Mr Charles Onyango-Obbo
On April 27 2025, Eddie Mutwe, the steely bodyguard of opposition National Unity Platform (NUP) leader Bobi Wine, was grabbed off a Kampala street by armed men, some clad in military fatigues. It turned out this wasn’t an arrest—it was a descent into a medieval horror show. NUP officials say Mutwe was subjected to relentless cruelty: daily electrocution, beatings with wires, waterboarding, his private parts mangled, wrists lacerated by tight handcuffs, and strange substances injected into his veins. When he was dumped at Masaka Magistrates’ Court on 5 May—limping, barefoot, a broken figure—he could barely shuffle. Charged with robbery under heavy guard, he was shielded from journalists’ eyes. The Uganda Human Rights Commission (UHRC) condemned the detention as illegal. Chairperson Mariam Wangadya, after visiting Mutwe in Masaka Prison, demanded urgent medical care for his raw torture wounds. Justice Minister Norbert Mao called it a “flagrant abuse of judicial processes,” a wound to the Constitution. With the 2026 elections looming, he warned that Uganda’s civic space is rapidly disappearing. But we shouldn’t pretend to be surprised.
Any casual reader of Ugandan history will know that torture, abductions, and those grim “safe houses” are as Ugandan as a Rolex sizzling on a roadside stall. Since the dark days of military dictator Idi Amin, abductions, torture, and the use of dungeons ironically labelled “safe houses” have been constants across the regimes that have ruled Uganda for over 50 years. The stark difference under President Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM) is that today’s torturers revel in it, and with the explosive growth of social media, a chorus of supporters now cheers them on in complicity. For all the brutality of the Amin and Obote II regimes, they never publicly admitted to torturing people, murdering them, or tossing bodies into crocodile-infested waters—or, in those days, Namanve forest. If you confront an Amin supporter today, they’ll deny, with a straight face, that his regime killed anyone, demanding evidence. Some claim the victims of the era were slain by Ugandan rebel infiltrators from Tanzania intent on tarnishing the Field Marshal’s name.
Uganda People’s Congress diehards will argue the killings were committed by Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA) rebels, seeking to ruin Milton Obote’s reputation. Until recently, Museveni himself condemned torture and the use of guns against unarmed civilians as cowardly and counter-revolutionary. But now, the dam has burst. Brutality is not just practised; it is celebrated. There is something profoundly un-Ugandan about this new torture swagger. It may well be a calculated battle plan. Labelling opponents “grasshoppers” isn’t merely a slur—it’s an erasure of their humanity. If you’re an insect, your suffering is irrelevant; your torture is just sweeping away a nuisance. It’s a page from the colonial playbook when Europeans branded Africans “savages” to justify whips and chains. British forces castrated Mau Mau rebels in Kenya. Belgians chopped off hands in the Congo for failing rubber quotas.
These were lessons in soul-breaking. After independence, the tools remained. Amin had his Nakasero dungeons and Makindye basements. Fast forward to today: in Zimbabwe, activists are abducted to stifle dissent; in Egypt, prisons echo with the cries of reformers. Torture is cheap, quick, and rarely held to account in places like Uganda. Liberation fighters, once shaped by resistance, now mirror their former oppressors. Museveni sits atop this dark chorus, either unable to rein it in or happy to give it a wink. The 21st-century generation of African leaders has taken over from their predecessors, recycling the old tricks and turning them against their own people. Against this backdrop, Mutwe’s torment (and that of hundreds more) wasn’t a random outburst—it was a calculated warning shot aimed at the NUP’s young, defiant urban base: Bobi Wine’s restless legion must be broken. The message is blunt: resist, and you’re finished.
Therefore, this isn’t just about silencing dissent; it’s about building a nation too scared to speak. Yet torture is a shaky foundation on which to build a nation. It breeds fear, but also fury. Regimes that rely on brutality—Uganda, Zimbabwe, Egypt—may buy time, but they forfeit trust. Survivors become tougher, movements grow, and the eyes of the world narrow in scrutiny. Torture often births more defiance than submission, transforming victims into legends and rulers into pariahs. Uganda now stands at a fork in the road: Ballots or basements? Those in power are betting that terror can rewrite the game—that a “grasshopper” nation will bow. But history, that sharp-tongued teacher, disagrees. Every tortured body sows the seed of revolt. Wounds heal, and pain passes, but what it provokes never forgets—and regimes built on fear will be outlived by the resistance they create.
Mr Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”.
X@cobbo3
