By Asuman Kiyingi
A profound and suffocating state of fear has been systematically engineered across Uganda. For the average citizen, the traditional markers of constitutional governance appear increasingly overshadowed by the reality of an alternative power center operating beyond the restraints of civilian law. The country has been plunged into mounting public anxiety over a relentless series of high-handed actions that project the Chief of Defense Forces (CDF), General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, as all-powerful, unaccountable, and effectively beyond the reach of the institutions established by the Constitution.
The most chilling manifestation of this unchecked authority unfolded in the pre-dawn darkness of mid-June 2026, when armed security operatives scaled residential fences in Wakaliga, Kampala. They did not arrive with judicial warrants. They arrived in unmarked minibuses colloquially known as “drones” and forcibly entered the residence of former Kampala Lord Mayor and senior advocate, Ssalongo Erias Lukwago. He was abducted by armed operatives and held incommunicado for days. Ironically, Lukwago was targeted just as he was preparing to serve court papers on the CDF regarding alleged social media threats.
When Lukwago eventually appeared before a court, visibly weakened and stripped of the ordinary protections of due process, he was charged with misprision of treason—an offence relating to the alleged failure to report a treasonous plot. By then, the institutional mask had completely fallen.
The abduction and detention in an unknown ungazetted place were not merely acknowledged; they were publicly celebrated. Through statements posted on his verified X account, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba openly claimed responsibility for Lukwago’s capture, stating he had been taken to the “basement”—a term historically associated with extrajudicial safe houses. The posts included photographs showing Lukwago blindfolded while in custody. In a series of posts, the General claimed that Lukwago had “urinated thrice,” required diapers, and would spend the night subjected to “kiboko” (caning). These statements, published by the country’s highest-ranking military officer, generated widespread alarm about the treatment of a senior advocate and opposition leader while in military custody.
The same verified X account subsequently carried threats directed at political opponents and traditional institutions. In one widely circulated post, the General declared that after targeting opposition figures, he would pursue the Katikkiro of Buganda and the Kabaka if their television and radio stations did not cease broadcasting about the individual he captured and subsequently handed over to the police.
When the head of a state’s military apparatus can summarily detain a senior officer of the court, torture him, and boast about it publicly as a personal “capture,” and subsequently use dehumanizing slurs to threaten the Katikkiro and the Kabaka of Buganda, a dangerous constitutional threshold has been crossed. This is no longer merely political repression. It represents the consolidation of what may properly be described as Sovereign Lawlessness—a condition in which a dominant actor signals to the entire country that he is answerable to nobody except the ultimate source of personal power, standing effectively above Parliament, Cabinet, the courts, traditional institutions, and the citizenry.
In constitutional theory and political science, this concept describes a dangerous mutation of state authority. It combines Carl Schmitt’s notion of the sovereign as the actor who decides on the exception with James Madison’s warning regarding “parchment barriers”—the structural reality that constitutional texts become ineffective when institutions lack the capacity or will to enforce them.
Sovereign Lawlessness emerges when state power becomes detached from legal justification and accountability. Law ceases to function as a neutral framework governing society and instead becomes an instrument deployed selectively against opponents while granting effective immunity to those exercising power. Authority is no longer validated by constitutional office, legal process, or democratic delegation, but by the capacity to coerce and the willingness to exercise coercion publicly. The sovereign is not merely the actor who exercises power. He is the actor who demonstrates, repeatedly and publicly, that legal restraints no longer meaningfully apply to him.
The pattern extends far beyond the unlawful detention of political opponents. General Muhoozi Kainerugaba has increasingly projected himself as a parallel source of state authority, exercising powers that belong neither to his office nor to the military institution he commands. In one extraordinary instance, he publicly declared that he had cancelled the Security Roads and Expressway Monitoring Project (SRG), a major government undertaking involving the Republic of Turkey and carrying obligations reportedly worth trillions of shillings. Whether legally effective or not, such pronouncements create uncertainty regarding Uganda’s international commitments and expose the country to reputational damage, diplomatic embarrassment, and potentially significant financial consequences.
