So Ugandans, what is your government’s plot for 2021?

About a year after key constitutional amendments that led to the removal of presidential age limit (and restoration of presidential term limits?), the government is set to constitute a commission to review the Constitution. This was recently revealed by Daily Monitor.
The idea of a constitutional review is not bad; but many political observers say the timing exposes government’s lacking in consistency and constancy. Worse, the names proposed to constitute the said Constitutional Review Commission have insufficient balances on their accounts in the bank of credibility.
During their time as active public servants, most of them carried out actions that betrayed an attitude of entrenched partisanship, the kind of attitude incapable of guiding the country on a new constitutional path at this material time.
But beyond that, there could be a story, the thematic visage being that the said government seems to be trying hard to be relevant to the citizens. We shall explain.
With nothing to offer on the governance front, government has been jumping from this to that action. First there was government’s failure to execute a Supreme Court order. Oh yes, do you still remember Presidential Elections Petition No.1 of 2016?
The particulars of this petition were that Mr Amama Mbabazi challenged the election of Mr Museveni as President of Uganda in 2016. But as was expected by most Ugandans, Mr Museveni’s election was upheld.
However, in the determination of the petition, the Supreme Court made a series of recommendations and ordered the government to carry out electoral reforms aimed at making the holding of elections in Uganda free, fair and credible.
To compel the government to carry out those reforms without fail and in time before the next cycle of elections, the Attorney General was ordered to report to the Supreme Court within a period of two years (from the date of the delivery of the judgment, March 31, 2016 and March 31, 2018).
In the last quarter of 2017, the government (perhaps oblivious of the March 31, 2018 deadline) originated a constitutional amendment process that led to the removal of the 75-year age limit for presidential candidates. One of the arguments in support of this constitutional amendment was that it was one of the responses to the orders of the Supreme Court in the matter of the Presidential Elections Petition No. 1 of 2016. Don’t laugh please…
Before that, the Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs in late 2014 delivered a statement on the floor of Parliament announcing that government was writing a Bill that would culminate into a constitutional amendment process. At that time, a group of civil society and political actors had crafted what they called a compact on minimum electoral and governance reforms.
Don’t laugh, but the minister’s statement was just a clever trick to water down the demands in the compact on reforms, which is why some observers think the announcement of a constitutional review commission now could be intended to water down the efforts of another set of civil society groups involved in the holding of the Uganda National Dialogue.
It goes without saying that the recommendations of the proposed constitutional review commission would enjoy superiority over those of the national dialogue. And with that, the government is merely seeking an alibi over their absence or lukewarm or no interest in the Uganda National Dialogue.
The most significant aspect of the constitutional review commission is the issue of ‘time’. And so, poor Ugandans are sleepwalking into fall or folly of the magical 2021. Please don’t laugh…