Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has said he will begin signing death warrants again after an absence of 19 years, AP reported.

On Thursday, speaking at a graduation ceremony for prison warders in the capital Kampala, Museveni vowed to “hang a few” to restore fear among criminals in the East African country, saying he had changed his mind on being lenient for nearly two decades because criminals were taking advantage.

“I am going to revise this and hang a few,” he said. “We must hang some of these people because if you see how they kill people, they deserve to be killed.”

There are currently 278 prisoners on death row. The last time the president signed death warrants was in 1999 when 28 people were executed.

However, the executive director of the local Foundation for Human Rights Initiative, Livingstone Ssewanyana warned that “executing prisoners won’t end crime”.

There have been recent cases of high-profile killings in Uganda, including the murder of 23 women in the city of Entebbe, which Ssewanyan blames on the country’s “failed” criminal justice system.

“The police are very weak with no capacity to investigate crimes extensively,” Ssewanyana said. “It is underfunded and the judiciary is also underfunded. As a result, you find serious failures in the systems.”

Museveni’s new attitude also flies in the face of a report last year by Amnesty International which said sub-Saharan Africa had “stood out as a beacon of hope and positive progress on the abolition of the death penalty” in recent years, despite Botswana and Nigeria in 2016 resuming executions.

As of the end of 2016, in addition to the above, Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan and Zimbabwe retain the death penalty.