Without mincing his words or butting an eyelid, Premier John Patrick Amama Mbabazi today told Ugandans agonizing over the impending hanging in China to “Please carry your own cross”. The Prime Minister was dismissing pleas from the convicts, MPs and other human rights organizations that are busy pestering the government to talk to China in a bid to save the Ugandans. Mbabazi told the convicts in no uncertain terms to bear the brunt of the law without begrudging anyone. “China is a sovereign state. The convicts breached the law in China and its laws must prevail,” Mbabazi declared. ‘Aint clean either’ Mukono North MP Betty Bakireke Nambooze immediately hit out at Mbabazi calling him a callous man “capable of even dancing on a dead man’s grave.” Alluding to the Temangalo/NSSF scandal, Nambooze said that Mbabazi was acting like the biblical man who picks out a small particle in his brother’s eye yet he carries a log in his own. Odonga Otto dug in, saying if the law worked in Uganda, many big wigs in government would have joined their creator long ago. Corruption is punishable by death in China. Going by the many corruption enquiry reports that have implicated almost the entire cabinet, many would have been hanged by now,” Odonga claimed. Arguments for Many politicians, religious leaders and human rights activists would of course not take Mbabazi words lying down. The death sentence has been a prickly issue in Uganda with religious leaders, human rights activists and members of the public calling for its abolition. Even Prison boss Dr John Byabashaija is one of the advocates of the abolition of the death sentence. When the death row prisoners filed a constitutional petition calling for the abolition of the death sentence, Byabashaija joined them by swearing an affidavit pointing out the dangers of the sentence. Advocates of the abolition of the death row argue that it runs counter to the imprisonment’s intention of reforming the culprit. Simply put, they opine that a dead man cannot reform his ways making the death sentence a contradiction of the intention of any form of sentence. They alternatively argue that any sentence is made to punish someone adding that a man hanged does not live to feel the pain of the sentence. In murder cases, the advocates argue that it makes no sense for the state to condemn a man for killing another and yet go ahead and kill another someone who should be learmning that murder is a crime. The advocates from the religious circles state that Uganda whose motto is ‘For God and my Country’, cannot be seen and heard breaching one of the God’s Ten Commandments “Thou you Shall not kill.” However, proponents of the death sentence argue that life is too precious to be lost in unlawful means and so whoever takes another’s life, must pay in the same currency. Therefore, they conform to the Mosaic law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Since a sentence is intended to send out a strong warning to others to think twice before breaching the law, this school of thought argues that no better sentence can serve this purpose than granting a death sentence to a man who has taken another life. However, the opposing side quickly counters. They argue that if the death sentence was actually deterrent as the proponents of it argue, the act of people killing others would have turned into history long ago. They argue that people who kill others have somehow lost their faculty of reasoning and need to see the relevant doctors to straighten things up. Meanwhile, the debate ranges on. Some countries, even Rwanda whose President Kagame of Rwanda, whom many dismiss as a disguised dictator has since dropped the death sentence. In our case, the Constitutional Court found it still relevant, but directed that government must hang those found guilty in three years or converts their sentence to life imprisonment.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Nov 2013 15:49:40 +0000
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