{What do you make of this cat and mouse games between you and the State? } <\/p>\n
I fully understand it from its depth because the NRM regime is really now in a siege mentality. It is and may be rightly so, feeling it is surrounded by enemies because the citizens have turned against it and the only way to maintain power is to project force to cause fear for everyone to submit by feeling if you don\u2019t do so there will be trouble for you. <\/p>\n
In the campaign we ended, we made it clear ours was going to be a defiance campaign which had two main objectives. <\/p>\n
The first was to empower our citizens with information that raises their confidence as citizens and makes them aware that unless they regain their power in the country, their problems won\u2019t go away and as long as a small clique monopolises power they will also monopolise use of national resources and therefore the poverty, poor services and unemployment won\u2019t go away.<\/p>\n
The second objective was to give them tools to organise and defy the injustice, create leadership and networks that can resist the injustice and defy it and I think the regime realised how potent that campaign was because in the short span of three months the whole country was up and active and involved and contributing money and other resources to liberate themselves.<\/p>\n
{Are some of these things such as Power 10 and the defiance campaign not mere high sounding proclamations and empty slogans? Are they not paper tigers?}<\/p>\n
Your first question was the in and out of cells situation and how I see it ending. Well, if the defiance campaign wasn\u2019t successful then I would be a free person; they wouldn\u2019t be scared at all. <\/p>\n
Of course we had a short span of three months, we could only do so much but the little we did had a profound effect so they are worried now that if we drive it a notch higher they will no longer be able to maintain power.<\/p>\n
The argument of the NRM is that it was elected, never mind the anomalies, by at least 60 per cent of registered voters and they have a constitutional duty to ensure law and order. You have vowed to make Uganda ungovernable and defy the State and that is why they are putting you to order for the greater good of peace in society
\nBut how would I achieve that as a person? In fact, it is shameful that it is Mr Museveni and his regime making such arguments. Museveni took to the bush and used guns that killed people because he believed that an election was rigged. He didn\u2019t test it anywhere.<\/p>\n
Possibly the courts at the time couldn\u2019t be a fall-back. Today, again notwithstanding your reservations, the courts are functional at least better than 1980.<\/p>\n
Of course there were courts at the time. He didn\u2019t test his belief that the election was rigged, he went to the bush and eventually the war was won, the winning of the war vindicated his belief that the election was rigged because if there was no popular support for the war it wouldn\u2019t have been won. <\/p>\n
But in our case this regime has been in power for 30 years, we have more than 80 per cent unemployment of youth, healthcare in total decay as we exposed it in elections and they had to guard so more filth is not thrown into the public eye. So the source of popular discontent is not unknown.<\/p>\n
If Museveni had won with 60 per cent, you would have had somewhere people celebrating but as soon as Badru Kiggundu (EC chairperson) announced (results) an aura of mourning descended on the country. <\/p>\n
The Constitution of Uganda deliberately envisaged that what the EC announces may not be true so it provided a mechanism of going to court. From the very day after elections I have been a prisoner and it is the candidate not the party that can petition. At any rate he has the responsibility of rallying the resources for the campaign and so on. The candidate would be having his agents everywhere.<\/p>\n
Let me come in right there. You claimed you couldn\u2019t petition the Supreme Court because the State frustrated you. What was the extent of this frustration?
\nIt was comprehensive.<\/p>\n
{Can you unpack it for the reader? } <\/p>\n
Not only was I incarcerated, our head office was invaded and taken over for three weeks, the up country offices too were invaded, more than 300 leaders and agents were arrested in that time. You saw what happened to the petitioner who eventually went to court, Mr Amama Mbabazi, his lawyers\u2019 offices were broken into, witnesses interfered with. <\/p>\n
That is the situation we are encumbered with and why Mr Museveni cannot claim to be a conclusive winner of the election because you become conclusively elected if at the very least the constitutional processes have been exhausted.<\/p>\n
That was exhausted when Mr Mbabazi, with all the issues you have highlighted, challenged the election in the highest court in the land and his case fell flat. The constitutional import of that is that Mr Museveni became conclusively elected.
\nBut as I have told you in our case we weren\u2019t afforded the opportunity to even consider going there.<\/p>\n
{You chastised the Supreme Court throughout your campaign, blew hot and cold how you will never return to their lordships having lost the 2001 and 2006 petitions and now people are starting to compare your contradictions to the man you oppose. Why the change of mind?}<\/p>\n
You see I was very clear it was a defiance campaign that means we shall resist the injustice and override it. We knew there is a partisan and biased EC but we leave it no room to announce another person if we are sufficiently organised. <\/p>\n
What happened in Kasese is a case in a point, the reason the people there are in trouble is because everything was tried to rig but these people through defiance overwhelmed all this. They stayed at the tally centre for three days before they announced the winner, they shot and killed someone, they just pulled the body, buried and others stayed. <\/p>\n
So even when institutions are clearly unfair you can win when there is such overwhelming power of right on your side.<\/p>\n
So the court system has three main problems, first the time frame within which court processes are carried out. Ten days to file a petition that satisfies the substantiality test. By comparison, an MP has a month to gather evidence for a petition and a presidential candidate 10 days to cover the country gathering evidence and it must be ruled on in 30 days including time within which the other people respond to that evidence.<\/p>\n
So in effect the court has about 10 days to hear the petition. Court is not supposed to conduct an election petition as a trial, it is an inquiry, so one would have expected that according to the mandate of the court they would be moved to investigate what happened, they don\u2019t have the time to do so that is why a recount can\u2019t be carried out.
\nThe second weakness is the standard of proof that I have talked about and the third is the impartiality of the court because like in this case with nine justices all were made judges by Mr Museveni.<\/p>\n
{In 2006 the same court with all the pressure from the regime came close to allowing your petition in a hair thin margin of 4:3. Justices Tsekoko, Oder and Kanyeihamba held that the election be annulled, are you being fair to the court?}<\/p>\n
Well, he didn\u2019t appoint Tsekoko and Oder, they were already judges.<\/p>\n
But Prof George Kanyeihamba had been a minister and strong NRM cadre so it is not entirely true that serving Museveni strips a judge of their independence.
\nKanyeihamba is the odd man out.<\/p>\n
You know that even lower courts such as the High Court have acquitted you in cases attracting a maximum of a death sentence and those judges are appointed by and in the same system. They could have as well been manipulated to secure you a place in the jail.<\/p>\n
But you see now the source of impartiality is that all the nine were made judges by Mr Museveni, many of them were NRM cadres including the Chief Justice, the others were ministers and in the NRM secretariat so inherently one would at the very minimum consider their impartiality suspect but if you have amassed overwhelming evidence because you are going to present it in the face of the country one would consider the court option. Again an act of defiance; throw everything in their face and see what they do with it so the court is itself put on trial and exposed just like we have done with EC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
{What do you make of this cat and mouse games between you and the State? } I fully understand it from its depth because the NRM regime is really now in a siege mentality. It is and may be rightly so, feeling it is surrounded by enemies because the citizens have turned against it and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[99],"byline":[2481],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-24492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics-48","tag-greatlakesnews","byline-daily-monitor"],"bylines":[{"id":2481,"name":"DAILY MONITOR","slug":"daily-monitor","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":null}],"contributors":[{"id":2481,"name":"DAILY MONITOR","slug":"daily-monitor","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":null}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24492\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24492"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=24492"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=24492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}