We, the people, and our leaders are in terrible jeopardy. An ominous cloud hangs over us as the 2022 elections approach. The retiring Chief Justice David Maraga was perceptive when he warned of drumbeats of political war. His words gave me an eerie feeling. A Luo in an election year. How can we bring these bloody elections to an end?

The Kenyan election cycle has become synonymous with bloodletting, which has disproportionately affected the Luo. The general election conjures up memories of 1969. The first parliament was ending in December and Kenya was to conduct the first post-independent general election. Following the 1966 fall-out at the Limuru Convention, a frightened government  sought to hold on to power at all costs. This would not be easy. The opposition Kenya People’s Union (KPU) formed in 1966 presented them represented a threat. To make sure they retained power, Jomo Kenyatta sanctioned the now infamous oath-taking to forge the uthamaki ideology to keep the presidency within the Gikuyu oligarchy and mobilise the Gikuyu folk around this narrative, thus binding the Gikuyu, Embu and Meru communities (GEMA) in a spiritual and political pact under KANU in an imaginary nation of Uthamakistan.

On July 5th they gunned Tom Mboya down in broad daylight. Although Mboya was a KANU leader, according to David Goldsworthy in Tom Mboya: The man Kenya Wanted to Forget, he had to be eliminated because he posed a threat to the presidency. Killed by a bullet coated in the blood of the oath. Since we have been conditioned to understand politics through the prism of tribe,  Mboya’s assassination snapped the already loose cord that tied the Luo to the Kikuyu community after the fall-out of Jomo Kenyatta and Odinga Oginga in 1966 and the mass state-led propaganda Kenyatta and his cabal undertook to paint the Luo community to the Kikuyu as a backward and violent community. The resulting protests against President Kenyatta at Mboya’s requiem mass marked the beginning of animosities that are still felt today.

Although Kenya has remained silent about Mboya’s murder, the effects endure to this day. As Yvonne Owuor, winner of the 2003 Caine Prize for African Writing, aptly observes, after Mboya’s death Kenya gained a third official language after English and Kiswahili: Silence. But I wonder what to expect when a train stops at a lakeside town in 2022. In 1969 the train “offloaded men, women, and children. Displaced ghosts. In-between people. No one to blame. Most of the witnesses were dead. Others had vowed themselves to eternal silence. This was the same as death,” in the words of Yvonne.

After Mboya’s death, the events of 25 October 1969 in Kisumu exacerbated the despair among the Luo. Jomo Kenyatta had come to open Nyanza Provincial General Hospital which had been built with aid from Russia. Although Odinga was not invited, he arrived in force, for it was he who had started the project with Russia’s help. In the ensuing mayhem, the presidential escort and the paramilitary General Service Unit (GSU) shot their way through the crowd, killing many and not stopping the shooting for 25 kilometres outside the town.

If Mboya died, then everything that could die in Kenya did. Including school children standing in front of a hospital the head of state had come to open, lamented Yvonne. The events emptied central province of a people they now called cockroaches, nyamu cia ruguru (beasts from the west). Who spoke of this exile, or of the souls evicted from our world?

The provincial security apparatus had warned people to stay away from Kisumu because of the protests following the brazen assassination of Tom Mboya, but as political scientist Akoko Akech asks, “Why did the presidential security shoot children, children in Awasi, some 50km away from the hospital?”

The killings were framed as animosity between the Luo and Kikuyu communities, but they were not. It was a group in power using government machinery to crush a perceived enemy. The Luo were not fighting Kikuyu people in the violence that broke out as a large crowd menaced Kenyatta’s security. The security forces killed indiscriminately, hence the “Kisumu massacre”. While the official body count was 11, historians close to the event such as B.A. Ogot put the numbers at 100 people dead. The school pupils along the road at Awasi had come out to sing praises to their president but his security forces silenced them and sent them to their graves instead.

