By Mulengera Reporters
During the Saturday Capital Gang of this Easter weekend, the moderator Oscar Semweya Musoke asked Ofwono Opondo to prove he is still a man of NRM.
This was after Opondo had candidly contributed to the debate on Judiciary rot which days earlier manifested in lawyer Eron Kiiza being asked to pay Shs20m cash for bail and his client Dr. Kizza Besigye denied bail even after the Judge had eloquently asserted there was no legal basis for him not to walk to freedom. Opondo observed this didn’t make the Ugandan Judiciary look good at all.
The Saturday Gang also discussed the patriotism, frustration, hopelessness and sense of duty with which MPs of the Legal & Parliamentary Affairs Committee recently stood up to and called out Judiciary officials who had appeared before them to defend their FY2025/2026 budgetary proposals and estimates.
The much respected Abdul Katuntu, an eminent member of that same Committee, was in the studios too as was State House’s Moses Byaruhanga, Eron’s lawyer Nicholas Opiyo, human rights NGO Chapter Four Chairman Angelo Izama, Agather Atuhaire and one other young lawyer.
Ofwono Opondo rebuked Nicholas Opiyo for speaking as if Besigye’s bail application was the only thing that had made the Judiciary look ugly in the recent past.
Opondo said there are many indicators to show the Judiciary needs a sustained public campaign to keep calling out floppy individual judicial officers like Isaac Ssemakadde had started. That the Besigye and Eron Kiiza maltreatment was just a tip of the iceberg because many less prolific Ugandans have suffered much worse at the hands of such decadent Judicial officers except that their plight doesn’t attract media publicity.
Opondo added that the Judiciary went to the dogs long time ago and there is need to keep calling out individual Judges who don’t take their work seriously, like Ssemakadde’s new radical bar had started doing.
Opondo said that the Judges have always acted funny and in very anomalous ways by accepting to be bribed which is why a suspect can be on remand for 15 years without trial as MPs recently discovered. He said that all this ineptness isn’t new, it’s how the Judicial system has always worked for years.
He recalled his days as the chief investigator for at Uganda Human Rights Commission (1996-2000). That he moved around the country and looked into several detention facilities and profiled individual inmates’ very traumatizing experiences. He suggested that Ssemakadde comes back to Uganda and continues leading the crusade against Judicial ineptness.
Opondo also benefited from Abdul Katuntu’s submission that Ugandan Judges have no reason being corrupt or inept because currently they are the best paid, facilitated and remunerated on the African continent. Katuntu wondered why a Judge who retires with a brand new posh vehicle a house and earns 80% of their salary post-retirement until death can have any reason not to give his or her all in the service of the Ugandan public good. He called this betrayal to the taxpayer whose money government uses to treat Judicial officers this well.
Katuntu also criticized the commercialization of bail, which the Saturday Capital Gang panel agreed was now for sale. The Shs20m that was asked from Eron Kiiza for a minor offence such as contempt of court was unanimously dismissed by gangsters as prohibitively high.
It was also submitted that such high bail fees create an impression that in Uganda, bail is now for sale and its only for the rich. And not accessible as a matter of right anymore.
Opiyo criticized the bail rules which these days govern the grant of bail in Uganda and according to which Judicial discretion has to be exercised. He said these rules had diminished the discretionally powers available to a Judicial officer who the public ordinarily expects to act reasonably while imposing conditions for bail.
Opiyo also spoke about the position of Ag Judge being an impediment to Judicial independence because Judges like Kania, who handled the Besigye application, naturally will reflect on the possibility of not being confirmed when deciding politically controversial matters like Kizza Besigye’s.
Opondo leveraged on all these submissions by fellow panelists to demand that any morally upright Judicial officer should decide matters basing on the law as opposed to fearing or thinking about imaginary political consequences.
He confessed that the Museveni he knows can’t call to rebuke a Judge for merely deciding any case independently basing on the law. He said any Judge worth their name should stand firm and do his or her work as opposed to engaging in self-censorship while imagining this or that will offend the President.
He said the rot Ssemakadde was beginning to dig up and expose was proof that the Judiciary is as disrupted and messed up as the Executive and Legislature.
This prompted the moderator to demand for clarification and assurances on whether Opondo is still NRM. “Let’s get this straight OO, are you really still NRM or I invited the wrong person to speak for the party in power?”
Opondo responded that he is still NRM and that the assertiveness and independence with which he speaks is what an ideal NRM cadre is supposed to be. He said that inside NRM, they allow debate and free thought which is why there is no way he can be gagged or punished for exercising his free speech.
The man from Mulanda made it clear that being a true NRM cadre doesn’t mean keeping quiet about the wrongs that are happening. Neither does it mean covering and shielding the Judiciary’s ineptness from being called out for what it is and publicly scrutinized.
The outgoing government of Uganda spokesman vowed to keep calling out all the wrongs in the NRM government MDAs which will help Ugandans see and appreciate the fact that being NRM isn’t synonymous with covering up wrongs. For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
