Uganda’s real opposition party is non-compliance

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OPINION

By Crispin Kaheru

The convergence of a festive season and an election season has helped me finally name Uganda’s simplest, most stubborn problem. It is not ideology. It is not a tribe. It is not even our religion. It is non-compliant.

Watch Kampala a few days to Christmas. The city becomes a classroom. Traffic thickens. Tempers rise. Rules evaporate. Drivers mount road shoulders, cut into oncoming lanes, ignore traffic lights, and wave away police officers as if they are inconveniences, not authorities. The reason is always urgent. Someone is late. Someone must shop. Someone must travel upcountry. Life is happening. Rules can wait.

The Bodas jump in the fray. Wrong side of the road. They treat red lights as suggestions. They fire up speeds that assume immortality. All in the name of getting a passenger to a destination faster. And if you dare stop at a red light, you will be hooted at in protest. Obedience, in Uganda, often looks suspicious. Compliance looks naïve.

Then the election season arrives and confirms what the roads already taught us. Non-compliance is Uganda’s most organised. You watch the news. You see it everywhere. Non-compliance with campaign schedules. Impromptu roadside rallies. Unsanctioned stops that choke towns. Non-compliance with public order and traffic regulations. Non-compliance with the Electoral Code on hate speech and incitement. Non-compliance with respect for political opponents, posters torn down, supporters, voters, and security intimidated.

Basically, non-compliance has members everywhere. It campaigns daily. It wins quietly. You find it prior to, and beyond elections. Non-compliance on the roads. Non-compliance in tax payment. Non-compliance with court orders. Non-compliance with procurement rules. Non-compliance with ethics. Non-compliance with truth itself.

Today, non-compliance is not rebellion. It is a habit. It is convenient. It is a survival strategy. And increasingly, it is entitlement.

Punctuality is optional. Procedures are flexible. Accountability is seasonal. Morality is outsourced to God. Consequences are postponed until forgotten. We bribe officials and complain about corruption. We disobey court orders and cry about the rule of law. We jump queues and demand order. We break laws loudly and ask for justice quietly. We evade taxes and demand world-class services. The contradiction is complete.

So, don’t be fooled. This festive season did not create this problem. The election season did not invent it. They merely turned on the lights. Non-compliance was already here.

This is not a crisis of laws. Uganda has laws. Many of them. Good ones. Sometimes too many. The real crisis is that consequences have become negotiable. And in law, negotiable consequences are no consequences at all.

We warn instead of enforcing. We caution instead of punishing. We forgive instead of deter. We reshuffle instead of prosecuting. Uganda needs certainty. Firm, lawful, boring certainty. For instance, if you steal public money, the response should be automatic: recover assets, freeze accounts, bar the offender from public office permanently. Make corruption expensive and unrewarding. If you lie in public office, you should be dismissed and disqualified, not recycled through boards, commissions or foreign service appointments. If you evade taxes, you should pay penalties, interest, and face closure. If court orders are ignored, contempt proceedings should follow consistently. No exemptions. No powerful surnames. No convenient excuses.

This is not authoritarianism. It is constitutional governance. Every society that stabilised did one simple thing: it made compliance predictable and non-compliance costly. In Uganda, we have tried patience. We have tried dialogue. We have tried warnings. Non-compliance has interpreted all that as weakness. Where laws exist without consequences, disorder rushes in to fill the vacuum.

So when I stop at a red light, I am not being naïve. I am making a choice. I am imagining a Uganda where obeying the law is normal, not brave. Where doing the right thing does not invite ridicule. Where rules are dull, predictable, and followed. And where that dullness is progress.

Until that day comes, one force will continue to outpace laws, leaders, and elections. It has no office, no face, no name on the ballot. Yet it rules our roads, our politics, and our public life. Its name is Non-Compliance.

The writer is Member of Uganda Human Rights Commission