Is Uganda sliding into dark past?

Reversing peace and security

Peace for the country and security of the citizens that was once the cornerstone and selling point of the NRM government, is fast melting away like glaciers on approach of the summer heat. Illegal detentions, wanton human rights abuses, including torture, killings, forced disappearances, impunity of security agencies, are now common place, and without accountability despite several laws, including one on individual culpability. Yet ridding the country of these ills were the golden promises upon which the NRM founders fought a bitter, destructive, and bloody five-year bush war and shot their way to power after denouncing the the December 10, 1981 polls as unfair and rigged. A journalist with this newspaper was on March 28 roughed up by soldiers near the Office of Prime Minister (OPM) premises as one of them even boasted how he could shoot him dead and nothing would happen to him.

Three months earlier, an officer Charles Bahati of the Police Counter Terrorism Unit and part of the security detail of one of the Supreme Court justices, fatally shot a civilian, Julius Ssemwaka on Ssezibwa Road for simply refusing to give them the right way. Some reports indicated the officers were actually delivering a cake. Mr Bahati subsequently fled into hiding, but critics who take to social media to abuse those in power are often quickly hunted down, seized and detained or quickly prosecuted. There are also rampant daily reports of traffic officers and civilians brutalised by military officers guarding fat cats in government who cruise in luxury vehicles paid by taxpayers’ money, pushing them off the narrow potholed roads.

Kawempe and echoes of 2020/2021 polls

The images of military armoured vehicles driving through polling stations during the March 13 by-elections in Kawempe are still fresh. The main opposition National Unity Platform (NUP) party supporters were brutalised and maimed by a gang of balaclava-clad security personnel reportedly of the Joint Anti-Terrorism Taskforce (JATT). Journalists were not spared as they received their share of brutality on the polling day. The ministers of Defence and Internal Affairs, who bear political oversight over the different security organs that are preoccupied with regime survival, too, faced hard time speaking about the actions of entities they are supposed to supervise. Cautiously, the ministers washed off their hands regarding the sanctioning and modus operandi of the security agencies, leaving the country with more questions than answers about command structures and accountability of the security forces.

The ugly drama in the Kawempe by-election was replay of the bloody stained 2020/2021 presidential campaigns and election, which pitted incumbent President Museveni, who has marked time in power for nearly four decades, against main rival and fresh-face popstar turned politician Robert Kyagulanyi, better known by his stage name of Bobi Wine. Critics said the polls were perhaps the most bloodied election campaign in post-independence Uganda, with government accepting that 54 people were killed by government forces in the poll-related violence. Scores more were injured in the protests.  This followed spontaneous riots in parts of the country when candidate Kyagulanyi was arrested on November 18, 2020, for reportedly violating Covid-19 standard operating procedures. Moreover, scores of Mr Kyagulanyi’s NUP party supporters were kidnapped by military operatives driving in numberless Toyata Hi-Ace vehicles popularly called “drones.” Some of the abductees never to be seen again nearly half-a decade later.

Attempts to compel the government to return those missing whether dead or alive through the courts of law have hit a dead end. Contrary to earlier claims that the persons never existed, during court hearings copies of their national IDs were presented to prove their existence and there was no evidence to prove that they might have exited the country at any border points. A police probe into the killing spree indicated the majority of the casualties were not involved in the protests contrary to earlier claims by the security services. While President Museveni advanced the theory of “stray bullets” and government promised accountability to the families of the deceased and injured, that was the last the country heard about it.

Peering into 2026

With another electioneering season around the corner, many fear the worst is yet to happen, with threats of violence frequently issued from security circles. Such extreme state-sponsored violence is the new normal, usually justified and defended or accompanied by winding promises of investigations and accountability or by silence by those in charge. When a group of activists last July organised a march to Parliament, weighed down by corruption and wheeler-dealing, they were arrested and brutalised and some reportedly sexually assaulted while in detention. The police denied the claims. Yet again, last week on Wednesday, the country was stunned when some UPDF soldiers raided a police station in Lubowa on the Kampala-Entebbe road and beat up police officers and civilians following a misunderstanding.

The army issued a statement saying the matter was being investigated. Similarly, only four days after Mr Kyagulanyi’s chief bodyguard Edward Ssebufu, better known as Eddie Mutwe, was reported abducted from Kiwango village in Mukono District by security personnel, but police denied any knowledge of his whereabouts. Curiously, the Chief of Defence Forces, Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, took to his X handle, confessing to holding Mutwe in his “basement.” Gen. Muhoozi posted an image of a seemingly disoriented, clean-shaven, half-naked Mutwe and dared Mr Kyagulanyi to attempt to come to his rescue. Gen Kainerugaba, who has variously threatened to “hang” three times presidential runner, Dr Kizza Besigye, who fought alongside his father during 1981-1986 rebel bush war that ushered in the NRA into power, said Ssebufu was being “taught Runyankore”, a dialect from south-western Uganda, which drew ire on X, with Ugandans on X denouncing it as ill-intentioned and calculated to pit one tribe against another.

