Museveni relentless on 3rd term

May 18, 2004

President Yoweri Museveni did well to directly respond to the late James Wapakhabulo’s letter (The Monitor, May 13, P.3 and The New Vision, May 14,P.4), thereby ending all speculation about his views on the issue of presidential term limits.

By Joe Oloka-Onyango

President Yoweri Museveni did well to directly respond to the late James Wapakhabulo’s letter (The Monitor, May 13, P.3 and The New Vision, May 14,P.4), thereby ending all speculation about his views on the issue of presidential term limits.

If there are lingering doubts in the minds of those who state that the President is yet to make up his mind on whether or not he will seek re-election in 2006, this latest ‘missive’ should put that uncertainty to rest.

The letter is an open declaration not only that the President wants term limits lifted so as to be chief beneficiary of the same, but also that he will go to all lengths to achieve that goal.

Those lengths will include undermining, sidelining and even destroying the institutions of governance such as the Judiciary and Parliament that have taken so long to re-build, provided they stand in his way.

It will extend to the coercion, manipulation and opportunisitic use of THE PEOPLE to do the President’s bidding. Finally—and in my view here lies the real tragedy—it will include the extensive use of political violence, as is apparent from the reference to Operation Wembley, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the debate at hand.

The President’s boastful sanctioning of the wide-scale and systemic abuse of human rights represented by Wembley (and continued by its successor VCCU) speaks volumes about what he is prepared to do to achieve the objective of a life presidency.

In sum, he will even kill to retain his position as President of Uganda. All this on an issue which until this letter, he has continuously dismissed as “unimportant.”

Fellow Ugandans, prepare for the Wembleyization of the political scene!

But let us move away from the political and back to the legal—the arena for which the President and his cohorts seem to have a pathological distaste—but which unfortunately is the primary source for our understanding and implementation of issues of a constitutional nature. I have argued before about the essential content of Article 1.

The President states that Article 1 is superior to every other provision in the 1995 Constitution.

For the sake of argument, let us agree. At a minimum, however, that article should be faithfully reproduced if it is to be fully understood.

Unfortunately, President Museveni persists in the deliberate omission of an essential part of that article precisely because it would undermine the very foundations on which his spurious and essentially illegal argument about “the people” rests.

First of all, Clause 1 stipulates that the power which belongs to the people shall be exercised in accordance with the Constitution.

Clause 3 of Article 1—which so far has not featured in the discussions on this issue—is even more crystal clear. It states: “All power and authority of Government and its organs derive from this Constitution, which in turn derives its authority from the people who consent to be governed in accordance with this Constitution.” (emphasis added).

The inclusion of the emphasis on governance in accordance with the Constitution was no accident.

In other words, and again for the sake of argument, what happened in 1986 was that the people regained their sovereignty, and continued to struggle for the restoration of constitutional governance and democracy.

They duly elected their representatives to design a new framework for that governance, which became the 1995 Constitution.

But the memory of Milton Obote’s illegal abrogation of the independence constitution in 1966 was never far from their minds.

This is why at every twist and turn, there is a reaffirmation of the need for the process of governance (and for all the institutions of governance including the Presidency) to be executed in accordance with the Constitution.

Mr President, it was not a “mistake”, an “oversight” or a “failure”.

Let us just imagine what the deletion of the phrase in accordance with the Constitution would mean.

Basically, that we would have reverted to the mode of governance exemplified by Field Marshal Idi Amin, where governance was executed in accordance with the whims of the regime.

The essence of the constitutional review that we are undertaking should be to expand, rather than to reduce the space for democratic participation in the manner the President is advocating.

Although Museveni hates listening to the correct interpretation of the law, he would be advised to look very closely at Article 3(2).

That provision states thus: “Any person who, singly or in concert with others, by any violent or other unlawful means, suspends, overthrows, abrogates or amends this Constitution or any part of it or attempts to do any such act, commits the offence of treason and shall be punished according to law.” That provision too was not a mistake by the people’s representatives.

The writer is a lecturer at Makerere University’s Faculty of Law

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});