Author: Moses Khisa. PHOTO/FILE
Last week’s Supreme Court ruling was a pleasant surprise for many. For close watchers of recent developments in Uganda’s political trajectory, especially the tenor and composition of the judicial branch of government, a landmark ruling rebuking and casting aside the court martial in trying civilians was scarcely expected.
Over the last decade or so, the judiciary in Uganda has been on a steady decline, facing a huge legitimacy crisis. Among other things, weighed down by blatant and pervasive corruption, denuded by appointments to the Bench of individuals meeting the threshold of ruling regime cadre-ship, and soiled by the continued trial of civilians in the military court in ways that offended all that the judiciary stands for.
As the lead-judge in a case about the powers and jurisdiction of the court martial, Chief Justice Alphonse Owinyi-Dollo carried enormous weight. By coming squarely down on the side of justice and the rule of law, Owinyi-Dollo may well have rehabilitated the judiciary’s image somewhat as he takes the homerun into retirement next year. It had been a while since the Supreme Court rendered such a consequential and monumental judgment. The political implications for our politics, the struggle for democracy and freedom, are hard to specify.
In a unanimous decision, but with some significant divergences in important details, the top court held that the military apparatus cannot purport to engage in judicial business by indicting and prosecuting civilians. This is precisely because the very nature and ethos of the military with its hierarchical power structure means that the individuals in charge of the court processes take orders from their superiors and thus are not as independent as to deliver justice.
If the Supreme Court’s ruling was surprising considering the hostile and anti-justice environment that has deepened in Uganda in recent years, the reaction of the topmost player – the president – was quite predictable and in tandem with previous utterances.
Every time the courts of law, especially the Constitutional Court and Supreme Court, have boldly held against his government, Mr Museveni predictably slams the rulings!In essence, last week he told off the judges of the Supreme Court, declaring that the Bench of the nation’s highest court cannot determine the course of the country and how we are governed.As a military man who has spent the bulk of his life heavily invested in the management and use of violence, Museveni is a military man at the very core.
He sees the military apparatuses as the ultimate solution to society’s problems, from fighting poverty to fixing physical infrastructure and dispensing popular justice.There is a long, well-travelled trajectory to Museveni’s ideological and political persuasion about justice through the military, indeed the military as alpha and omega. If in doubt, the starting point is the man’s undergraduate thesis at the University of Dar es Salam in 1969.
Also, important insights that speak to Museveni’s militaristic approach to societal problems appear in an interesting paper by Prof Dani Nabudere written in the immediate weeks after the May 1980 military coup of Paulo Muwanga.A close analysis of Museveni’s government shows the widespread involvement of the army in all sorts of otherwise civilian positions and power plays. In the executive branch, it is not just members of cabinet who are military men and women, it is also technocrats and heads of government agencies.
In the legislature, we have army officers, presented as ‘listening posts’. Directly militarising the judiciary is tricky. The optics of appointing uniformed personnel to the Bench would be weird.The prudent solution then is to skilfully package and aggressively prop up the court martial, presented as a parallel court system, imposed for decades and in violation of basic freedoms and due process.
This is precisely what justices of the Supreme Court strongly denounced in last week’s ruling, to which Mr Museveni responded with a sardonic retort. The bottom line from the past has not changed. The current rulers draw from a military ideology and history.
Their modus operandi is rooted in a militaristic ideology and power vision. To dismantle this system and its ideological underpinnings will require a radical rupture and the reimagining of a new Uganda away from a history of militarism and unbridled autocracy.
