UGANDA PEOPLES CONGRESS
(Office of the President)

PRC MEETING - 24 MAY 2002

MESSAGE FROM A. MILTON OBOTE
PRESIDENT
UGANDA PEOPLES CONGRESS

1. Fellow citizens, Members of the PRC and Members of the Congress of the people; I send you very warm greetings.

2. I am most pleased that the PRC should be meeting at a time when every political gauge in Uganda now shows that the NRM dictatorship is on its way out.

3. The war against dictatorship which the people of Uganda have been waging with the multipartyists in the vanguard is not yet won but except for the politically blind, light can be seen at the end of the tunnel.

4. I send through you greetings to the multipartyists in their various Parties. I warn that because the dictatorship is aware of losing, it will go all out to sow seeds of distrust in the
multipartist camp.

5. In March this year, Uganda's political Parties and organizations did, for the first time a golden service for the people of Uganda. They composed a Petition to the Commonwealth Heads of Government and submitted it to their Meeting held in Australia.

6. The Petition was about dictatorship in Uganda and the violent suppressions of the human rights and freedoms of the people of Uganda for 16 years.

7. The Australian Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) was dominated by events in Zimbabwe and the Uganda Petition was therefore not discussed. The Uganda dictatorship is now most concerned that the Commonwealth will take up the matters in the Petition.

8. Since 1998, the Uganda dictatorship has been wanting to entrench itself by enacting a Political Organisations Bill (POB). It took the dictatorship four years to re-enact Article 269 of the Constitution which was first enacted in 1995. The dictatorship has run out even of ideas of how to entrench itself.

9. I have requested the PPC Chairman to send me a copy of the enacted POB. There are matters which should be uppermost in your minds as you consider the UPC's response to POB. In my view, the UPC, other Parties and the multipartyists should respond to POB from a position of responsibility and strength.

10. The first thing I see in the decision of the dictatorship to enact POB is arrogant defiance of the opinion of Uganda's multipartyists, of the provision of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of the opinion of supporters of the Movement and of the
friends of dictatorship in the older democracies who do not support the provisions of Article 269 of the Constitution.

11. My reading of the positions of the friends of the dictatorship in the older democracies leads me to warn the UPC, other Parties and multipartyists to adopt a response position rooted on the enjoyment and exercise by the citizen of his/her inalienable human rights and freedoms.

12. There are three matters to consider in adopting that position. First, some of those in the older democracies have been urging the dictatorship to enact POB. Second, some of them have never in 16 years accepted that Uganda is or has been under a dictatorship.
Third, some of them would rather give subventions to entrench the dictatorship than suspend the subventions.

13. After considering the positions of the friends of the dictatorship in the older democracies, you have to consider the fact that the Uganda judiciary is part and parcel of the dictatorship which some of the friends of the dictatorship abroad do not accept.
In the Judgement delivered in January, 1994 on the first UPC Petition of 1993, the Constitutional Court declared a position on the enjoyment and exercise by the citizen of his/her human rights and freedoms which showed that the Court is a validation institution of the inhumanities of the Uganda dictatorship.

14. In January, 1994, the Constitutional Court said that the suppressions of the human rights and freedoms of the citizen and of his/her political Party in the Constituent Assembly Statute, were TEMPORARY. Now in the year 2002, the dictatorship has entrenched what was Temporary in 1994 in a way which takes away all dignity from the
position and office of every Judge.

15. A response based on responsibility and strength means that it must not be emotional. I suggest that you submit a very strong case against POB 2002 to the Constitutional Court. The objective must be to bring it out most clearly that even the Uganda dictatorship has
accepted in Article 20 of the Constitution that the human rights and freedoms of the people of Uganda are inherent (given by God) and not granted by the State as POB 2002 purports to do.

16. When Museveni signs POB into law, the UPC should be prepared to co-operate with other multipartyists to go to Court together. Meanwhile, the PPC should begin in earnest to work on the UPC case. I send you my own contribution. My contribution is based on my belief that in enacting POB 2002, the dictatorship has taken the erroneous
position: -

(i) That Article 270 of the Constitution has been amended by POB 2002.

(ii) That Article 73 of the Constitution allows a POB to provide for the restrictions of political Parties when only the Movement System is in office when, in fact, the terms in the Article are meant to be neutral and to apply whenever any of the systems in Article 69 is in office.

(iii) That since Article 270 is no longer in operation: -

(a) No Party therefore exists and since no Party exists, all the prohibitions in Article 269 now re-enacted in POB 2002 means no Party can claim to enjoy or exercise them unless the Party is registered as stipulated in POB 2002.

