MPs are right to fight for civil liberties I watched with the interest of a theatre-fan the dramatic events of August 1 in Parliament. Ordinarily, one may wonder why a Member of Parliament chooses to adopt an extra-ordinary and in many ways belligerent approach to handling parliamentary business. That is possibly why some individuals castigated the actions of some MPs who made it impossible to pass the Public Order Management Bill, 2011. But on more careful and rigorous scrutiny, I construe the circumstances of this occurrence as a form of positive deviance. Positive deviance is predicated on the argument that in every community there are some individuals or groups whose unusual behaviour and strategy enable them to find more pragmatic solutions to problems than their peers, while having access to the same resources and facing similar or worse challenges. It goes without saying that the main bone of contention in the Public Order Management Bill is that it threatens the freedom of assembly. Freedom of assembly, sometimes used interchangeably with the freedom of association, is the individual right to come together and collectively express, promote, pursue and defend common interests. Article 29 of the 1995 Constitution provides for the protection of freedom of conscience, expression, movement, religion, assembly and association. However, in a country where some opposition members have in the recent past been ineptly denied the liberty to meet with their constituents, it is only normal that an attempt to legitimise such inept obstruction of fundamental freedoms will be resisted. Infact, while many more MPs may be opposed to the passing of this Bill, only a handful adopted a deviant strategy that at least delayed it’s passing. I would actually have been shocked if the opposition had shied away from confronting the process of “expeditiously” passing the Bill. The actions of some of the now suspended MPs should be a fore-warning that public space is under threat. Even if this Bill is passed, as is actually most likely, it does not sanitise it of its lethal capability in militating against freedom of assembly. I can with near certainty predict that some of the ruling party faithful chorusing the need to pass the Bill will become some of the first casualties of the stifling of the right to assembly. Not everything legal is good. Legality only provides legitimacy and the law can be used to legitimise negativity. A nascent democracy like Uganda needs more of national consensus and unity than the suffocation of civil liberties and its potentially chaotic ramifications. Obiga Makambo,
Posted on: Wed, 07 Aug 2013 23:55:30 +0000
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