When I look at Hon. Robert Kyagulanyi Sentamu a.k.a Bobiwine, I think of Thomas Sankara and his guitar, I think of all the legendary guitars and musicians that went silent in the face of political strife. Music has for so long been an instrument of change.
In view of the recent cancellation of his Kyarenga extra concert, the witch hunt and ongoing house arrest that suffers Hon. Kyagulanyi, one starts to questions the working of human rights laws in Uganda, the loyalties of the Uganda Police Force and the rule of democracy. The normal procedures of arrests have been violated, the workings of the law been undermined and abused in view of the person of Hon. Kyagulanyi.
We have been here before, in 2016, we witnessed the brutal arrests and man handling, we have walked through the trauma of witnessing police brutality and without a doubt, and people came out and had an opinion about it. Demonstrations happened that most times ended up in tear gas and deaths. But the last time we had these episodes it was against the former Presidential candidate Dr. Besigye Warren Kiiza.
So why is an episode that is unprecedented meeting the same contradictions? Is there something in our push for human rights and justice that was not remedied that we ended up in the same fracas three years later? Is there redress in the rule of law that we have ignored and we find ourselves at the same dispensation?
Hon. Kyagulanyi says that he has been waiting for the court ruling on the dismissal of their concerts since 2017.As I write, the Concert promoters have filed a case involving all Bobi wine concert appearances for redress in the courts of law.
And even then, as I write the police are preparing to file criminal charges against Hon. Kyagulanyi that he will need to answer. While still camping at his house and holding him under house arrest in what has been termed as “preventative arrest”
I borrow the words of Bobi wine, “Mwebeleremu!” The people need to find purpose within the cause of Hon. Kyagulanyi; the tribulations of the people are not any different from the very things Hon. Kyagulanyi faces today. The collective voice of the people, civil society and human rights bodies needs to be heard far beyond the media and press address on the human violations that suffer Hon. Kyagulanyi as first and most a citizen of this country
The death of the rule of law, the impunity of the government operatives, and the apathy of the citizenry has become the defining face of Uganda and it is important for us as a people to take back the reigns of order. The people need to be empowered to find reason to make sense of what democracy is and what it is not in the Uganda experience.
We need to foster dissent in the political spaces of Uganda in order for us to have the ability to accommodate different political actors in the politics of Uganda.
As a country, we also need to have a streamlined definition of the role of police in the protection of the people because I am very certain that the very police deployed to deter the Kyarenga Concert would have been used to protect the revelers.
So it is a question of whether there is a chance for the reign of the law in Uganda. Can we as the people of Uganda, civil society and the powers that be work towards fostering the rule of law and democracy in Uganda? When we can have common grounds on where we go from here on, then we can have a chance to work towards change.
