OWEYEGHA-AFUNADUULA: The Abuse or Threatened Abuse of Law to Undo The Judiciary Of Uganda

By Oweyegha-Afunaduula

Center for Critical Thinking and Critical Analysis (CCTAA)

In President Tibuhaburwa Museveni’s Uganda anything is possible against both domestic and international law with the President himself leading the crusade against the law. This might be against the supreme law whose making he presided over: The Uganda Constitution 1995. When this happens, we use the phrase “Abuse or Threatened Abuse of Law or Legal Process.

The term “abuse or threatened abuse of law or legal process” means the use or threatened use of a law or legal process, whether executive, legislative, administrative, civil, or criminal, in any manner or for any purpose for which the law was not designed, in order to exert pressure on another person to cause that person to take some action or refrain from taking some action.

I want in this article to use the recent decision of the supreme court to stop President Tibuhaburwa Museveni’s use of the constitutionally established Military tribunal as a military court to try civilians as if they were soldiers with the purpose of creating and sustaining fear among the population and controlling especially the political activities of politicians in the opposition.

This is in addition to the truism that even if the Uganda Constitution 1995 grants Ugandans the freedom to publicly demonstrate to show their discontent, disapproval or displeasure within the public realm, for almost 40 years, President Tibuhaburwa Museveni has used the army and police to repress and suppress especially Ugandans who do not subscribe to his Party in power. This is what we can refer to as abuse of law under the rule of law. It is expressed almost exclusively in abuse of law enforcement.

As Helen Suzman Foundation (2025) says, citing Diamond, Plattner and Walker’s (2016) “Authoritarianism Goes Global,” while referring to South Africa, ‘Abuse of law enforcement is another arrow in the authoritarians’ quiver.  Offices may be raided under various pretexts, with NGO leaders, their staffs, and even relatives hauled in for questioning and put under unwarranted surveillance.

Prosecutors’ offices may be bent to the task as well, bringing cases under repressive NGO laws, tax laws, or even criminal libel laws.’ We Ugandans are used to this. Even Offices of the Media and political parties have been raided by the military and police. Or else weapons of mass destruction of life have been used to eliminate some identified people and then many often innocent people have been arrested and incarcerated, and sometimes either pardoned by the President or released without charges, in a show of power.

The Uganda Constitution, like that of South Africa, emphasizes “the supremacy of the constitution and the rule of law”.  The rule of law means that the state can only do what the law allows it to do. Put slightly differently, the state has no power except were granted by law. This aspect of the rule of law is sometimes called the ‘principle of authority’ (Helen Suzman Foundation, 2025).

During the reign of the white supremacists in South Africa, there was a type of abuse of law that the rule of law did not prevent: wicked laws. When an apartheid police officer arrested someone for violating pass laws, he wasn’t acting outside his powers. Apartheid law permitted this. He was also implementing the law in good faith, at least in the sense that it was for a purpose the law was enacted to further – white supremacy. This is why rule-of-law challenges under apartheid were often stillborn.

An abuse of law can be inconsistent with the rule of law. Even if it is not, it might still be unconstitutional. An NGO that constantly has to defend itself against legal harassment is less able to do its work. A public servant that faces a politically motivated prosecution is undermined by stress and fear.

An authoritarian that abuses the law will always have these victories, no matter how often he loses in the courtroom. This is why abuse of law cannot be defeated by lawsuits only. It must also be defeated at the ballot box (HSF, 205). However, in Uganda, this is always impossible. One time the President told Ugandans that a mere piece of paper cannot remove him from power. He was right.

The so-called Independent Electoral Commission is entirely his own making. Besides, every election he has successfully mobilized the army and police to harass and cause adequate fear among the population and alternative leaders, and vote theft, vote stuffing and political buying are integral to the electoral process; so is the abuse of the law with impunity for the sake of winning an election, even when the winning has no real impact on the power equation since the military and militarized police are central to it.