Pearl of blood

Uganda’s history of state-sponsored violence has had ethnic undertones, which are compounded by, among others, political exclusion, and share of the national cake, among others. While President Museveni has previously defended his son, Gen Muhoozi’s posts on X as “musings” to stir debate, Gen Muhoozi last Thursday wrote: “I don’t know why people think my tweets are jokes.” He had previously justified the violence by JATT personnel during the Kawempe-by elections, and promised to annihilate NUP, among other threats. With President Museveni well into making 80 years, and Gen Muhoozi, 51, being looked at by some as heir apparent, few inside the government dare speak about his actions and posts, however incendiary both within and outside Uganda’s borders. Only the Uganda Human Rights Commission chairperson, Ms Mariam Wangadya, who has been hitherto been criticized as a lame duck, issued a statement calling upon the CDF to release Mr Ssebufu.

The Uganda Human Rights Commission (UHRC) was established under the 1995 Constitution as a permanent body that monitors the human rights situation in the country. The body on its official website said the creation was in recognition of Uganda’s violent and turbulent history that had been characterised by arbitrary arrests, detention without trial, torture and brutal repression with impunity on the part of security organs during the pre and post-independence era. Article 53 (1) of the Constitution gives the UHRC the power of a court to: summon or order any person to attend before it and produce any document or record relevant to any investigation by the Commission; and question any person in respect of any subject matter under its investigation, among others. Speaking in Luganda yesterday at a thanksgiving event at Lweza in Entebbe, Buganda Kingdom Premier (Katikkiro) Charles Peter Mayiga said: “Uganda is full of people who feel powerful. They are kidnapping people and then they gloat about it.” Some of these state-sponsored crimes are eerily familiar as they were the modus operandi of past governments that President Museveni has vilified.

In the book titled, Slow Poison, set to be published later this year, renowned political scholar Prof Mahmood Mamdani draws parallels between the often-vilified President Idi Amin’s regime from 1971 to 1979, and the current in power for nearly four decades. President Museveni, who has a particular referencing of President Amin, has unfailingly vilified Amin over his government’s human rights record, namely torture, disappearances, murders, arbitrary detentions and impunity by security agencies that caused “so much suffering” to Ugandans, has variously discounted comparisons of his government to that of Amin. But to some scholars, history has an uncanny way of repeating itself, and a quick scan of the 1994 report titled, Pearl of Blood, reveals that only the actors have changed but the script is the same. This, as many continuously fear of the country sliding into its dark past with tragic consequences.

Sidestepping the NRM/A years

Upon shooting its way to power in 1986, the National Resistance Army constituted a commission of inquiry led by Justice Arthur Oder to look into human rights violations suffered by Ugandans from independence in 1962 up to 1986, stopping with Mr Museveni ascendancy to power. Other members of the eight-member commission included John Nagenda, John Baptist Kawanga, Joan Kakwenzire, Dr Jack Luyombya, Dr Edward Khiddu-Makubuya, and Edward Ssekandi, later to become the Speaker of Parliament, as legal counsel and Alex Bwangmoi Okello, now Permanent Secretary of Ethics and Integrity, as acting secretary. The commission’s report was published in October 1994 and detailed the rights violations, some in grim detail, by mostly security agencies.

Particularly, named was the army which operated under loose command structures and by impulse determined the fate of hundreds of many who “were anti-people; indisciplined, consisted predominantly of certain ethnic groups in and outside Uganda; were loyal to and supported only leaders coming from the areas where the majority of the soldiers originated rather than the nation and state of Uganda; were led by officers and consisted of men who had had little or no formal education; were completely ignorant of their duty to respect, protect and promote.” But a February 2023 report by the by United States Institute of Peace (USIP), a Washington-backed think-tank, drew parallels that such brazen acts of security agencies continued under the current government, while introducing new ones, practices that for the most part cemented the role of security forces in regime survival by fusing military and political elites.

Unending cycle of violence

The USIP report asserted: “Overall, the role of security forces in regime survival has become far more entrenched in post-1986 Uganda. The regime is characterised by both continuity with and marked departure from previous regimes. Political uses of the armed forces have deepened, but in a context where the same elites who recrafted the sector—the rebel leaders turned state leaders—remain in power. New security personnel are beholden to the same top leadership.” Uganda's post-independence governments, according to the Pearl of Blood report, especially from 1967 to 1971, and 1971 to 1979, and 1980 to 1986, like many other African regimes—like today—went to great lengths to deny any human rights abuses. The report read in part: “Once such denials were made, perpetrators of abuses could not be brought to justice because you cannot punish offences the commission of which you have publicly denied ... The official denials, therefore, provided protection to the violators of human rights.” The report said the types of torture were varied “as the methods applied and the reasons or objectives for the torture, if required.

