The trial of Professor Nyanzi

AIMING to shut her down over her biting criticisms of the conduct of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and his wife, Janet Kataaha Museveni, the president has ordered the arrest and prosecution of Makerere University medical epidemiologist and women’s rights activist, Dr. Stella Nyanzi. For comparing President Museveni with a pair of buttocks, presumably incapable of anything other than bodily expulsion, she has been charged under a barely known colonial era Mental Treatment Act of 1938. If convicted under this statute, Dr. Nyanzi can be subjected to mental examination and committed to a psychiatric institution.

In the meantime, following the adjournment of her case by Chief Magistrate James Eremye Mawanda, she will be remanded in Kampala’s Luzira prison until May 10 2017. Her bail application before Justice Elizabeth Kabanda is awaiting hearing, but her supporters, aware too well of the government’s capacity to manipulate the legal process, are not lighting a candle.  One does not have to be a legal expert to realise that this is another example of a witch-hunt by a Museveni regime that has shown no restraint whatsoever in clamping down on the opposition and generally making life miserable for those who dare to espouse a future for Uganda that has no place for Mr. Museveni and his wife, popularly known as “Mama Janet.”

For instance, and in a story typical of the fate that has befallen critics of President Museveni, opposition leader Kizza Besigye has been arrested and detained on numerous occasions. When he tried to run for the presidency in February 2016, he was put under house arrest and later charged with treason. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Museveni, now 72, claimed victory and was sworn in as president for a record fifth term. He has been in the saddle since January 1986.

Mr. Museveni has brought the same playbook of persistent intimidation to the trial of Mrs. Nyanzi, whose sole crime is that she has refused to keep silent about the untoward state of affairs in Uganda. For instance, she has been voluble about the plight of young girls who are forced to miss school repeatedly because their parents cannot afford sanitary pads. She wrote: “What sort of mother allows her daughters to keep away from school because they are too poor to afford padding materials that would adequately protect them from the shame and ridicule that comes by staining their uniforms?” She then followed up with a dig clearly aimed at the wife of the Ugandan president: “What malice plays in the heart of a woman who sleeps with a man who finds money for millions of bullets, billions of bribes, and uncountable ballots to stuff into boxes but she cannot ask him to prioritise sanitary pads for poor schoolgirls?”

Cautioned as to the personal risk she is taking by taking on the mighty Ugandan state under a president who has no scruples about locking people up and throwing away the key, she retorted: “The only way I will stop is if women stop bleeding. Who should not be scared in this country? We should all be scared because we might go to the hospital and find no drugs. Or we could be butchered at our doorstep any time.”

Using an ostensibly simple matter of poor young girls and the unaffordability of sanitary pads as a point of departure, Dr. Nyanzi, a single mother of three young children, has let a shaft of light into the dark state of affairs in Uganda. We salute her courage and applaud her efforts—undertaken at risk to life and limb—to make the Ugandan state accountable to the ordinary people of Uganda. By focusing on the plight of young girls in rural areas of the country, she has, with quiet tenacity, exposed the untold desperation that has been the lot of the average Ugandan under the malevolent rule of President Museveni. Whether or not the president and his wife agree with Dr. Nyanzi on whose responsibility it is to buy sanitary pads for young girls, that this is currently an issue in Uganda is a direct indictment of the thirty-one year rule of Mr. Museveni.

Responding to Nyanzi’s arrest and prosecution, Amnesty International said in a statement: “Public officials should tolerate more criticism than private individuals. Laws that have the intention or effect of prohibiting insulting the Head of State or public officials are disproportionate, unnecessary and have a chilling effect on freedom of expression.”

We identify with the sentiment behind this statement and urge the authorities in Uganda to free Dr. Nyanzi immediately. Every day she spends in detention on these bogus charges is a violation of her right to free movement.