In one article “Apartheid-style governance in Uganda” by Oweyegha-Afunaduula and Mayanja Lawrence (2022) the writers said there are many people -Ugandans and non-Ugandans -who believe that with the capture of the instruments of power by the National Resistance Movement (NRM)/National Resistance Army (NRA) in 1986, an Apartheid-style governance has been taking root in Uganda.

They cited Prof. Amii Omara-Otunnu (2014), who in his pioneering article “Confronting Museveni’s Apartheid Style Regime in Uganda” (www.backstarnews, August 22, 2014), gave some evidence that President Museveni has introduced Apartheid Style Governance in the country. They asserted that In Uganda, these facets of segregation seem to be manifesting and getting intensified supersonically, with the disappearance of the Public State and its replacement by the Deep State unelected people superseded by a small ethnic group of closely related people by kith and kin.

Therefore, there are all indications that President Tibuhaburwa Museveni and his party are determined to undo the citizens of Uganda, particularly the indigenes in terms of democracy, justice and freedom, let alone the perpetuation of their identities and belonging in their ancestral lands. There, people of exogenous origin and related to those in power are grabbing land and dispossessing and displacing the indigenes, thus distorting their futures.

The tile of this article is “Uganda: The Abuse or Threatened Abuse of the Law to Undo the Judiciary”. Historically, the Executive has used the Legislature to change certain articles in the Uganda Constitution either to enhance its power or ensure the retention of power by President President Tibuhaburwa Museveni well in future.

Where the Uganda Constitution set 75 years as the upper limit of age one can seek to be President of Uganda, the President influenced the Legislature to ensure that the Legislature removed it to allow him to stand for re-election beyond 75 years of age. Where the Uganda Constitution set two terms in office for the President of Uganda, the President influenced the Legislature to remove the article that prevented him forum being President for ever.  The Judiciary could do nothing to enforce the Supreme law with regard to the Presidency.

Currently the Judiciary is in conflict or at variance with the Executive because the Supreme Court of Uganda recently ruled that military courts should henceforth stop trying civilians. This did not please President Tibuhaburwa Museveni and his son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba who is his Chief of Defence Forces (CDF).  However, Oweyegha-Afunaduula saw the judicial action of the supreme court as liberation of justice from military fangs (Njoroge Linda, 2025) in his analytical perspective of Uganda’s struggle for constitutional autonomy (Oweyegha-Afunaduula, 2025).

The President said he would cause the Legislature to change the UPDF Act so the Military Courts continue trying civilians.  When he summoned his NRM Parliamentary Caucus he influenced it to agree with him that the UPDF Act should be changed to allow him to use military courts to try civilians.

The CDF said they were shocked that the Justices of the Supreme Court ruled the way they did, depriving the military courts of the power to try civilians and exuded confidence that the highest Command would decide the matter in favour of the military courts continuing to try civilians.

The Military Courts are judicial bodies of the military created according to the military code. They are set up to hear and prosecute failures to obey the Military Code of Conduct including acts by soldiers arising from an act of indiscipline. The offenses tried by the Military courts are called service offenses; these are offenses committed by military personnel while in service in Uganda or abroad.

The army is organized in a very different way from civilian courts and, therefore, the military court system is designed for the enforcement of military discipline. Trials before military courts are public. However, the public may be excluded for reasons of public safety, morals or defense (Justice Centres Uganda 2021). Despite this stipulation in law, President Tibuhaburwa Museveni presided over the conversion of the Military Courts into Courts of Judicature that could try civilians. The majority of those who have found themselves before the military courts have been politicians or supporters of politicians in the opposition.

The Military Court has been successful in depoliticizing and deradicalizing Ugandans to the extent of disabling them in their struggle for meaningful and effective liberation from what many consider as occupation by people of a largely exogenous origin.

What is happening between the Executive and the Judiciary in Uganda could be a case of the manifestation of what Oweyegha- Afunaduula (2022) referred to as presidentialism, the tendency of the President to be at the centre of everything all the time, and to resist any authority to supersede his thinking or choices in anything, and what Oweyegha-Afunaduula (2024) characterized as politics of fear in Uganda from 1986 to 2026 -fear at the top!

