President Museveni routinely albeit illegally goes out to campaign for NRM parliamentary candidates in general and by-elections.

On one such occasion in Masaka, the President urged voters not to mind quality representation in Parliament. All he wanted, he said, were MPs who slept all the time (too dense to follow in Parliament) but woke up in time to do his bidding.

Occasionally, some voters defy the President in which case the Electoral Commission (EC) swings into action and votes for the rebellious voters, in various ways as Ssemujju Ibrahim Nganda has been able to demonstrate in his well researched articles in The Weekly Observer newspaper. This process produces MPs who are routinely and condescendingly summoned to State House to be told to reject a report they have not read and to support another one which they will not have read either.

In a rather cynical, if cruel way, the President keeps a lien over these people's brains and personalities after he has spent public resources on their "election". It should cause pain to feel that you enjoy all the privileges of an MP in return for not using your brains because the deal requires you to play the clown.

One way in which MPs are turned into jesters is through the badly abused parliamentary whip system. The system aims to ensure attendance and voting on important party policy issues. But it was brazen abuse of office to bring the Temangalo scandal within the whip system. It was an investigation of alleged wrong-doing by individuals. Was it party policy for NSSF to buy the Temangalo jungle, and so irregularly?

The snowball effect of the President's unjustified involvement in Parliamentary elections is the systematic and now irreversible institutional self-destruction.

The Attorney General referred to in Article 119 of the Constitution is Principal Legal Advisor to Government, meaning the Executive arm. He is not the Advisor to Parliament and the Judiciary, the other two arms of the State. He is by Constitution a cabinet Minister.

By submitting to the authority of the Attorney General to be its Principal Legal Advisor, Parliament meant that even the Judiciary must submit to the same authority. By that logic we should soon hear the Chief Justice announce that courts should seek the guidance of the Attorney General before they make their decisions. That absurdity is within reach. The institution is hanging on a kind of unsustainable bravado that will give way soon.

When the President in visible rage attacked the Judiciary following the Constitutional Court ruling that the Movement system had never come legally and to be having been created by a law that never was, the message sank.

In fear, Supreme Court judges made an indeterminate ruling overturning the Constitutional Court judgment. No one seems to know what they in effect said. I doubt they themselves know.

To be or not to be judges is the question, but my salutary experience is sufficiently foreboding. After the 2006 grand election fraud, the EC, true to itself, gave my seat which I decisively won to someone else. The Kalungu West results have never been declared, but someone was stealthily gazetted as the winner. And all the judges involved in the conspiracy know this fact. I went to court. If the "winner" were not a statutory respondent, I would not have bothered to join him because the whole fraud was perpetrated mainly by the EC.

Mbarara Resident Judge was immediately transferred to Masaka to hear my petition and another one that had been brought against Speaker Edward Ssekandi. Masaka Resident Judge, Kibuuka Musoke was sent elsewhere. Judgment in my case was scheduled for a Friday in September, 2006. On Thursday we received a call from Masaka Court informing us that judgment would not be delivered the following day. The judge spent the following week in Kampala.

After a week we were invited to receive judgment. I went on Thursday afternoon to spend the night at my local home. Late evening, I drove to Kalungu trading centre where I shared an evening with some of my campaigners. As we sat and shared drinks, some 'Movementists' came to where we were and informed me that there was celebration in "the other camp" because they had been informed that they had won the petition. They claimed that the judge had been summoned to Kampala and instructed to dismiss my petition. They divulged names of high-ranking individuals they claimed had talked to the judge.

I told them I had not heard anything like that and that I would go to court to receive judgment. Early in the morning, at Masaka Court, I met Dr. Paul K. Ssemogerere who had traveled from Kampala to hear the judgment. Before we entered court we were confronted by journalists who told us they were sorry to hear that my petition had been dismissed on orders from somewhere. I told them judgment was yet to be delivered. We entered the courtroom, and the judge delivered his judgment. I was shocked. It was a scurrilous attack on me personally. It did not require a trained lawyer to realise that the judge was not discussing the evidence he had heard. He simply raided my personality.

When I decided to appeal, I had learnt on very good authority that I would not get justice. I was aware I was being targeted personally. I decided to go on nevertheless, just to put the entire Judiciary on record, not only for posterity, but also for a book I hope to publish soon on judicial conspiracy.

I applied for the record of proceedings for the purpose of appeal. It was subtly denied. As days in which to file the record of appeal began to run out, I informally obtained an unsigned copy of the "judgment". I wrote to the Chief Justice asking him to give directions on the matter under Rule 94 of the Court of Appeal Rules. I also filed a Notice of Motion in the Court of Appeal for extension of appeal time. The CJ did not reply, but a few days to the deadline, I received the record, too late to peruse it. I had no alternative but to let my counsel sign a Certificate of Correctness of Record even when it was quite clear that the record was grossly inaccurate, not least the judgment which was materially different from what had been read in open court. The rest will be in my book.

I have since received a clearly contrived bill of costs to the tune of Shs 598,000,000, easily the first of its kind in East Africa. We are going through a perfunctory taxation exercise.

I should end with an unrelated question. Why would a judge at 75 be too old to sit on the Supreme Court of Uganda but be considered fit to serve on a supra-national court to which Uganda is a signatory?

John B. Kakooza, The author is a lawyer and former Corporation Secretary of the NSSF.