Uganda’s top judge ‘regrets removing president term limit’

Uganda’s chief justice has said he bitterly regrets the removal of presidential term limits from the country’s constitution, according to the Daily Monitor newspaper.

Justice Alfonse Owiny-Dollo is quoted as saying the body he was part of made a mistake:

“I wept for this country [over] the removal of the presidential term limits. That is where we lost it. The mistake we made in the Constituent Assembly was not to entrench, not to make it difficult for anyone to amend the provisions of the term limits.”

Separately, the issue of presidential age limits is controversial because long-standing President Yoweri Museveni is 76 years old, and the limit for re-election was previously capped at 75 until the ruling party successfully campaigned to remove it all together.

Uganda’s constitution allows the amendment and removal of the presidential age limit without a referendum – something Justice Owiny-Dollo appeared to imply is unfair in his interview with the Daily Monitor:

“That one, I take responsibility and anybody else who was in the Constituent Assembly; that we should have secured, entrenched that provision so that if you want to amend that particular article, you would go back to the people. We failed the people of Uganda as a consequence.”