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Ssegirinya's death and Museveni's last political lap

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Mr Charles Onyango-Obbo

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Uganda’s ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) government has been blamed by many for the death of the Kawempe North Member of Parliament, Muhammad Ssegirinya, on January 9 , 2025.

On September 3, 2021, the National Unity Platform legislator was arrested alongside fellow MP Allan Ssewanyana on charges related to murder and terrorism in the Greater Masaka region, which resulted in the deaths of over 20 people. The arrests were met with scepticism by many who believed they were the usual politically motivated actions by the NRM government to silence opposition voices.

Matters weren't helped by the fact that credible proof of the allegations was never presented. It is alleged that the two were tortured while in detention. Ssegirinya, in particular, seemed to have had the worst of it.

His application for bail to seek emergency medical treatment was denied by Justice Lawrence Tweyanze of the Masaka High Court. After spending over 500 days in detention, they were granted bail in February 2023.

Ssegirinya subsequently travelled to the Netherlands to receive specialised treatment for his torture wounds and was in and out of hospitals in Nairobi and Kampala. However, the damage had been done. He didn’t live to see the second anniversary of his bail. It was truly remarkable to see the long queue of people on the road headed to Ssegirinya’s funeral.

His death struck a nerve. The timing of his passing is extremely problematic for the NRM and President Yoweri Museveni from a legacy point of view. It has happened in the 39th year of Museveni's and NRM’s rule. While the NRM can reinvent itself as a democratic and 21st-century party and rule Uganda for a long time, for Museveni, who is turning 81, the most optimistic outlook is that he will be president for another 10 years.

The stories that his rule will be remembered for are those that happened later in his incumbency and will be fresher in the public mind, and those from the past which are accessible and have been more dramatically narrated. We will illustrate. Hussein Musa Njuki, one of the founders of The Shariat newspaper, and also editor of the Islamic opposition paper Assalaam, died in police custody on August 28,1995.

While Ugandan state media played down the role of the state in Njuki’s death, that side of the story has been buried by the many accounts, especially from human rights and press freedom groups, laying the blame at its doorstep.

Here is an account, the first that pops up in online searches, from the Committee to Protect Journalists: “Njuki, editor of the opposition weekly newsletter Assalaam, died in police custody in a hospital. He had been arrested three days earlier and was immediately taken to the Criminal Investigations Division. While CPJ received several different reports regarding his arrest and death, it is certain that he was taken into custody by a group of plain-clothes officers from the Anti-Robbery Squad, an extension of the government’s Internal Security Organisation (ISO).

"One source claimed that Njuki had been suffering from a debilitating illness, the effects of which were fatally exacerbated by the shock of the ISO squad’s ambush. Another source reported that Njuki was in perfect health before the arrest and was beaten to death by ISO agents. Yet another report contended that he collapsed during an attempt to escape and died in the hospital of a heart attack. A police guard remained in Njuki’s hospital room throughout his stay.”

This is the dominant narrative about virtually all deaths of journalists, activists, and politicians in Uganda over the last 39 years who were critics of the NRM government and President Museveni and are alleged or rumoured to have been done in by the state.

The government's side of the story has become invisible in online databases, partly be- cause the international rights groups who record the alleged atrocities have a far bigger reach and better projection, including that old-fashioned trick called search engine optimisation (SEO), the process of perfecting a website or web content to improve its visibility, ranking, and organic (non-paid) traffic from search engines like Google.

A researcher on Museveni’s rule in 10 years will face a reference landscape that is very bleak for the president. Partly because of this, a leader must govern differently in his sunset years. This is when they lock up the dogs. Two of our neighbours did it. In Tanzania, after 22 years, Julius Nyerere liberalised.

In Kenya, after 24 years, Daniel arap Moi took the boot off the opposition’s neck and unleashed a slew of reforms – and stepped down. A clever ruler leaves a sweet taste in the mouths of the people who will witness his/ her end. The time for abducting Kizza Besigye from Nairobi and trying him in a military court was 2000, not 2024/2025.

Mr Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist,
writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great
Africans.” X (Twitter) @cobbo3