Where officers have broken the law, citizens should sue them - Deputy AG

It is about a year since you were appointed to this office. How has it been?
So far so good. It’s a busy office. You must be ready to give advice to all offices; from local governments, chief administrative officers to commissioners, ministers and permanent secretaries, among others.

At all times you have to be ready to give a call or receive a letter to render advice to all sectors of government. 

What are you doing to make sure that the Office of Deputy Attorney General serves the people, and not selfish interests?
I would not want to make any comment about my predecessors, but each one of us has his own work ethics. But what matters most is what you project to the nation, and the feeling outside was that the office was full of corruption.

In the few months that I was here, people would come to offer me [bribes], but the fact that I was not able to receive them, maybe they got the message that this is not his work ethic.

And you know ours is like a law firm and we don’t have to necessarily advertise our services, but when we do well as government, its visible; when we pass Bills it’s visible; when we win cases, it’s visible. The only problem is that we do not blow our [own] trumpet. 

But when it comes to budgeting, for example, they budget for us like a consuming entity. They do not know that the Attorney General’s Chambers saves all the money from all other ministries from being mismanaged. Whether in Agriculture, Finance, it all comes back to us, we are the ones to fight the battles.

I want us to talk about the subject you have just introduced, corruption. When the President was presiding over your swearing-in, the most important topic he tackled was fighting corruption. Just how bad is it?

There is corruption in all sectors if you have been following honourable Peter Ogang, the State minister for Economic Monitoring in the President’s Office. He has been running around in the local governments.

So many contracts in those local governments come to us for approval. We look at them letter by letter, clause by clause and we pass them. However, what has changed hands before those contracts come to us its unknown to us.

But you will find an individual who wants to stop a government project because he wants to be compensated. There is an individual demanding Shs6 billion for a rock. Sometimes you wonder whether the rock was produced by his grandparents. This is nature he found there and he wants to be paid for it. 

There is public outcry about impunity. How are you dealing with this?
I have said it before that we come from different walks of life, we are raised differently. Some people are overly assertive, if they get into office they want everybody to know who they are. If someone is appointed minister, or RDC, or given a police office, he changes his style of working and forgets that life is always changing. You’re not the first one or the last one in those positions.

Whatever you do you must keep in mind that you’re a human being and there is a code of conduct that you are expected to keep; rules and obligations you’re supposed to abide by. Human beings are human beings, treat your fellow man with respect, this we do tell our people regularly as we work.

We went to Parliament and passed the Human Rights Enforcement Act, and in addition to that, all cases against government would previously be paid for by the Attorney General’s Chambers.

If police somewhere messes up, the Attorney General is sued, the Attorney General pays. But of recent we have centralised that mandate; we say if a soldier in Mbarara misbehaves, yes the Attorney General will be sued, but if he loses the case Ministry of Defence pays.

It is the duty of the Ministry of Defence to look out for this person and others like him and discipline them because they are affecting their budget.

But Mr Deputy Attorney General, we have some untouchables in Uganda. Who is above the law? 
No one is above the law. I will repeat, we come from different walks of life. Sometimes people get power and it gets in their heads. They may not listen and understand or keep in mind the rules they are expected to keep. 

The Attorney General always gets a backlash when impunity is exhibited. For instance, the re-arresting of prisoners who have been released by court. MP Muhammad Ssegirinya is a very good example, and most recently novelist Kakwenza Rukirabashaija

Recently, I appeared before a parliamentary committee and something similar to that was raised. As the Attorney General’s Chambers, once in a while we meet with the PS (Permanent Secretary) to go over what they should do, but we believe they are conversant with what they are supposed to do.

But let me tell you this, we cannot do beyond what the law says. If someone chooses to go beyond, our hands are tied.

Two, for matters that are in court; Ssegirinya and Kakwenza I may not comment. But where individuals have deliberately broken the law, be it police or army, the law allows an aggrieved party to sue them.
The only problem is we have what we call “the deep pocket theory”. When police abuse me as an individual, do I sue these police officers, or the Attorney General? And if I sue both, who has more money to pay me? So I go for a deep pocket, the one with more money – the Attorney General. 

So, we have gone ahead and asked the Ministry of Internal Affairs to either deduct money from these persons towards remedying his mistakes, or find other ways of taking remedial action.

View ... Deep pocket theory  
For matters that are in court; Ssegirinya and Kakwenza I may not comment. But where individuals have deliberately broken the law, be it police or army, the law allows an aggrieved party to sue them.

The only problem is we have what we call “the deep pocket theory”. When police abuse me as an individual, do I sue these police officers, or the Attorney General?