The 25th Annual Report on the State of Human Rights And Freedoms In Uganda In 2022 has exposed how top clerics sexually abuse, extort and impoverish their believers.

The 25th Human Rights Annual Report for the year 2022 was compiled by Uganda Human Rights Commission and was publicly launched on Friday 19th May, 2023.

The report defines Religion as a human relation to divinity, reverence, worship, obedience and submission to the mandates and precepts of supernatural or superior beings.

The report notes that the right to freedom of religion or belief is guaranteed in a number of core international, including regional human rights instruments and under customary international laws.

It further highlights that Uganda is a multi-religious country with various coexisting beliefs and practices and the freedom of religion is enshrined in the constitution which guarantees the right to practice any religion and manifest it through worship, observance, practice and teaching.

According to the report, Uganda has a population of approximately 40.9 million people of which 86.4% identify as Christians with Pentecostals who believe in Jesus Christ as the son of God accounting for 30% of the total population.

Other religions include Muslims, African tradition, Salvation Army, Bahai, Jehovah’s Witness, Presbyterian, Mormons, Jews, Buddhist and non-religions which account for 1.7% of the total population.

According to the report, in 2014, Catholics accounted for 39.3%, Anglicans where 23.0%, Moslems where 13.7%, Pentecostals or Born Again where 11.1%, Seventh-Day Adventists were 1.7%, believers on traditional were 0.1, Baptist were 0.3%, Orthodox were 0.1%, Others were 1.4% and those without any Religion were 0.2%.

The report however mentions a number of concerns where clerics are taking advantage of innocent people who are trying to understand their religion by manipulating them which has resulted in bankruptcy and further monetary issues to the believers.

The report pines Pentecostal clerics who take themselves as celebrities and want to live lavish lifestyles thus placing their monetary hunger for material gains above salvation and surviving on church members’ donations.

“However, whenever monetary donations become a frequent point of discussion and always a point of emphasis, it is possible that these religious authority figures are less concerned with spreading the gospel and more interested in lining their own pockets,” the report highlights.

The report adds, “This is especially more likely whenever monetary donations are stressed as effective means to garner favour in the eyes of God and increase the chances of getting into heaven.

“In many cases, this is a blatant act of manipulation and exploitation of vulnerable church members’ reverence for God and their hope for a fruitful afterlife.”

The report adds that Born Again pastors have succeeded in portraying themselves as tiny-gods whose words are to be taken as gospel and whose demands are to be obeyed with both haste and minimal question.

The report explains that the Born Again pastors behave in that way because of the absence of a regulatory framework like it is for traditional religions like Christianity (Catholics and Protestants) and Islam who have laws requiring leaders to complete training before taking charge of their congregations.

The report discloses that such trainings teaches leaders in these traditional religions policies including the conducts of priests and leaders as well as mechanisms for managing complaints and conflicts unlike some Born-Again pastors, teachers, apostles, prophets, bishops and evangelists.

The report also accuses religious leaders of promoting gender discrimination, exclusion and inequality against women and girls.

This is done through presenting negative stereotypes about women and reinforcing traditional views about their subordination to men and this is not limited to any particular religion or region.

“The discrimination against women in religious doctrines and in the practice of religion, including the refusal to admit women as priests has had a pervasive effect throughout society of maintaining the belief in the inferiority of women,” the report states.

It adds, “In many religions throughout the world, including the Roman Catholic, Mormon, Orthodox, Jewish and Islam, women are denied equal opportunity to learn and teach religious knowledge which is available to men. Women cannot be ordained or given leadership positions in most religion.”

It further gives the example of the Jewish men who begin each day with a ritualised prayer thanking God for not having made them women and in Orthodox Judaism where women can never be rabbis or mingle with men at prayer in the synagogue.

“Church leaders are on the frontline in attacking women and their bodies often become specific targets for religious groups to exercise control and reinforce power dynamics.”

The report established that most family-related issues have a faith dimension including marriage, divorce, custody and inheritance.

The report cited the form of racism where in the Islamic religion, tradition and culture are seen as a threat and often lead to provocation, hostility and intolerance through threatening, harassment, abuse, incitement and intimidation of Muslims.

The report noted that in 2021, the Uganda Muslim Youth Development Forum reported to the Commission that some Muslims are experiencing employment discrimination.

They cites a case in which a telecom company dismissed a staffer after she ignored instructions not to wear a veil at work.

The report further cites a number of complaints from Muslims accusing the government of persecuting them over involvement in terrorism acts across the country.

“It is discriminatory for the government to always raid mosques and violently arrest sheikhs without following the law and detaining them incommunicado without producing them in courts of law,” the report quotes Kira Municipality legislator Asuman Basalirwa.

The report also mentions the ongoing infightings among Pentecostal churches which are mainly caused by power struggle dynamics within the religious leadership, differences in ideological inclinations and the desire to dominate the religious space.

The report also shows that churches have established media houses such as radios and televisions which they use as platforms to attack each other.

They further state that in some religious practices, worshippers have to make public confessions of private matters, particularly family conflicts, as well as make public their illnesses or troubles to obtain deliverance which violates their rights to privacy that is enshrined in the 1995 Constitution as Amended.

The report shows that a number of complaints have been filed at the commission and at police against churches who usually surpass their limits of freedom of worship and infringe on other people’s rights especially churches near residential areas where the noise they make violates other people’s right to a clean and healthy environment.

The commission was concerned  over the frequent reports that everybody wants to start a church or drinking joint in residential areas without any plan to regulate noise during the day and night when people are sleeping and working.

The report adds that people’s rights to form families have also been violated because young people are forced to have weddings which has raised gender-based violence in communities.

“Some families break up because of the difference in opinion of worship by children in respect of where their parents grew up worshiping from and wedded from,” the report states.

The report advised that places of worship need to be regulated because many people resort to churches for redress due to the biting levels of poverty and limited health services where majority of Ugandans are unable to meet their medical expenses particularly for long-term illnesses.

The report states, “Some church compounds and pastors’ homes have been turned into hospitals with patients making makeshift shelters as they await their healing and deliverance.  Some clerics are accused of discouraging their followers from taking their medication and others engage in prolonged fasting periods that are harmful to their health.”

The commission established incidents of coercion in converting people to various religions that have also amounted to the loss of properties which is done through the promise of wealth and influence.

“With the high unemployment and poverty levels some people have become victims of this coercion and there are reports of alleged exhortation for scholarships and better lives,” They disclose.

They add, “Pastors are accused of fleecing believers of their hard earned money to sow seeds for better life and this is lack of transparency and accountability of millions of monies collected from believers seldom complain of these manipulations since their faith prohibits them from touching God’s anointed.”

The commission recommended that president Museveni’s government should put a regulatory framework for religious institutions to curb the abuse, manipulation, exploitation and extortion of followers.

The further recommended that the government should ensure that economic empowerment programmes targeting the youth are equally distributed to prevent religious extremism in the country.

The Commission also asked government to embark on awareness programmes to prevent the exploitation and abuse of people exercising their freedom of religion.

By Sengooba Alirabaki