By Mulengera Reporters
Justice Minister Norbert Mao says that the report on electoral reforms is ready and he will be proceeding to propose the relevant amendments in Parliament as soon as his boss Gen YK Museveni is ready to make his input and flags him off.
Mao says it’s clearly too late to have those reforms applied to the 2026 elections because for such changes to be reflected and be of impact, they must be enacted two years to the next elections.
The Minister says that the reforms will be relied upon for purposes of elections that will come in 2031. He says there is a lot he has learnt, and which has humbled him, since joining Cabinet.
That he now realizes that effecting electoral reforms or even political transition isn’t as easy as he originally thought.
Speaking on Kabaka’s BBS TV on Saturday, Mao said that even the Constitutional Review Commission, which he desired to put in place, failed and the idea was abandoned because there was no money.
Mao, who in his first months as Minister used to address public gatherings claiming how there is a lot of money in government, said on BBS that the government is so broke to the extent that even the Commission of Inquiry the President created to look into Apaa land wrangling has never started working because there is no money for its operationalization.
He said that the electoral reforms are going to be enacted following a cheaper option than what he originally had in mind. That he realized the Uganda Law Reform Commission, which his Ministry supervises, would be effectively used to put together proposals that can be processed into electoral reforms.
Mao says that to get the opposition concerns, he ordered the Commission to make use of the Citizens Compact, a comprehensive document which the entire opposition, working with CSOs, put together and dangled at government as the country prepared for 2016 elections.
He believes that the Citizens Compact is comprehensive enough because it was a document which all key opposition and CSOs players had agreed upon under the TDA arrangement in 2015-2016.
Mao says that the Commission utilized this document and also reviewed the contents of the proposals that were authored and tabled before Parliament by independent MP Wilfred Niwagaba in his capacity as the Shadow Attorney General.
Mao added that the Commission had also made use of the 10 recommendations the Supreme Court had made in 2016 as part of their Lordships’ ruling on the Election Petition by Amama Mbabazi as he challenged Gen YK Museveni’s victory in 2016.
Ironically, in his BBS TV talk Mao didn’t make any reference to ex-LoP Mathias Mpuuga who has lately been very outspoken about the need for electoral reforms. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
