THE NEW BAIL PROPOSALS start of dictatorship

Dec 13, 2021 Irene Lamunu Features 0

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BY TIMOTHY KALYEGIRA

A presenter on Busoga One radio station in Jinja on Monday November 1st, 2021 narrated a conversation he had with the opposition MP and lawyer, Medard Lubega Ssegona. He explained that ever since his arrest in 2011 over allegations of treason, his police file has disappeared and there is no trace of documentation around the case. Ssegona said that had the proposed
stricter terms for the granting of bail for capital offences been the law in 2011, he would have spent the last decade in jail, without ever being rought before a High Court judge. This is what is so problematic with the new bail terms proposed and being pushed by President Yoweri Museveni. What it would amount to would be, in essence, detention without trial for political reasons. For those unfamiliar with Ugandan history, the proposed tough bail terms are shocking and disturbing but this has been part of the country’s politics since the 1960s. It was the Minister of Justice, Grace Ibingira, who in the mid-1960s proposed detention without trial for political opponents and critics of the UPC government of Milton Obote. In a sense, Museveni’s proposed tightening of bail is the latest in what for decades has been a pattern building up to an autocratic state. Injustice and oppression have come to different sections of the population at different times, which is why it has taken so long for the population as a whole to view the ituation with alarm in the same way and for the same reasons. One group’s oppression has often been viewed with indifference by another
group; one region’s marginalisation has been regarded as either of little concern to another region or even as a fate that they deserved. For the past 30 or so years, Ugandans have accepted to live with some of the anti-democratic practices of the NRM government as a trade-off for a return of the country to stability and a revival of the economy.They accepted the 1986 suspension of political party activities, agreeing with the NRM that
partisan politics around tribe and religion had destroyed Uganda since
independence. Ugandans accepted the reasons given by the NRM government in late 1986 for the arrest of Dr. David Lwanga, Paulo
Muwanga, Dr. Andrew Kayiira, Evaristo Nyanzi and others, on allegations that they had been planning to overthrow the new government. Ugandans politely accepted the NRM’s questionable decision in 1989 to extend its term in office, President Museveni having pledged in 1986 that the NRM.

“Ugandans politely accepted the NRM’s questionable decision in 1989 to extend its term in office, President Museveni having pladged in 186 that the NRM would be in power for only four years until 1990”

would be in power for only four years until 1990. The sale of state-owned civil servants’ houses, government cars and state-owned enterprises starting in 1990 was accepted as the government divesting itself of bloated enterprises and properties in favour of a leaner, more efficient government. In the 1990s, it started becoming clear that most prominent government and parastatal jobs were being given to people from one part of the country, but while this caused disquiet, it too was reluctantly accepted in the interest of the greater good — the restoration of peace in Uganda. The peace in question was mainly experienced in the southern half of the country.
From the late 1980s throughout the 1990s, much of northern Uganda was
in political turmoil, with hundreds of thousands of internally displaced
people reduced to living in camps and the army using brutal tactics on
the civilian population in its counter insurgency operations. The southern Bantu-speaking tribes turned a blind eye to this brutality, partly with the justification that the northern tribes from 1962 to 1986 when they held
state power had brutalised southern Uganda. The very public humiliation
and brutalisation of a new national opposition leader, Dr. Kiiza Besigye, starting in 2001, finally opened the eyes of many Ugandans to the disturbing situation in the country. Between 2001 and 2016, Besigye the
main challenger to President Museveni became the most-arrested person in
Ugandan history. Charges from rape to treason, hooliganism and unlawful assembly were brought against him. The political opposition was more or less criminalised and by 2021, it was highly risky for one to become a leading presidential contender, sometimes even life-threatening. Lawyers, journalists and human rights activists regularly reported on the many Ugandans being illegally held in prison and other detention centres, others being tortured in security safe houses. Land-grabbing and eviction of people from their village land began being reported in the early 2000s.
Also, at the time 20 years ago, the NRM government begun to tighten its grip on,the media and becoming more and more intolerant of criticism from the press. All these injustices, contradictions, rigged elections and undemocratic tendencies the Ugandan population can take. But when the matter of detention without trial comes up, that is a red line crossed. This is a development that should concern all citizens, regardless of political affiliation, ethnicity and religion. Detention without trial symbolises the
end of the last pretense about being a democratic state and heralds the arrival of a full-blown dictatorship

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