The same pattern is visible in his repeated public threats against political opponents. Leaders across the political spectrum—including Dr. Kizza Besigye, NUP President Robert Kyagulanyi, Leader of the Opposition Joel Ssenyonyi, and Hon. Ibrahim Ssemujju Nganda—have variously been subjected to threats of arrest, detention, political replacement, or worse. Ordinary political disagreement is increasingly framed through the language of military containment rather than democratic contestation. Most explicitly, the CDF publicly stated his intention to name a Leader of the Opposition of his choice to replace Ssenyonyi, completely subverting the constitutional mandate of opposition parties in Parliament.
Equally disturbing is the deliberate cultivation of ethnically and historically charged narratives. Through repeated invocations of his claimed Chwezi ancestry and rhetoric perceived by many as triumphalist and exclusionary, the General has introduced into national discourse themes that risk deepening social divisions in a country whose stability has historically depended upon careful management of ethnic and regional sensitivities. At the same time, General Muhoozi has openly immersed himself in partisan political activity through the Patriotic League of Uganda (PLU), notwithstanding the constitutional requirement that serving members of the Uganda People’s Defense Forces remain politically non-partisan.
This development is not disconnected from Uganda’s political history. Rather, it reflects a long-standing pattern in which independent centers of influence are systematically neutralized before they can mature into meaningful alternatives to executive authority. The fate of Dr. Kizza Besigye, the political isolation of Amama Mbabazi, the dismantling of General Kale Kayihura’s security networks, and the curtailment of Rebecca Kadaga’s independent parliamentary influence all illustrate variations of the same principle. Most recently, the political difficulties confronting Anita Among arguably follow a similar historical trajectory. The principle is quintessentially Machiavellian: a ruler must never permit the emergence of an independent center of political gravity capable of rivaling the throne.
Yet under General Muhoozi, this logic appears to have undergone a significant mutation. The earlier model relied upon legal processes, bureaucratic manoeuvres, and institutional management to preserve a veneer of constitutional order. The emerging model increasingly dispenses with subtlety. It does not merely manipulate institutions; it publicly humiliates them. Threatening the Buganda Kingdom, its Katikkiro, and its media platforms for reporting on a matter of public concern represents an attempt to subordinate one of Uganda’s most enduring centers of cultural and historical legitimacy to raw military authority. Previously, when summoned to appear before a Parliamentary Committee, General Muhoozi refused to attend, derisively dismissing the Committee members. Journalists and independent media outlets like NTV and the Daily Monitor are openly labelled as “circus clowns,” alongside the ominous declaration that “those days are over” because leadership has been handed to his generation.
Most significantly, these developments raise unavoidable questions about presidential responsibility. The Constitution designates the President as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and vests in him ultimate civilian authority over the military establishment. Yet despite repeated public controversies involving the Chief of Defense Forces—ranging from threats against political opponents and traditional institutions to admissions of unlawful detention and declarations affecting matters of state policy—there has been no visible effort to publicly restrain, discipline, or disavow such conduct.
In constitutional democracies, silence can itself become politically consequential. When a subordinate repeatedly exercises extraordinary power without correction, citizens inevitably begin to ask whether that power is being exercised with tacit approval. The issue is no longer merely the conduct of the subordinate. It becomes a question of whether the constitutional chain of accountability remains operational at all. Where authority appears to flow not through institutions but through personal and familial relationships, public confidence in constitutional governance inevitably deteriorates.
Uganda’s trajectory is not unique. Across Africa, republics have often been weakened when institutions were subordinated to family succession projects. In the Chadian model, following the death of President Idriss Déby in 2021, the constitutional succession framework was set aside as military authorities dissolved key structures to install his son, Mahamat Déby. The Togolese precedent offers an example of institutional capture; following the death of President Gnassingbé Eyadéma in 2005, the military facilitated the installation of his son, Faure Gnassingbé, using legislative institutions to regularise an extra-constitutional transfer of power. In the Mobutuist model of Zaire, meaningful coercive power was progressively concentrated within elite units personally loyal to Mobutu Sese Seko, draining practical authority from formal state offices. While Uganda’s circumstances remain distinct, repeated public declarations by General Muhoozi expressing his desire to succeed his father as President have naturally generated public debate regarding the future relationship between military authority, dynastic succession, and constitutional governance.
