Opposition Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) has welcomed the recommendations made by the Judiciary while issuing the final judgment of the presidential election petition which was delivered on Friday last week.
The party spokesperson, Ibrahim Semujju Nganda told the media on Monday that the party welcomes all the recommendations especially regarding handling and consideration of electoral reforms by Parliament.
The judgment proposes that an amendment to the electoral law be made within at least two years before campaigns for general elections start.
“We welcome that recommendation and since it has come from the Supreme Court, our prayer is that government will take it serious because none of the judges is a contestant. If it was a proposal from FDC, they would say that we wanted to advantage ourselves,” Semujju said.
He noted that, “If you look at the last elections for example, Parliament revised an amendment nomination fees both for Parliamentary and Presidential yet some of the presidential candidates had already paid the Ugshs 8m under the old Act.”
Semujju said that for Parliamentary elections, nominations fee was raised from Ugshs 200,000 to Ugshs 3m when the nomination process had already started.
“For an individual candidate, this might not be very big but it had an effect on a political organization which already had a budget like FDC. We ended up spending nearly a billion on paying nomination fees for Parliamentary candidates and yet not fielding candidates in some electoral areas,” Semujju noted.
“We also welcome other proposals. We are working on proposals many of which were submitted to Parliament much earlier with the civil society under the Citizens Compact; we will be able to consolidate them into bills this time and present them before Parliament.”
“Our only view as a party is that when you are amending the constitution, you need to build consensus of all the necessary changes to the Constitution comprehensively, you don’t go and isolate only one area of your interest as if the rest of the country isn’t interested.”