17. With the above positions of the dictatorship, my plaint would go to the jugular veins of POB 2002 with the objective to jugulate (kill) the Movement System and render POB 2002 and its Section 21 unconstitutional, defective, impotent and fraudulent. I do not have POB 2002 but my plaint would be as follows: -

(i) That Article 270 of the Constitution has not been amended by POB 2002 because: -

(a) there is no provision in the Constitution on how to amend the Article and

(b) No Bill has been published with the express provision as stated in Article 258(2)(a) to amend Article 270.

(ii) That the Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC), the Party which together with Kabaka Yekka formed the first Government of Uganda in 1962 and again formed the Government of Uganda in December, 1980, is one of the political Parties stated in Article 270 of the Constitution as being in existence immediately before coming into force of the 1995 Constitution and that on account of Clause 2 of Article 72 of the Constitution, Parliament was to make laws relating to the registration of political Parties and Organisations under which the UPC would then operate as a political Party and further that POB 2002 is not the law provided in Article 270.

(iii) That it is the contention of the UPC that laws for registration of Parties in Article 270 or for regulating the activities of Parties in Article 269 which were to be made by parliament had to be enacted because both Articles are in the Transitional Chapter of the
Constitution within the Transitional Provisions of Article 263(1) and (2) of the Constitution so that they appear in the Statute book before the elapse of nine months after the promulgation of the Constitution in October, 1995 and not seven years later in the year 2002.

(iv) That since under Article 21 of the Constitution, citizens who subscribe to each of the systems in Article 69 are equal before and under the law in all spheres of political, economic, social and cultural life and in every other respect and shall enjoy equal
protection of the law, it is the contention of the UPC that by placing the enactments of laws for the registration and the regulations of the activities of the Parties of the citizens who subscribe to the System in 69(2)(b) in the Transitional Chapter of the Constitution and providing in Articles 263 and 264 the ends of the Transitional Provisions, the Constitution does not authorise any POB to be enacted seven years after the promulgation of the Constitution.

(v) That any POB enacted under the authority of Article 269 of the Constitution has to deal with three separate matters: -

(a) Because the subscribers to the systems in Article 69 are under Article 21 equal before and under the law and enjoy the equal protection of the law, the POB must be enacted within the time provided in Article 263 which period elapsed in 1996 and POB 2002 is
therefore defective, impotent and fraudulent.

(b) It must only regulate the activities of the political organisations such as when the UPC is holding a public meeting at the Constitutional Square, no other Party should seek to do the same at the same place and time and do so by providing that the political Parties shall continue to exist whenever any of the systems in Article 69 is in office. POB 2002 is therefore unconstitutional, defective, impotent and fraudulent in purporting to provide for the registration of the political Parties in accordance with Article 73 of the Constitution under each of the systems in 69. POB 2002 is unconstitutional because it purports to provide that under Article 73 political Parties are to be restricted when the Movement System is in office. POB is supposed to define or regulate the activities of the
political organisations under each of the systems in Article 69. Furthermore, POB 2002 because it was not in place to make the citizen make an informed choice in the 2000 Referendum in respect to the activities of the political organisations under each of the systems in Article 69, now show that the 2000 June referendum because of the
absence of an effective POB was null and void.

(c) The Preamble to Article 269, read together with Articles 69 and 71 authorise parliament to only make laws regulating and not for the registrations of political Parties or suppressing the activities of the political organisations so that any such laws would under Article 73(1) be neutral to each of the systems in 69 and therefore that
"during the period when any of the political systems provided for in this constitution [Article 69] has been adopted, organizations subscribing to other political systems may exist subject to such regulations as Parliament shall by law prescribe." By repeating and
adopting the prohibitions which apply only to organisations in Article 71 provided in Article 269 and listed as (a) to (e), POB 2002 has ceased to be neutral within the meaning of Article 73 and is therefore unconstitutional, defective, impotent and fraudulent.

18. My draft plaint against POB 2002 is a layman's political move. POB 2002 is itself the political move and challenge by the dictatorship. It is for the PPC to polish my draft, expand it and file in Court.

19. When trial begins, the citizen shall stand erect in his/her Court with much dignity in the trial of the dictatorship and the Judges.

20. Our case is that the human rights and freedoms of the citizen are God given and are not granted by the State through a POB which also restricts them to Kampala. Our case is that where the citizen resides, his/her human rights and freedoms also reside, that is to
say, like the UPC, EVERYWHERE, in Uganda.

21. I send you this MESSAGE in the Spirit of our National Motto: FOR GOD AND MY COUNTRY.

A. Milton Obote