Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said Monday he regretted stopping executions in his “pre-industrial” country, just days after his vow to resume death sentences alarmed rights groups. Museveni last signed a death warrant in 1999 to execute 28 convicts, while execution under military law was last carried out in 2002. “I saw some NGOs opposing the death sentence. In a pre-industrial society like ours removing death sentence is a recipe for chaos. We believe in the law of Moses; an eye for an eye”, Museveni told the annual judges conference in Kampala according to his senior press secretary, Don Wanyama.
“I have been making the mistake of not sanctioning these death sentences, I am repenting,” said Museveni. “As you are aspiring for best international practices, you must be aware that societies like the United Kingdom went through the industrial revolution 200 years ago. Here in Uganda and Africa, we are dealing with pre-industrial societies,” Museveni told the judges.
On Friday, during the passing out of prison wardens in Kampala, Museveni said: “Criminals think they have a right to kill people and keep their heads … I am going to revise a bit and hang a few.”
According to prisons service spokesman, Frank Mbaine, over 250 convicts are on death row in Uganda. Amnesty International said Museveni’s threat to resume executions was “misguided since there is no credible evidence that the death penalty is a deterrent to crime”. The rights watchdog said that Museveni should instead lead Uganda to fully abolish the death penalty like 19 other African countries have done.
“Uganda’s refusal to carry out executions in recent years has been a credit to president Museveni, but resuming them now would destroy more than a decade of progress, not to mention buck the global trend towards abolition”.
Museveni, 73, has been in power for three decades, and could potentially seek a sixth term in office in 2021 if a bill to remove presidential age limits is passed: https://www.modernghana.com/news/830202/ugandas-Museveni-regrets-halting-death-penalty.html
Good move mister President. Your first job is to protect your people from killers. The idea that capital punishment is not a deterrent is stupid and deceptive.
No one who has ever been given the death penalty has ever returned to kill. Those opposed to the death penalty have no data to support the negative. They cannot show how many people who normally would have killed, did not because they knew they will be killed in turn.
What we do know is that we see the upward trend of violent crimes in countries where there is no death penalty. It’s time for that lie to be shredded and exposed.
This writer has long argued that the nations who have reached Industrialized status did not do so by ignoring the criminals in their midst. In fact Canada Britain, most of western Europe and the United States have had very strict laws and policies in place which got them to where they are today.
Now that they have fixed their societies they are able to finesse the broader issues of rights because they have established their justice systems, established effective law enforcement structures and established appropriate legislative frameworks which interdict, indicts and incarcerate felons and keep them in jail where they belong.
All of these infrastructural frameworks did not occur overnight they happened after decisive actions have been taken by their security services to clear out those who would destroy life and property.
It is instructive to recognize that in none of these countries does Amnesty International or any other so-called rights lobby get to tell western democracies how to run their countries.
Neither have they bothered with the incidents of human rights abuses in powerful western nations.
So we are left to contend with the glaring facts, poor countries with people of color are best kept in the status quo of crime and poverty which results in more crime and poverty so that they may continue being slaves to the rich lenders in the powerful industrial nations which just happen to be largely white-dominated nations.
Small nations leaders like those in Jamaica can continue on their path to failed state status by pretending Jamaica has arrived while hiding behind grill fortifications.
We will see how long those grill fortifications will hold.
Amnesty international is one of the most despicable organization in the world and a threat to other countries advancement.
In the countries where these organizations have no airtime or publicity those countries are doing quite fine: China.
White people are inherently unconscionable and depraved minded people. Why would any decent black leaders listen to them when they have been their enemies from the very day our ancestors laid eyes on them!
Black people want to believe that the whites have their interest at heart and that’s the furthest thing from the truth!