Mityana Municipality MP, Francis Zaake has once again allegedly courted trouble at parliament after “hijacking “ a microphone but also refusing to listen to orders of the Deputy Speaker, Thomas Tayebwa.
On Tuesday, during plenary, the youthful lawmaker raised a procedural matter of the continued abduction of members of the public, especially opposition National Unity Platform(NUP) supporters by security agencies that he said the August house has not given attention.
He said that under rule 85 of rules of procedure it requires “us as MPs to base our conduct in full consideration of the public interest.”
“The abduction of citizens especially here in central region has reached crisis levels. The victims are mostly supporters of opposition. Only this month alone, hundreds of youths have been abducted and disappeared, not seen or heard of, ” Zaake said on Tuesday.
While Zaake presented his matter to the August House, deputy speaker, Tayebwa interjected and informed him the matter was not among those that had been scheduled to be discussed on the day.
However, the pleas by the dputy speaker fell on deaf ears as Zaake insisted on putting across his message
This prompted the deputy speaker to suspend the sitting for a few minutes as he sought audience from the Leader of Opposition, John Baptist Nambeshe on the matter.
Later, when the sitting resumed, the Leader of Opposition apologized for the mishap but noted as opposition legislators, they are concerned about the massive abductions many of which are unaccounted for.
Disciplinary action
Following the standoff, the Mityana Municipality legislator was referred by the deputy speaker to the Committee on rules for disciplinary action in accordance with rule 175 of the rules of procedure.
“If you ( Zaake) want to do drama, go and do it in your constituency, you can’t do it on this floor. If you want pictures of people holding you up and how you were arrested to use during campaigns, we can organise for you, we are near national theatre,” the furious Tayebwa said.
Commenting about the incident, Zaake said he will continue fighting for rights of Ugandans.
“Judge and criticize me if you wish but history will remember that I turned up whenever the occasion demanded. The abduction, disappearance and extra judicial killing of hundreds of our people is too grave a matter of public interest for us to continue treating it lightly,”he tweeted.
This is the third time Zaake is referred to parliament’s rules committee.
Earlier, he was referred to the committee for confronting Makerere University Vice Chancellor, Prof.Barnabas Nawangwe who was appearing before parliament.
Zaake accused the Vice Chancellor of unfairly dismissing and suspending students at the university.
Recently the legislator was accused of misconduct over his social media posts that were deemed to be aimed at attacking Speaker Anita Among.
This saw him scrapped of his position as a commissioner of parliament.
He has since dragged parliament to court over the matter.
Abductions
Zaake’s actions come on the backdrop of continued abduction of several opposition supporters, especially for National Unity Platform.
NUP recently said over 20 of their supporters including the party president, Robert Kyagulanyi, also known as Bobi Wine’s bodyguard, Jamshid Kavuma who went missing on November 5.
The opposition political party accuses security agencies of orchestrating the abductions using Toyota Hiace vehicles commonly known as drones.
