience by intentional rejection of its pleas. Repeated transgression eventually kills the conscience, to the point that you are able to do what is wrong and feel perfectly okay with it, and no shame at all.

Uganda’s biggest tragedy, since independence, is the coming to power of the National Resistance Movement (NRM), an establishment that has killed the conscience at both individual and collective level. Ugandans are now able to indulge in shameful acts with a clear conscience. 

Citizens adopt the moral course charted by the leaders. Corrupt leaders, corrupt citizens; righteous leaders, righteous citizens. When the State openly tortures innocent people, and we see it as normal and in fact, a prerogative of the State, you begin to see even in homes, babies being tortured with no mercy and no shame.

You can recover money taken by the corrupt, but it is a different proposition, recovering the collective conscience of a nation that has been intentionally, systematically and repeatedly violated over 40 years. Pray for this country!

Mr Gawaya Tegulle is an advocate of the High Court of Uganda     [email protected]

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