The question is, what will Ugandans do if President Tibuhaburwa Museveni, his son Muhoozi Kainerugaba and the Military Command (of which Muhoozi Kainerugaba, President Tibuhaburwa Museveni and his half-brother, Akandwanaho Salim Saleh are the principal members) succeed in returning civilians to the military courts in case the Parliament of Uganda retunes the UPDF Act to serve their desire to have military courts continue trying civilians?

Carmel Rickard (2024) addressed the new challenges to judicial independence in Uganda, Noting the interference of a District Commissioner in Kigezi in court proceedings and President Tibuhaburwa Museveni’s, interference in the process of a court order involving Shaban Mubajje’s Uganda Muslim Supreme Council’s Man Mosque in Kampala, which was threatened with being auctioned by order of court presided over by a Justice.

The President wrote to the Chief Justice. to stay Justice Christopher Gashirabake’s order. He was more or less directing the Chief Justice to stay the order. According to Lawyer Gawaya Tegulle, cited by Carmel Rickard, had this (Uganda) been a progressive, free country, the letter would have been ground sufficient to impeach the president under article 107 of the constitution. One wonders how many cases the President has personally interfered with in favor of those he has a soft spot for!

The latest interference in the judicial decision to stop military courts trying civilians, characterized by the public outbursts of the President and his son, is a continuation of the tendency of the Executive to influence the judiciary.

However, the President has chosen what he habitually does: using his NRM Parliamentary Caucus to change the UPDF Act to reverse the judicial order that the military stops trying civilians and that all cases of civilians under the military court be turned over to civilian courts. In effect the President and his son are determined to see that this does not happen by using both the Parliament and the Military High Command. Although they stress security it is also true that the military court has emerged as a major political weapon in Musevenian politics of the 21st Century to sustain fear and contain the Opposition.

It is true that Parliament has the right to reverse judicial decisions, but government in general and the President and his son in particular must be careful not to undermine the important role the courts play as a check on and balance of power. When this is not the case then it is the end of constitutionalism (i.e., a system of government that is based on a working constitution) and constitutionality (i.e., the state of acting in accordance with a constitution) in Uganda.

Retuning an article of a constitution or the whole constitution to serve the personal interests of a leader rather than the public interest cannot be said to be constitutionalism or constitutionality. It is concealed use of military decrees enshrined in the constitution. Idi Amin did not pretend to be democratic or guided by the constitution. He ruled by outright military decree to keep his military dictatorship from 1971 to 1979. However, under Musevenism, many Ugandans will not know that the country is under military dictatorship because of naked constitutional and democratic pretense.

Constitutional pretense is when a government uses constitutional values or rights to hide or misdirect attention from their actions. Governments may use constitutional pretense to mask the true nature of their actions. This can include using constitutional rights or values to disguise their actions.

The rulers do not only use constitutional pretense but also constitutional parasitism and camouflage to shape citizenship by subterfuge (Farrah Ahmed 2023).  In law Subterfuge means using a clever plan or idea to escape, avoid, or hide something. For example, someone might use a subterfuge to avoid getting in trouble for breaking a rule or law.  What President Tibuhaburwa Museveni is trying to do to avoid the court order on military courts is subterfuge. It is trickery, unfortunately.

Democratic Pretense, is so common and according to Mohammad Shakir Raza Rizvi (2025) it undermines democratic progress. Mohammad Shakir Raza Rizvi (2025) writes that some coups need to make clear that democracy is over in order to succeed; and some coups need to pretend that democracy is still intact. This is what the NRM has done since 1986. The democratic pretense has undermined not only democratic development but also political development and political literacy in the country.

Constitutionalism and Constitutionality are necessary for healthy constitutional development, and democratic development, free of constitutional pretense and democratic pretense.

For God and My Country

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