The Civil Society Organisations in Uganda have condemned the Police brutality against Kyadondo East MP Robert Kyagulanyi alias Bobi Wine and his pressure group who were blocked from conducting their first consultative meeting in Gayaza in Wakiso district.
Police accused People Power for not fulfilling some of the requirements in the public order management act.
While addressing the media in Kampala, Henry Muguzi from the Alliance for finance monitoring explained that; “The police, from what we have seen, it has become a tool for serving the interest of the regime.”
He noted that it is so embarrassing to see police violating human rights calling upon Ugandans to identify individual officers to be prosecuted in the courts of law.
“As civil society, we call upon people to document individual police officers violating their rights,” he said.
Richard Ssewakiryanga, the Executive Director of the Uganda National NGO forum also said that parliament should consider addressing the issue of electoral reforms with immediate effect.
“The absence of the meaningful electoral reforms continue to make the citizen’s participation in elections meaningless. We are entering the last year of ruling party’s 5-year term in office, the constitution and the electoral reforms necessary to secure the conducive democratic environment for citizen have not been enacted,” he said.
Charity Ahimbisibwe from the Citizen’s Coalition for Electoral Democracy said they will not only engage parliament about this but also other stake holders will be involved in the electoral process.
“We are going to dialogue with institutions like Electoral Commission, Police, Uganda Communication Commission because many journalists have been arrested in their day to day work. We need democracy,” she said.
Civil society organizations also tasked government to address the problem of land grabbing, poor implementation of environmental policy measures and economic growth that is not having a positive impact at the household level.
They said that if these issues are not solved with immediate effect, they could lead to chaos in the country.