The most common included threats of death or injury to the victim or family members, detention or confinement in crammed space or insanitary conditions, denial of water and food, kidnapping; stripping men and women naked and bodily harm; suspending heavy objects from men's private parts or cutting off women's breasts and sexually assaulting the women, burning molten plastic objects, and other forms of inhumane and degrading treatment.” The report details that whenever there was a change of regime (invariably through violence), almost everything, including bad human rights violations records “is swept away and things begin afresh, as if nothing happened or existed before” a practice which precipitated a cycle of violence. “The army, police, state security agencies and the Executive have been central in the perpetuation of the cycle of violence. This fact is well attested to throughout the evidence given before the Commission,” the report read in part.

According the Pearl of Blood, another key factor in the propagation of the cycle of violence was the ignorance of human rights by either the law enforcement officers and agents or their victims. Consequently, officers and agents of the state regular)' abused the rights of those who fell in their hands and the victims and the public often aided the process by being passive. The other assumption, the report notes, was that “those who do not oppose” the regimes in power are safe, or that only those who had “offended” the regime in power or belonged to the 'wrong' ethnic groups were wanted by the regime further proved disastrous, especially during Amin's regime and the years of insurgency between 1981 - 1985. For instance, the commission noted that during Amin’s regime “it was common practice for one or two intelligence officers of the State Research Centre or other agency to arrest someone from amongst a huge crowd of people, bundle him in a car boot, carry him away and proceed to kill or make him disappear never to be seen again. Whenever such incidents happened, persons not affected felt or thought that they themselves were innocent and safe.”

History of disappearances Justice Oder’s Commission of inquiry was the second in a space of 12 years, after the Saied Commission. Following the 1971 coup that dislocated President Milton Obote while away in Singapore for the Commonwealth Heads of State Conference, scores of people, particularly of Acholi and Langi origin, were disappeared. In Uganda’s political parlance, the word ‘disappearance’ was, as is nowadays, a euphemism for civilians taken by security operatives without disclosed offence, taken to an unknown location and without certainty about their return. By 1974, disappearances, like in the curious case of NUP party supporters who have been picked since 2019, elicited nationwide and international outcry. By decree of Legal Notice 2 of June 1974, President Amin, who doubled as Commander in Chief and Minister of Defence, constituted a four-member commission of inquiry led by Justice Mohamed Saied to investigate the disappearances. Other members of the commission included two police officers, Superintendents S.M. Kyefulumya, and A. Esar, and one Capt Haruna representing the army—then Ugandan Armed Forces.

Specifically, the Saied Commission, according to the decree was to among others “inquire into and establish the identity of the persons who are alleged missing, and to establish whether such persons are dead or alive” and recommend to government what should be done to “put an end to the criminal disappearances of people in Uganda.” Earlier on June 4, 1974, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), a human rights group of eminent jurists—including senior judges, academics, and attorneys, had published a scathing report detailing “a total breakdown in the rule of law” in Uganda occasioned by a series of decrees overriding all constitutional safeguards. This, according to ICJ, midwifed “a massive and continuing violations of human rights” by the main security agencies, the Military Intelligence unit, the Military Police, the State Research Department, and Public Safety United leading to “a reign of terror” in which thousands of people from all walks of life, Africans as well as Asians, have sought refuge in voluntary exile”, while those who had remained were in a constant state of insecurity.”

Even then, according to the Oder-probe report, disappearances started in the political turbulence of the 1960s. During the 1966 crisis, a number of people from or near the Mengo palace disappeared, never to be seen again. It is presumed that they were killed in what came to be known as the “Battle of Mengo”. Disappearances became a commonplace between 1971 and 1985 during President Amin’s regime, and the successive short-lived governments of Godfrey Binaisa who ruled for 68 days, Yusuf Lule for 11 months, then briefly the Paulo Muwanga’s Military Commission, and subsequently the Obote II regime that came in after the December 1980 General Election until July 1985. “It is not possible in a work of this length to discuss the numerous cases of disappearances. Only some names of those who disappeared may be set out to illustrate the extent of the problem,” the report reads in part.

The essence, behind the largely donor-bankrolled commission of inquiry, was to “find and recommend possible ways” of preventing the re-occurrence of human rights violations that plagued the country as a result of toxic politics. The commission’s report methodically details that law enforcement agencies, from 1971 to 1985, became so notorious for violation of human rights so much so that the "term law enforcement became an inapplicable designation.” “During this period, some security agencies retained a degree of professionalism, however some of the agencies, such as the Special Force (with its Special Force Unit) and the General Service Unit (a para-military force), employed ruthless operational tactics which gave them a generally fearsome reputation in the eyes of the public,” the report notes. Indeed, as philosopher Friedrich Hegel remarkably said: “The only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”

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