The public has continued to speculate over the health condition of the ailing Speaker of Parliament, Jacob Oulanyah who is currently hospitalized in the US.
The speculation that Oulanyah’s health is getting worse by the day follows an abrupt visit scheduled by the Deputy Speaker of Parliament Anita Among,Chief Justice CJ Owiny Dollo and Francis Emuna, supportive staff at Parliament and his brother.
The trio traveled on Tuesday to the US at 05:00 pm via Entebbe International Airport. Deputy Speaker Among adjourned the house after only 30 minutes in session leaving items on the order paper pending.
Public Relations Officer at Parliament Chris Obore says the group was already scheduled to travel abroad and it is not abrupt as earlier presumed. He also says the CJ traveled because he is a close friend to Oulanyah.
“First of all the plenary was not cut short, the travel of the deputy speaker was a scheduled travel because there was not much business in the house“I have seen social media with all sorts of angles but no, checking on a patient is something usual, and there is no patient whose family, friends, and relatives do not visit,”
Obore said Obore says people have been speculating over Oulanyah’s condition for long because bad news excites the public.
“This speculation is because of what we have become as a society, I do not know whether people want to hear bad news all the time,”he says
Oulanyah was airlifted in the early hours of Thursday February 3rd, aboard a chartered Uganda Airlines’ Airbus A330-800 neo, with registration code 5X-NIL which reportedly flew from Entebbe to Keflavik, Iceland in a flight time of 10 hours 42 minutes before starting its second leg from Keflavik to Seattle which lasted 7 hours and 28 minutes.
This is not the first time that the Speaker has disappeared from the public eye under similar circumstances. In June last year, the Speaker went missing shortly after chairing the budget reading.
The last time Speaker Oulanyah was spotted in the public eye is in June during the 2021/2022 budget reading. The Omoro county Mp drew attention from both the public and his fellow legislators.
The lion of Omoro would later appear on July 29, 2022 in a flamboyant entrance to Parliament looking thinner but stable and fine. That Thursday afternoon, Speaker Oulanyah tagged a section of legislators hypocrites for demanding to know his whereabouts.
Oulanyah made a dominant entry to the August house clad in a navy blue suit, looking poised and ready to resume work. While at Parliament Oulanyah made an intentional entrance to an induction workshop for opposition MP’s where he made his first remarks.
Oulanyah blasted“Some of you had made it a habit to demand my presence, yet for one and half years when I never chaired or even appeared in Parliament you didn’t raise it, now I am away for a week and they are like… Acholis are going to demonstrate. Let’s stick to standard principles. Let us have one standard with which we shall be judged.”
