Movement in Own Trap - UPC
The Monitor (Kampala)August 7, 2003
Posted to the web August 7, 2003 Mwanguhya Charles Mpagi and Hallima Abdallah
Kampala
The Uganda People's Congress has said that the current problems within the Movement do not constitute a national or constitutional crisis.
Mr Peter Walubiri, the UPC lawyer and party's policy commission member, said yesterday that the Movement has fallen into its own trap, which it had blindly hoped to use against political parties.
"The authors of the 1995 Constitution built a trap by creating into the Constitution something called the Movement system well knowing that it was not a system but a party," Walubiri said while addressing UPC's weekly media conference at Uganda House.
He was reacting to questions on the ongoing moves by the government to amend the Movement Act to allow current office bearers (whose term expired in July) stay in office until 2005.
Parliament has rejected the amendments presented by the Minister of Constitutional Affairs, Ms Janat Mukwaya.The Movement, which has ruled the country since 1986, has been pursuing plans to transform itself into a political organisation to compete in a pluralist environment as the National Resistance Movement Organisation (NRM-O)."
The Constitutional Court did us proud by declaring that the Movement organs were organs of a party [and] from that day the NRM ought to have respected the Constitution," he said.
Efforts to register the Movement as a political organisation are reported to have hit a snag with the registrar general questioning the legality of using NRM as the name of the new political entity.
