Friday, August 14, 2015

You are wrong Mr President, Ugandans want term limits

By Philip Wafula Oguttu

Posted  Thursday, August 13  2015 at  01:00
During a joint press conference with President Uhuru Kenyatta at State House Entebbe, President Museveni said Ugandans overwhelmingly rejected term limits.
This is not true. The President is quoted to have said, “For us in Uganda, we do not agree with term limits. We rejected them.”
He went on to say, “If people do not want a particular group, they vote them out.” Of course, Museveni knows that what he said is wrong because he is aware of the actual position of Ugandans on term limits.
It is President Museveni who appointed the 1988 Odoki Commission to draft a new constitution. The Odoki Commission traversed the whole country soliciting people’s views on the making of a new constitution.
And among many other views, they gathered was one that the term of office for the President shall be five years renewable only once. This was and is still the view that Ugandans unanimously supported.
These findings culminated into The 1995 Constitution and there-in was Article 105, which provided for presidential term limits. 
Unfortunately, this particular provision of the Constitution was never allowed by the President to be tested.
In 2005, Shs5 million was paid to each Member of Parliament who was ready to vote to amend Article 105 of the Constitution to remove the presidential term limits and it was done in minutes. Indeed he was resoundingly successful.
The people were not consulted, neither by government nor by mercenary MPs. 
The Sempebwa Constitutional Review Commission Report of 2003 also upheld the people’s demand for presidential term limits.
Ironically, it was only one year after this Commission presented its findings that term limits got lifted and the people’s wishes were ignored by the President and his regime.
Whenever ordinary citizens have taken it upon themselves to return term limits in our constitution, President Museveni has not paid any attention.
Ugandan citizens under a consortium of civil society members, political leaders of all parties, the religious fraternity, and senior citizens for the past two years have traversed the whole country collecting views on what they felt were the necessary constitutional reforms they wanted.
Presidential term limits was on top on the list of views that citizens had the highest level of consensus during the exercise.
In the December 2014, a final consultative conference organised at Hotel Africana to synthsise the views collected, (where President Museveni was invited to attend but he chose not to), The Citizens’ Compact of reforms, including term limits, was agreed on. The compact was later presented to Parliament and government but was simply ignored.
The Committee of Rules and Privileges of Parliament also carried minimal consultations on constitutional reforms in all the four regions of Uganda and one thing was unanimous; “reinstate the presidential term limits”.
However, at the time of drafting the Committee Report, the Committee was reportedly reined in by President Museveni not to include anything about term limits in their final report.
With all this knowledge, for President Museveni to tell the whole world that Ugandans “do not agree with term limits” is not only untrue but also cheap politicking.

Mr Oguttu is the Member of Parliament for Bukoli Central and Leader of the Opposition in Parliament.
http://www.monitor.co.ug/OpEd/Commentary/You-are-wrong-Mr-President-Ugandans-want-term-limits/-/689364/2829790/-/bibhvqz/-/index.html

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