Oau Activist Appeals to Museveni On Prostitution

By Geoffrey Kamali, New Vision, 28 September 2000

A Pan African activitist has appealed to President Yoweri Museveni to intervene and pardon over 60 prostitutes who were remanded at Luzira last week for allegedly engaging in sex trade.

Peter Wankulu, the co-ordinator of the Organisation of African Unity Veterans, a Pan African organisation, said, in a two-page letter to the President, that the prostitues were forced into the sex trade by the hard economic conditions in the country.

Your Excellency, I hereby kindly appeal to you to intervene and release the 60 women imprisoned recently for sex trade, Wankulu said.

I doubt highly whether so many women in Uganda would go public if they had other alternatives and yet the economic situation is so difficult, he added. Over 60 prostitutes were recently rounded up by Kampala City Council enforcement officers recently from different areas in the city. The police officers posed as clients, and later drove them to the Police station, where they were arrested and later charged in Buganda Road court.