Uganda’s ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) parliamentary caucus has been “drafted to kick-start amendments to the constitution and the Uganda People's Defence Forces (UPDF) Act, 2005, to give it legal force to try civilians again”, Daily Monitor reported on Monday.
This legislative manoeuvre follows an angry and tempestuous response by President Gen Yoweri Museveni and some in the military leadership, to the Supreme Court's ruling on January 31, which declared it unconstitutional to parade civilians before military tribunals.
Given the balance of power in Uganda, the Kaguta House will get what the Kaguta House wants. But if these MPs were wise to the winds of change, they’d think twice. As the sun sets on long-ruling regimes and the shadows of opposition grow longer, or they face global developments that are weakening them at home, leaders often reach for the legal equivalent of a sledgehammer to keep dissent at bay.
However, precisely because this often comes in the afternoons and evenings of these regimes, passing those repressive laws is a terrible idea. Why? Because these repressive laws are akin to planting seeds of your downfall. They bloom into tools that can be wielded by those who follow, with no moral qualms about using them against you.
Uganda serves as the gold standard of this bitter lesson, not just for Africa but for the world. It’s a saga retold with each new moon, its lesson timeless. Grace Ibingira was Uganda’s minister of Justice under Milton Obote I. Ibingira supported the “Detention and Removal of Undesirable Persons Act” in 1962. This law allowed for detention without trial, one of several emergency measures passed by the Uganda People's Congress (UPC) government to manage political dissent.
But on a fateful day, February 22, 1966, Ibingira found himself on the wrong side of his own creation, detained alongside other ministers, the so-called “Kabaka Yekka” (KY) ministers - Emmanuel Lumu, Balaki Kirya, Matthias Ngobi, and George Magezi – accused of plotting to unseat Obote.
In reality, their detention came in the context of a power struggle within the UPC government, particularly after the 1964 “Lost Counties” referendum, which saw the return of two counties (Buyaga and Bunyala) from Buganda to Bunyoro. This was part of a chain of events that led to the “1966 Buganda Crisis” where Obote ordered the military to attack the Lubiri (Kabaka's palace) in Mengo, Kampala. This resulted in the deposition of Kabaka Mutesa II, who fled into exile. It snowballed into the 1967 Constitution, which abolished the traditional kingdoms, including Buganda, centralising power under Obote's presidency.
There is also a line from those events to the January 1971 coup that brought Field Marshal Idi Amin to power. Ibingira’s arrest and detention without trial were justified under the law he had previously supported. Tasting the bitterness of the legislation he backed, Ibingira challenged his detention in court. In “Ibingira and Others v. Uganda,” the High Court effectively declared his detention under this law as an affront to the very essence of personal liberty enshrined in the constitution.
Next door in Kenya, the British colonial government enacted the Preservation of Public Security Act (1960). This act allowed for detention without trial during emergencies, initially used against Mau Mau fighters. After independence in 1963, the law was retained by the Jomo Kenyatta and, later, the Daniel arap Moi governments. The Act became a double-edged sword for Kenyatta and Moi, who used it to purge dissent from their ranks in KANU, as much as against the opposition.
Further south, Zimbabwe’s ruling ZANU-PF passed the Public Order and Security Act (POSA) in 2002 to crack down as Opposition mounted (it was upgraded with the smoother-sounding Maintenance of Peace and Order Act (MPOA) in 2019). Then, political power shifted within ZANU-PF, and in 2017, Mugabe was ousted, and his deputy, Emmerson Mnangagwa, whom he had been trying to finish off, took power. Some members of Mugabe's faction, who had once cheered for POSA, found themselves under its shadow, facing scrutiny or political isolation under the new leadership invoking the spirit of the law. Because, likely, a post-Museveni order will not be a liberal one born out of a velvet revolution, amending the UPDF Act to allow summary trials is like loading a cannon for a future regime, one that might be born from the fires of retribution.
Ibingira remains among the brightest men ever to be a minister in Uganda, but he missed the foresight to see his own legislative Frankenstein. But in his moment of reflection, as he was whisked away to detention in Karamoja, he said: “Fate is a double-crosser. I am the one who saved the Deportation Ordinance from being repealed.”
The author is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans.”
X (Twitter): @cobbo3