The anxiety now gripping many Ugandans stems from a disturbing shift: ordinary civic activity increasingly risks being framed as subversion. Activities ordinarily protected under Chapter Four of the Constitution—political discussion, media engagement, public criticism, and civic mobilisation—are increasingly treated as security concerns. Most alarmingly, the logic of intimidation has begun extending even to senior figures within the state itself. When Major General (Rtd) Kahinda Otafiire publicly raised concerns about rogue security elements within the Police Crime Intelligence Directorate allegedly involved in unlawful killings, the response was not an institutional inquiry. Instead, he became the subject of public threats from military figures, with the CDF warning that the minister had “provoked lions enough” and was dangerously close to being arrested. Such incidents reinforce the terrifying perception that constitutional office no longer guarantees protection from arbitrary, personalised power.
When institutions fail, constitutional responsibility does not disappear. The Constitution of Uganda locates sovereignty in the people. Article 1(1) explicitly provides that all power belongs to the people, while Article 3 imposes a mandatory injunction and a supreme constitutional right upon every citizen to defend the Constitution against efforts to subvert the established constitutional order. This does not require violence; indeed, constitutional fidelity demands precisely the opposite. It requires lawful, organised, and principled resistance to illegality. Under the lawful authority of Article 3, Uganda’s terrified population can utilise specific, asymmetric mechanisms to raise the political cost of lawlessness.
First, public servants remain custodians of legality through bureaucratic constitutionalism. To protect the state apparatus from absolute capture, civil servants and professional officers can insist upon strict procedural compliance, demand formal written instructions, document irregular directives, and maintain meticulous administrative records to slow and expose unconstitutional exercises of power.
Second, where domestic remedies prove inadequate due to institutional capture, citizens and civil society organisations must systematically bypass local bottlenecks through regional and international litigation. Invoking supranational regional mechanisms, such as the East African Court of Justice (EACJ), places the regime under international legal scrutiny. Articles 6(d) and 7(2) of the EAC Treaty legally bind member states to the principles of good governance, democracy, the rule of law, and social justice, while Article 30(1) allows any resident of a Partner State to challenge the legality of state actions. Crucially, as established in milestones like James Katabazi & 21 Others v. Secretary General of the EAC, the EACJ has consistently affirmed its jurisdiction to review human rights violations when framed as fundamental breaches of the Treaty’s rule of law clauses. Because EACJ judges sit entirely outside the reach of local military deployment, regional litigation dramatically increases the diplomatic and economic costs of unconstitutional conduct.
Third, the digital age allows citizens to turn threats into legal exhibits through meticulous documentation and evidence preservation. The principal actors of this current overreach are leaving an undeniable, primary trail of their own lawlessness. Every public threat, admission of unlawful conduct, and documented abuse should be permanently archived. Today’s reckless social media post becomes tomorrow’s legal exhibit when international bodies look to enforce targeted transnational financial and travel sanctions under frameworks such as the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act—a path previously seen when General Kale Kayihura was sanctioned in 2019 for his alleged role in corruption and serious human rights abuses.
Finally, because divide-and-rule methods rely on the isolation of individual targets, the most effective response is building institutional solidarity. When traditional cultural institutions such as the Buganda Kingdom, religious bodies, professional associations like the Uganda Law Society, civil society organisations, and independent media explicitly align, they form an immense social bloc.
Constitutional governance survives when institutions collectively refuse to stand alone, or to validate personalised tyranny by whatever name it is called.
Sovereign Lawlessness is ultimately unstable. A political order that simultaneously intimidates the judiciary, weakens Parliament, threatens traditional institutions, attacks the media, and marginalises constitutional safeguards gradually erodes its own foundations. The Constitution anticipated moments of institutional failure and therefore placed ultimate sovereignty not in the military, not in political parties, and not in individuals, but in the people themselves.
The challenge facing Uganda today is not simply whether its institutions can survive. It is whether its citizens, acting lawfully and collectively under the authority of Article 3, can preserve the constitutional republic before personalised military power supplants it entirely. The writer is a Senior Advocate and former Minister. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
