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Habibi, on August 3, 2026, President Museveni wrote a missive responding to veteran journalist Andrew Mwenda’s “investigations” into a one Stephen Nuwagaba.
Prior to Mwenda – and later his publication, The Independent’s writing about Nuwagaba – not much was known about the 27-year-old, who is said to claim proximity to Mossad and other intelligence agencies.
Regardless, Mwenda wrote of Nuwagaba as a chief villain; a man who had Uganda’s “State House and security agencies under siege” to use The Independent’s diction, and was so cunning that he hoodwinked the former speaker and her husband by playing each against the other as he made money from the scheme.
That’s not all, Mwenda also accused Nuwagaba of doing a lot of the things that Ugandan state operatives are accused of – or seen – doing every now and then, including driving vehicles with covered numberplates, soliciting bribes, and authoring fake intelligence reports.
Interestingly, while Museveni’s response mentions Nuwagaba several times, he is quickly relegated to the footnotes and the missive shifts into a defence of the President’s record on human rights, especially torture. So, reading the missive, I couldn’t help but wonder, was it really a response to Andrew Mwenda as stated in the title?
For context, just six days earlier, CIVICUS, a global civil society alliance and a group of 246 global civil society organisations, wrote to the United Nations, African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and the East African Community calling for an end to “escalating repression in Uganda.”
Two days later, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk issued a scathing statement “denouncing… the ongoing crackdown on dissent, erosion of the rule of law, increased military involvement in civilian institutions, and shrinking civic spaces” in Uganda.
It is highly likely that Andrew Mwenda’s piece gave Museveni the perfect cover to respond to those organisations without having to mention them, in the typical Museveni style.
Like the saying goes, God truly has an interesting sense of humour because, at the time Museveni published his response, saying he has not in 56 years ordered or presided over torture, a video of Sam Mugumya, a political activist and former personal assistant of Kizza Besigye who has been missing since September of last year, surfaced online.
Mr Mugumya previously spent close to eight years detained in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Even then, he came out on his two feet. The video of him circulating on social media shows a man crippled and unable to walk without an aid!
What, then, would explain the circumstances of Mugumya in Uganda under the leadership of Museveni? Not surprisingly, a big part of Museveni’s missive was dedicated to creating a gulf between his and the regime of Idi Amin Dada.
What was surprising though, is that for what must be the very first time, he says some of the people Amin’s regime executed were members of the rebel outfit formed in the early 1970s, the Front for National Salvation (FRONASA), which he formed and led.
Until now, most of what Museveni has written about Idi Amin created a picture of a lunatic president who used the army to inflict the most imaginable pain on Ugandans. However, going by his account in the missive, Idi Amin executed 11 members of the rebel group on February 11, 1973.
Crucially, the date provided for the executions falls about six months after Idi Amin’s Uganda was invaded from Tanzania by Ugandan rebels in September 1972. One of the people mentioned in Museveni’s missive is Karuhanga.
According to the story on the front page of “Voice of Uganda” that Museveni attached in his missive, “Karuhanga… was found guilty of harbouring guerillas by a military tribunal in Kampala.”
This suggests that the executed members of FRONASA were subjected to a form of trial before the military tribunal, sentenced to death, and then executed. This begs the ageold Ugandan questions, how free and fair were these trials if the “judges” were appointed, and answerable to Amin alone?
Would Mr Karuhaanga have stood a better chance if he was tried before an impartial civilian judge? Would he be alive today? Since 1971, Museveni the civilian, military man, minister, and president has cultivated a symbol of the president Uganda does not need.
Among others, that president is not one who gets to the position without the mandate of Ugandans, one who engages in torture of civilians, illegal detention, and extrajudicial killings.
He normally summarises all this by using a four-letter word – Amin – who he accuses of committing all these crimes against the people of Uganda.
However, for many Ugandans following the trial of Doctor Kizza Besigye in the High Court – ironically, Besigye is charged with treason just like Museveni’s FRONASA friends in the ‘70s – seeing the pictures of a tortured Mugumya, the photo of Lukwago and Eddy Mutwe in the “basement” after their abduction, the president will have to do more than writing missives to create the gulf he needs between his government and that of Amin.
At best, the missive can be a good start.
The writer is the deputy Team Leader at Agora Centre for Research.
