The police have confirmed that they have impounded over 6,000 motorbikes belonging to errant boda-boda riders across the country.
Traffic police are currently conducting operations to crackdown on riders operating without a driving permit, PSV insurance, third-party insurance, helmet, and reflector jacket.
But as usual, without much sense of shame and drunk with bad political ideologies, the leader of the National Unity Platform, Robert Kyagulanyi, aka Bobi Wine, has once again roared in total disagreement with this operation.
Based on his defiant method of work that opposes everything, whether good or bad, by the NRM regime, Kyagulanyi has incited hooligans and vowed to mobilise NUP-intolerant gangsters against this operation through either waging a direct attack on traffic personnel or staging an illegal demonstration, I wish him well.
To him, the operation to enforce established traffic laws is a move by the police and government to make boda-boda riders poor, what desperate politicking!!!
“After all, the regime’s true intention is to ban boda-boda riders from the city because most of the riders are our (NUP) supporters. The underlying motives of this operation are to make those who support us poor….”Wine tweeted.
Could Bobi Wine be behind the recent attacks on our police in Luwero? Is he celebrating the lives of many people lost in various boda-boda accidents, or is he just ignorant about traffic laws in Uganda? These are some of the unanswered questions in my mind.
In October 2022 alone, police confirmed that 257 lives were lost, mostly in boda-boda crashes across the country.
On February 24th, 2020, around 1pm, a NUP supporter named Ritah Nabukenya, a 28-year-old female adult from Bunamwaya, Rubaga Division, died at Mulago National Referral Hospital from head injuries sustained in a severe boda-boda accident behind Nakawa Market.She was rushing to participate in her party activities in town, but Kyagulanyi seems to have forgotten this too.
As a constitutional lawyer and a businessman in Kampala, I find this outrageous and grounded in political desperation to mislead the boda-boda community to oppose a good cause.
Wine needs to differentiate between lawlessness and wealth creation because the latter can only be realized if the former is checked.
Lawlessness threatens the survival of every society, and of course, that of mankind. That’s why we have regulations that govern us in society.
Similarly, the traffic and road safety laws were enacted in a bid to bring sanity to the roads by protecting road users against errant motorists. Traffic laws are uniform in nature; they protect and regulate both the poor and the rich, irrespective of one’s political affiliation.
The police’s traffic operation should not be politicised but rather supported in order to save Ugandans from the road carnage caused by errant driving.
The author is a Constitutional Lawyer,Dr Peter Kiyambi Ndombolo (PhD) and the Executive Director of Wan-Uganda International Research Centre based in Kampala.
