Author: Alan Tacca. PHOTO/FILE
Headaches sometimes come in quick succession. Uganda’s President Museveni and other bigwigs must be still trying to figure out how to sustain their customary opulence, now that Donald Trump has slammed the brake on the flow of American money that gave a semblance of life to our healthcare system.
Then bang… A disrespectful noise from the Supreme Court, whose recent judgment relegates the court martial to a rather contemptible tribunal only fit to handle wrongdoing by real soldiers in selected military contexts.
Very inconvenient; why?
From the mid-to-late 1990s, when opposition to National Resistance Movement (NRM) rule started gathering momentum, there has been growing discomfort about the fate of political actors who either disappear, or cannot be located and accessed, or are brought to civilian courts on ridiculous trumped-up charges.
Some of these actors went through the so-called ‘safe houses’ and came out with horrific stories.
Manned by shadowy operatives, safe houses had an air of barbaric informality that contrasted sharply with the regular prison system.
The reputation of President Museveni’s NRM government (as liberators) was being increasingly eroded. Similarities with Idi Amin and Milton Obote’s governments were beginning to be registered.
With their cases unsustainable in normal courts, and their detention in safe houses now too controversial, people we can only call political prisoners were a cumbersome burden.
But the regime gladly discovered that it could find relief through the court martial mechanism.
The aim was not to deliver justice quickly in a high-security facility, but to postpone, muddle or deny justice in a feared system where the force of command meant much more than the assemblage of evidence.
Previously, the regime had found it useful for the soldiers who bundled a victim into a safe house to pretend that they were not soldiers but some kind of civilian goons.
Now the regime found it useful to identify or frame the victim as a military type who deserved a military trial.
At another level, these distortions are part of the general breakdown of governance witnessed today.
We are often told that the civilian courts are too slow and corrupt, with a backlog of thousands of unresolved cases, some of them pending for several years.
Yes; but in the NRM’s long rule, judges remained underpaid for a long time.
Also, they were (and are still) too few for the population and its crime rate.
In NRM’s weird calculations, it is more rewarding to have twice the number of MPs and less than half the number of judges and magistrates Uganda really needs.
The same mindset gives you hundreds of redundant but handsomely paid presidential advisors, plus a whole rack of Resident District Commissioners that many citizens would rather do without.
For judges do not work in an isolated sphere. Police investigators and prosecutors are scanty, poorly paid and easily distracted or corrupted.
They are often unable to present timely quality evidence for the judges to work with.
The corrupt in these institutions are emboldened by the environment.
They see corruption everywhere as an integral feature of the NRM ethos.
NRM leaders who sometimes defend recourse to military tribunals because of shortcomings in the civilian courts must also accept responsibility for failing these courts.
And finally, like a voodoo zombie, the court martial may be both dead and undead.
Attorney General Kiryowa Kiwanuka is not short of detractors.
But, if need be, President Museveni and his NRM trust Kiwanuka can fix the corpse, tinkering with the law to recast, recycle or substitute the (post?)-court martial mechanism in Uganda’s crippled justice system.
