The grim choice of exile, jail or torture for activists 

In his popular tune, Bizeemu (the things have resumed) singer Ronald Mayinja recounts the things that he says took President Museveni to fight in the Luweero jungles after the controversial 1980 general election. 

On Mayinja’s list is bad governance, killing people, tribalism, rigged elections, armed robberies, persecution, especially imprisoning innocent people, and security forces misusing their guns. 

Other things he cites are poverty, currency devaluation, poorly resourced hospitals, expensive healthcare, nepotism, “panda gari” (get into the car), arrests en masse, enforced disappearances, abductions and kidnaps. 

Mayinja’s appreciation of the reasons President Museveni mobilised his comrades to wage a protracted liberation struggle do not largely differ from what is captured in the NRM’s 10-point programme, which sought to usher in a peaceful, democratic future, free from corruption, and with basic services and economic opportunity for all citizens. 

The video of plain clothed armed men dragging a woman into a drone, a Super Custom-type road delivery van, which has become synonymous with terror rained on Ugandans by the security forces including kidnappings and enforced disappearances circulated on social media and surprisingly condemned by the police, captures the panda gari that President Museveni and others sought to end.

The woman was later identified as Anisha Komuhendo who had gone to Mbarara to stand surety for her relatives before a court. 

After outlining these ills, Mayinja, who has had a brush with politics through his relations with politicians and powerful lyrics with political undertones, concludes that the things that compelled President Museveni to go to the bush to fight have started again under his watch. 

Ironically, after releasing the song and other tunes such as Ani agula ensi kuba tugitunda? Mayinja went to compose President Museveni’s 2021 campaign theme song Akalulu Kako Mzee (the vote is yours old man). That irony is a story for another day. 

Mayinja’s Bizeemu aptly captures the direction Mr Museveni’s Uganda has taken since capturing power in 1986. The fleeing of novelist and activist Kakwenza Rukirabashaija and the events leading to that decision cap it all. 

After being disappeared for weeks, Mr Kakwenza was quietly charged in court and remanded to prison. Upon release, on bail, he was again kidnapped on prison gates by people who dumped him at his home in the middle of the night. 

His body looked like a real character in Alex Haley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Roots. Many Ugandans who watched its adaptation into a mini-series remember it as Kunta Kinte, the main character who is flogged by a White overseer to forget his name. 

The people, however, who tortured Kakwenza are, by his own account, not some foreign slavers or colonialists but agents of men and women who took up arms to end the ills that Mayinja sings about in Bizeemu. 

Kakwenza is charged with disturbing the peace of President Museveni and his son Lt Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba through his Twitter handle. 

Some of the stories of brutality told by activists and other anti-regime supporters echo those narrated by William Pike in his book Combatants - A Memoir of the Bush War and the Press in Uganda and other writings that chronicle Uganda’s “dark history” of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. 

Kakwenza’s fleeing from the country and that of other activists is symbolic, given Uganda’s turbulent political history characterised -- as Frederick Golooba, a political scientist and researcher, writes -- by “putsches, dictatorship, contested electoral outcomes, civil wars and a military invasion” among others. 

Independent Uganda’s first four presidents died in exile and all Uganda’s post-independent presidents, including President Museveni, have lived at one point in exile.  

Living in exile, for all, was not a choice but one imposed on them by circumstances created by those in power.

President Milton Obote forced his predecessor Sir Edward Muteesa into exile in the United Kingdom where he died. Obote was overthrown by Idi Amin while abroad and this meant automatic exile for Obote. 

Golooba writes in a January 2008 paper titled, “Collapse, war and reconstruction in Uganda: An analytical narrative on state-making” that more than 20 exile groups were involved in one way or another in the campaign to overthrow the Amin regime. They succeeded with the help of troops from neighbouring Tanzania in April 1979.

“By driving hundreds of ex-servicemen into exile, the regime created a source of potential recruits for insurgent activities and set the stage for future political violence. Indeed, these exiles eventually became a source of destabilisation and participated in the Tanzania-led war that toppled the Amin regime in 1979,” he says. 

Prof Yusuf K. Lule, who was president of Uganda for 68 days after the overthrow of Amin, also died in exile in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. 

Amin made Uganda famous for the wrong reasons. His regime stands accused of widespread killings, torture and pushing multitudes into exile, including many of the country’s educated class depriving Uganda of a much needed resource. Lule was soon replaced by Godfrey Binaisa who spent time in exile in the United States. Both Binaisa and Paulo Muwanga, his successor, died in Uganda.

That Obote, who had a second stint in power, died in exile is a very touchy story for Ugandans whose families had some sort of influence in those dark years, or opposed or were deemed to oppose the regimes of the day.

Many people occupying powerful positions today, including Lt Gen Muhoozi, were born in exile because their parents had fled the country. Muhoozi was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. 

The fleeing by Mr Kakwenza, citing persecution, casts President Museveni’s regime in the same light of the past governments he has ridiculed and whose leaders he often calls swine. 

Not the first 

Mr Kakwenza, however, is not the first to run to exile and will likely not be the last. Since 1986 when President Museveni took power, many Ugandans opposed to the regime have remained in exile despite efforts to woo them back. Some have returned based on what they say are broken promises.

Ex-BBC stringer Henry Gombya, in whose home Dr Andrew Lutakome Kayiira was murdered on March 6, 1987, has lived in exile in Britain since that year and has not returned to Uganda.

Gen David Sejusa, the former co-ordinator of Intelligence Services, spent 20 months in exile in the United Kingdom after leaving the country in May 2013. 

In August 2001, Dr Kizza Besigye fled the country, citing persecution. He said he was afraid for his life. For four years, he lived in South Africa before returning to context in the 2006 elections. This was Dr Besigye’s second rodeo in exile having fled the country to Nairobi, Kenya, after he was imprisoned and tortured in the Nile Hotel in 1981, accused of working with the rebels. It was from Nairobi that he joined the Bush War in 1982. 

Stella Nyanzi spent years in exile as a child and recently fled to Germany with her young family citing persecution. The writer and activist who was imprisoned in 2019 after posting a profane poem about President Museveni cited the increasing crackdown against the Opposition in the country.

Another growing category is that of Ugandans forced to go abroad because of the economic situation in the country. Educated, young and energetic but unable to find jobs, many Ugandans have moved to the Middle East. While some find success, many are in a cycle of exploitation and modern-day slavery.  On social media, this diaspora group all over the word keeps pushing for change in the hope of returning to a better country than they left behind. 

As the government becomes firm on cracking down on dissent, these find themselves in an unenviable position with threats of persecution with the authorities that regulate and control the companies that export them.