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Is Uganda Police Force captive?
Moses Khisa
One of the ardent readers of this column, Samuel, wrote early in the week asking if the Uganda Police Force is fully captured. What exactly did he mean? I return to this question in a moment.
I need to restate one critical fact. The police force, in any country that has pretentions to being democratic and rule-governed, is easily the most important agency of the State. Law and order, the remit of the police, is an everyday activity.
To maintain order, ensure that laws are followed and enforced, there has to be in place the requisite human and financial resources, the apparatus and systems to execute that mandate.
The police are the foremost institution in the justice, law and order sector. It is essential and indispensable. Other agencies and actors like courts and prosecutors may take a break or go on strike. Police officers cannot break off at once and police offices cannot close, not even for a day.
In fact, it is now standard practice that officers of the Uganda police are not granted leave during Christmas holiday, the time when everybody else whether in public or private sectors is off from work.
A few years ago, in the final days of his gripping hold on the Force, the former Inspector General of Police, Gen Kale Kayihura, a highly partisan officer who did enormous damage to the institution of the police, pulled off a stunt: He ordered the men and women in white, the traffic officers, to withdraw from Kampala roads one afternoon. What followed was the worst traffic lockdown in Kampala.
Anyone who was in Kampala that evening appreciated just how much the traffic police do to reign in errant motorists and maintain some semblance of order on our deeply messy roads.
I say this despite their overzealousness and the knack to disregard traffic signals even when it is unnecessary, which sometimes adds to the mess and confusion. Now, this was just the traffic police withdrawn, and for a few hours and only in and around Kampala. But imagine if all police officers deposited their weapons, uniforms and all their work tools and went totally off duty. Just for a few hours or utmost a day.
One way or the other, the police serve all of us members of the public without exception, or at a minimum, their work touches on our lives and wellbeing in some ways, and on a daily basis. Given that the institution of the police plays such a crucial everyday duty of law enforcement, maintain order, providing protection and promoting justice, for the police to be efficient and effective in serving the public, it must have the best human and financial resources at its disposal.
Yet, on the contrary, under the current regime, for long, the Force tottered under gross underfunding and was considered the go-to-place for anyone looking for a last choice option for a career.
It was not until the 2000s, specifically with the appointment of Gen Kayihura as IGP in 2005, that the police underwent a dramatic turnaround with exponential flows of finances from government, the upping of recruitment of university graduates into the Force and an aggressive agenda of training, promotions and operational expansion.
Ordinarily, this was a very positive development. In practice, it was little more than a nefarious scheme to capture the police, place it firmly under the control of regime agents and partisans, and completely turn it into a tool for regime protection, away from being a professional and competent Force that impartially serves the public.
Even with the unprecedented growth in its official budget and the recruitment of better-educated officers, the Uganda Police Force for the most part remains institutionally deficient, fraught with nepotism and malfeasance.
Worse, it has been politically appropriated to serve the narrow interests of the rulers, part of a larger institutional decay, at the behest of a group that militarily captured power to rule and not lead, to pursue personal enrichment and not societal transformation.
Kayihura over-performed for his master, but got thrown under the bus, for whatever sins he may have committed against the chief, but he engineered a thoroughgoing capture of the police.
Now it does not matter who is the Inspector General of Police. What is important is that it is now an established norm to have military officers, on a mission to perpetuate the use of the police as a tool for regime protection and a conduit for channelling classified expenditure toward political activities.
Khisa is assistant professor at North Carolina State University (USA).
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