Prime
Eleventh Parliament starts afresh without a technical Speaker
Author: Mr Karoli Ssemogerere is an Attorney-at-Law and an Advocate.
What you need to know:
- In the five decades on earth, he lived under all Uganda’s presidents from first to last from Sir Edward Muteesa II to the incumbent Yoweri Museveni.
In July 2021, after an evening tea at the lodge, I wondered aloud to my guest, one of his closest friends and companions whether Speaker Jacob Oulanyah was warming up to his chair. His answer was bland, he had ascended to the position of Speaker when he was no longer much interested in the job. In short he had over waited.
This casual conversation perhaps was a harbinger of the short career that ended several days ago in a Seattle medical facility. The Speaker of Parliament, after a highly contested election where he bested his former boss Rebecca Kadaga in May 2021, was no more.
Jacob Oulanyah has lived a relatively short life, just 56-years-old when he breathed his last. In the five decades on earth, he lived under all Uganda’s presidents from first to last from Sir Edward Muteesa II to the incumbent Yoweri Museveni. That on its own is an illustration of how young our country is. Even though the people living inside its borders started around 200-300 AD in small villages in the thick forests surrounding Lake Victoria.
The famous Bachwezi and the Chwezi Empire did not take shape until centuries later. This empire then waged wars of conquest in the interlacustrine region. The Luo started settling on the banks of River Nile after 1600. And the modern kingdom of Buganda the eponym of Uganda only took final shape in a dramatic 150 years from 1750 to 1900 when three colonial chiefs signed away their sovereignty to the British exchanging traditional authority for symbolic power and formal offices.
These agreements repeated in Bunyoro, Ankole and Tooro also formalised the “spoils” system that replaced the vassal existence of scores of chiefdoms in the lake region.
So in the context of a young country like Uganda, the death of a key official of the republic is a major event. In any case no such death has been recorded of a very senior official in office since independence. How the country absorbs such an event in its 60th year of independence has assumed another urgency, a human aspect.
I felt sorry for our Chief Justice Alphonse Owiny-Dollo, a key figure in the last years of the northern insurgency as Minister for Pacification of the North in a flash of anger directed his frustration at a small group of demonstrators who gathered outside the Fred Hutchins medical facility in Seattle [it appears at least one or more of their staff were Ugandan] by directing remarks at the Kabaka.
Fortunately, the Chief Justice has apologised. His wife a High Court Judge, Florence Nakachwa, is a draftsman like the late Speaker and probably advised him to break protocol to refer to the Kabaka for the first time as “His Majesty” rather than the “His Highness” favoured by the President.
Oulanyah will be missed greatly as a draftsman. He taught legislative drafting at the Law Development Centre Bar course as a young lawyer. Earlier in the 6th Parliament he along with Maj Gen Gregory Mugisha Muntu pushed an amendment that brought presidential and parliamentary elections on the same day. Although at the end of the same Parliament he chaired the Legal Committee of Parliament that put in motion a return to multi-party politics but also deleted presidential term limits from the Constitution.
The same legal committee scrutinising the 2001 elections led to the disbandment of the Aziz Kasujja Electoral Commission and its replacement headed by Eng Badru Kiggundu. Many innocent staffers of the Electoral Commission took responsibility for what now passes as “minor shortcomings” that don’t substantially affect the outcome of the election.
Three Chief Justices including Owiny-Dollo have led Supreme Court corams faced with the same quandary.
READ: Oulanyah’s death triggers real and crocodile tears
Parliament and the country will miss him and possibly miss his skills at making legislation and guiding this process from the Chair. He may have been another James Francis Wambogo Wapakhabulo who too died in his prime before age 60 in 2004.
May His Soul Rest in Eternal Peace.
Mr Ssemogerere is an Attorney-At-Law and an Advocate. [email protected]
