The NGO Registration (Amendment) Act 2006 amended the 1989 Statute (CAP 113 of the Laws of Uganda). It is under this law and the Companies Act that NGOs have been registered. While it is considered a retrogress law, NGOs have thrived under the NRM administration, if numbers are anything to go by. (It is estimated that the number grew from a handful in the 1980s to over 6,500 currently.
The 1989 law was enacted only three years after the NRM came into power through a protracted struggle and therefore, unsurprisingly, the law has a security ring about it. The recently enacted law comes exactly 20 years after the NRM came into power and it was expected that it would set a different tone from the law of 1989 because the times have changed, for the better. We thought that we are in the era of ‘cooperation’, ‘participation’, inclusiveness; the law was debated by a democratically elected Parliament as compared to the National Resistance Council. NGOs made numerous submissions to the Parliamentary Committee on Defense and Internal Affairs, who seemed to appreciate their views. However the law as it now stands suggests that all the submissions by NGOs and some of the donors went unheeded or were summarily dismissed. And if applied to the letter, the law will have significant adverse implications on the role of NGOs in promoting respect for human rights and democratic governance. Indeed, it would seem that it is such NGOs as those that challenge Government on human rights that will be likely to fall as the early victims of some of the provisions of that law, particularly at the hands of over-zealous government operatives.