Uganda Human Rights Commission officials Shifra Lukwago and Crispin Kaheru appearing before MPsA toxic workplace is bad. It gets worse. Toxic workplaces are more common than we realise. It’s almost a rite of passage to experience (and survive) a toxic workplace. A toxic place can be deadly for one’s overall health. In severe cases, it can even lead to the highly unwanted side effect – premature death. What happens when the workplaces that are meant to look out for others are a source of toxicity themselves? In 2018, 65-year-old Gaëtan Mootoo, an Amnesty International researcher, took his life at his workplace. Mootoo left a suicide note in which he complained of work pressure and lack of management support. An independent inquiry into his death established that there had been a serious failure of management which saw Mootoo, who had been an Amnesty employee for 30 years, feeling abandoned and neglected. Six weeks later, another Amnesty employee committed suicide – at her home. A separate inquiry cited personal reasons for her death, exonerating the organization. However, the second suicide brought the organization’s work culture into sharper light, prompting the organization to conduct a comprehensive staff wellbeing review. According to The Guardian UK, the report found that the organization’s management routinely employed bullying and public humiliation. It further stated, “Given Amnesty’s status and mission – to protect and promote human rights – the number of accounts the assessment team received of ‘bullying’, ‘racism,’ and ‘sexism’ is disconcerting… Amnesty cannot effectively strive to make the world a better place while perpetuating an organisational culture deeply marked by secrecy, mistrust, nepotism and other forms of power abuse.” In a 2019 article, ‘Rights groups plagued by ‘toxic’ work culture’, Deutsche Welle (DW) explored how organisations mandated to do good are many times blind to their own internal contradictions. Human rights organisations are seen as ethically responsible due to the nature of their work; while we have heard of terrible abuse of power in political, business, and religious circles, human rights watchdogs tend to get overlooked. A 2021 BBC article posited that non-profit enterprises that depend on external funding are prone to nurturing toxic workplaces – owing to the constant stress of underfunding and how it affects the organisation. DW noted that people working in humanitarian or social justice spaces need to remember that they are as human as the rest of us. Thus, these organisations should be even more vigilant about walking that talk. For Amnesty International, this meant replacing five of its seven-member top management team, among others, in response to recommendations from the workplace review. Dear reader, let us return to the appalling hot mess that has been our Uganda Human Rights Commission (UHRC) over the past weeks, with reports of infighting and counter-accusations. As the beleaguered UHRC Chairperson, Mariam Wangadya has repeatedly stressed, the UHRC has the broadest mandate of all constitutional bodies – don’t let its grossly underfunded budget fool you. Mariam WangandyaOn the UHRC website, this mandate is captured as follows, “The Uganda Human Rights Commission (UHRC) was established under the 1995 Constitution of the Republic of Uganda to promote and protect human rights and freedoms in the country in recognition of Uganda’s violent and turbulent history that had been characterized by arbitrary arrests, detention without trial, torture and brutal repression with impunity on the part of security organs during the pre- and post-independence era.” Consequently, the toxicity between the Chairperson and the Commissioners means the lofty and noble mandate of upholding and defending the human rights of Ugandans, a work that is long in suffering, rich in despair, is suffering even more. Parliament Watch reported that when an emotional Wangadya appeared before a parliamentary committee last week, she intimated, “The work of at least three members of the Commission is to conspire against the chairperson, orchestrate a smear campaign, place defamatory material in the media, and lodge baseless complaints against me with every investigative agency in the land.” She further remarked, “Today I should be supervising investigations, talking to refugees, interacting with stakeholders, constituting tribunal panels and addressing major human rights issues. Instead, I have spent the past five months defending myself before every media house in Uganda.” In the context of our violent and turbulent history and an unsettled and precarious political transition, amidst continued reports of torture, abductions, restrictions on media freedoms and persistent impunity by state actors, we need the UHRC to raise the bar higher than ever. Beyond embattled reputations, salacious headlines and bruised egos, every day spent on internal battles is a day not spent investigating violations, protecting the vulnerable and holding power to account. But assigning blame as we quaff down the delicious gossip morsels about who-did-what-to-whom is the easy part. The harder question is whether UHRC can pull itself back from the brink. There is an opportunity here. Toxicity need not be the end of an institution. In the wake of the tragic suicides, faced with evidence of bullying, secrecy, mistrust and abuse of power, Amnesty International was forced to look itself in the mirror. The findings were uncomfortable. Heads rolled. Reforms followed. In the end, the bigger question is not who wins the latest round of infighting or catches the President’s eye eventually. It is whether the institution and its overseers, like the Presidency and Parliament, can harness this opportunity to comprehensively reform the UHRC. Not just for the sake of UHRC but for Uganda. Uganda will always be worth fighting for. For that is where UHRC’s redemption will come from. smugmountain@gmail.com The writer is a tayaad muzzukulu.The post Uganda Human Rights Commission: When watchdogs fail appeared first on The Observer Media Ltd.