Tuesday's re-introduction of the Public Order Management Bill heralds the crowning moment of a perverse wish to totally police life in Uganda. And as if to spite human rights defenders, the Bill arrived hardly a month after this government pledged to meet its obligations during the UN's Universal Periodic Review on human rights.
It is a proposed law whose constitutionality was successfully challenged in its previous form because it was prohibitive and could not be defended as a justifiable limitation on the people's rights in what purports to be democracy. That it has been smuggled back would indicate that the hardline fringe in government has triumphed over reason and good judgement.
The fringe elements have progressively lost sight of what is just and right, believing instead in the temporal seduction of force. The unconstitutional restrictions on political activity and expression are now to be proscribed both in dubious law and through the indiscriminate deployment of the coercive elements of the State.
Irrespective of the harsh lessons so eloquently re-told in the violent end of the butcher of Tripoli, it appears that Uganda hurtles towards a brutal totalitarian order. An order where to claim one's constitutional rights and freedom to hold an alternative opinion, of speech and assembly condemns one to a fate that begins with trumped-up charges of treason.
An uncertain future where Ugandans' inherent freedoms and rights to justice as a free-born people looms and must be opposed. Gaddafi met his bloody end because he thought that he could forever unleash the vicious police apparatus against a nation straining to taste the liberating freshness of democratic order.
Ironically, history is replete with proof that tyranny is just a passing, though terrible phase. The only truly enduring form of government is one where opposite views are allowed to freely contend in an unencumbered democracy, human rights are respected and the rule of law is the order of the day.