Govt needs to form crisis management committee

On Thursday, members of Parliament called on government to move to stem the proliferation of false reports on social media about the health of the Speaker of Parliament, Mr Jacob Oulanyah, who is undergoing specialised treatment in the United States.

The death announcements that gained traction on Tuesday following the decision by the Deputy Speaker, Ms Anita Among, to abruptly adjourn the proceedings of Parliament, before she, together with the Chief Justice, Alfonse Owiny-Dollo, flew out to the US, certainly have no place in our societies. It is a taboo among almost all tribes and cultures of Uganda for one to pronounce another dead before their time.

Whereas he is a public figure, Mr Oulanyah has a right to privacy. He has the right to be alone and to determine when, how and to what extent personal information about him can be communicated to others. That privacy includes personal medical records and physical and emotional autonomy. It should, therefore, follow that it should only be him or members of his immediate family that should be making comments about his state of health.

READ: Speaker Jacob Oulanyah dies in Seattle

We would in light of the above think that the legislator’s call for government to move against those who have been pronouncing Mr Oulanyah dead is appropriate.

The problem though is that government has always been out of its depth whenever serious developments have come up or near crisis situations have arisen.

Late in January, Rwanda announced that the common border between Uganda and itself would be reopened on January 31, a month shy of three years since it was first closed to human and cargo traffic. Ugandan has a media centre headed by an executive director, a minister for Information and National Guidance and a minister of Foreign Affairs, but none of them issued a statement whatsoever. 

The state of health of Mr Oulanyah has not been managed any better. Parliament has a director of communications and public affairs, a clerk and a Deputy Speaker to Parliament, all of whom could have worked with the Speaker’s family to issue an appropriate public statement. That has not been done.

Silence on the part of those whose responsibility should be to provide reassuring statements only serves to fuel the kind of unhealthy speculation that has been going on since Tuesday. This calls for better management of situations such as these. It calls for the formation of a crisis management committee in government to prepare for peculiar situations such as the one in which we find ourselves.