Uganda: Democracy

Alex Sobel Excerpts

Tuesday 8th January 2019 Westminster Hall

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McDonagh. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton South (Dr Williams), who made a powerful and eloquent speech. His long association with Uganda puts him in a position to be an authoritative advocate for human rights and democracy there, and I thank him for bringing this debate to the Chamber.

The Ugandan people have long suffered from tyrants who have committed crimes against their own people. The name Idi Amin will live long in infamy. The rule of Milton Obote was also mired in human rights abuses, with Amnesty International estimating that the regime had been responsible for more than 300,000 civilian deaths across Uganda. After Obote, Museveni became President in 1986. He said in his acceptance speech:

“The people of Africa, the people of Uganda, are entitled to a democratic government. It is not a favour from any regime. The sovereign people must be the public, not the government.”

Those are his own words—words that he should heed now.

President Museveni’s tenure has always been problematic, but his attempts to constrain democracy have been creeping. First came the repealing of the two-term limit on the presidency, which was introduced in 1995 under his own presidency. The lifting of the term limit led Bob Geldof to say:

“Get a grip Museveni. Your time is up, go away”—

not untypical of Bob Geldof, we might think. The arrest of the main opposition leader Kizza Besigye, as my hon. Friend mentioned, in the lead-up to the third presidential election was another stain on an election that Museveni should not have been contesting. In December 2017 he succeeded in getting the presidential age limit of 75 removed, just as he was approaching that age himself. The hallmark of a dictator is stripping away the impediments to his becoming leader for life, and that is exactly what Museveni has done.

In 2017, shortly after I was elected, I had the pleasure of being invited to a meeting of Ugandan exiles in the UK who support the main opposition party, Forum for Democratic Change. I was invited by my old friend Jimmy Sydney, who is here today and who became a social entrepreneur in Leeds after leaving Uganda. At that event I met Nandala Mafabi and through him found out about the conditions under which Ugandan MPs have to function. Nandala told me how the Parliament had been entered by Government troops, who had arrested MPs opposed to the life presidency; their symbol of a red hat and ribbon made it easier for the troops to spot them. I sat there imagining that happening to us here, today—troops coming in and stopping us having this debate because the Government did not like what we had to say. I found it unbelievable. It still is unbelievable to me that that could have happened in a country that calls itself a democracy and that MPs could be arrested in Parliament for exercising their democratic rights. This is surely a sign that democracy has died.

Just a couple of weeks after that event, I heard that Nandala had been arrested and spent two nights in the cells. His alleged crime was that he was part of a group of protestors demonstrating against the proposed amendment of the constitution to remove the presidential age limit. That is just the story of one MP; my hon. Friend told the stories of other MPs and the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) told that of yet another.

We must heed the words of the Ugandan community in the UK. Will the Minister commit to meeting their requests? I echo the requests made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton South for the Government to place targeted sanctions on Uganda, including on military materials; to freeze assets of Ugandan officials known for violations of human rights and abuses of power; to enforce a travel ban on Ugandan leaders known for corruption and violations of human rights; to condemn in the strongest terms the attacks and abuse of Ugandan parliamentarians and all activists, whether in or outside Uganda, including in this country, and to apply conditionality to aid to the Ugandan Government.