The people were silenced, the records expunged and the photographic and film evidence of the event destroyed, and we would not have seen the devastation were it not for the oft-reproduced single monochromatic photograph of the chaotic scene taken by Mohammed Amin, and Satwant Matharoo’s film footage that was shown to the British audiences by the WTN. Even the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) removed the oral eyewitness accounts and memoranda from its last report on the colonial and post-independence massacres. The now official record is an extract from the unofficial Report of the Commission on Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation.

In his book Exclusion and Embrace, Prof. Miroslav Volf captures the experience of the Luo people best when he avers, “We demonise and bestialise not because we do not know better, but because we refuse to know what is manifest and choose to know what serves our interests.” Hence, the proscription of KPU made Kenya a de facto single party state and established a pan-ethnic nationalism. The government accused KPU of being subversive, stirring up inter-ethnic strife, and accepting foreign money to promote anti-national activities, which included the building of the aptly named Russia Hospital that the president had come to open. Having demonised Nyanza Province, it was easy to exclude her from “national” development plans.

Unless we confront the past,  murders like that of the electoral official Chris Musando in 2017 will recur. Kenyan police have a long history of using excessive force against protesters, especially among the Luo in western Kenya. Of the over 1,100 people killed during the 2007 post-election violence, over 400 were shot by police in the Nyanza region. According to Human Rights Watch, in 2013 police killed at least five demonstrators in Kisumu who were protesting a Supreme Court decision that affirmed Uhuru Kenyatta’s election as president. And in June 2016 police killed at least five and wounded another 60 demonstrators in Kisumu, Homabay, and Siaya counties. The state acknowledging these crimes and making public apologies to the Luo will, in my view, end the continued violence against the community.

It is the duty of the current Kenyan state to reach out to the Luo community for the killings since 1969. If we can trace the records of  Nazi Germany atrocities during World War II, why can’t we do the same in Kenya? Why hasn’t any government felt the duty to at least apologise or acknowledge the trauma?

In December 1970, during a state visit to Poland which coincided with a commemoration of the Jewish victims of the Warsaw Ghetto, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt spontaneously dropped to his knees. Although he uttered no word during his Kneifall von Warschau, his Warsaw Genuflection, Brandt later wrote in his autobiography that upon “carrying the burden of the millions who were murdered, I did what people do when words fail them”. The Kenyan government should do for the Luo what Germany’s leaders did for the Jewish victims of the Nazis.

In 2011 German leaders again expressed deep remorse for the suffering their nation had inflicted on Poland and the rest of Europe during World War II. “I bow in mourning to the suffering of the victims,” German President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier said  at a ceremony in Warsaw. “I ask for forgiveness for Germany’s historical debt. I affirm our lasting responsibility,” the statesman said, calling the war a “painful legacy”. Where are the presidents of Kenya who have expressed such remorse?

Even if no one does, we remember. As long as it is remembered, the past is not just the past; it remains an aspect of the present. A remembered wound is an experienced wound. Toni Morrison is right when she says in Beloved that, “Deep wounds from the past can so much pain our present that, the future becomes a matter of keeping the past at bay”. Without apologies, the crimes are bound to recur and our wounds to remain uncovered.

I am terrified by the state’s silence, the wishing away of the crimes and the failure to reach out to the Luo community. While President Steinmeier has called WW II a “German crime” that his nation will never forget, Kenya’s leaders are quiet and want Kisumu forgotten. How can the Luo people forgive crimes no one owns? How can the scar they bear be concealed? I fear that without acknowledgment, ownership and apology, we cannot build any lasting bridges.

On January 8, 2020, Facebook removed 32 pages, 220 user accounts, 59 groups, and 139 Instagram profiles working to promote Ugandan president and National Resistance Movement (NRM) leader Yoweri Museveni. The accounts of at least six government employees and two PR firms were involved in the network taken down by Facebook for using fake and duplicate accounts and misleading pages to target public debate ahead of the January 14 presidential election.

According to a Facebook statement, they removed the assets “for violating our policy against government interference, which is coordinated inauthentic behavior on behalf of a government entity. This network originated in Uganda and targeted domestic audiences.”

The takedown was precipitated by a DFRLab investigation into the inauthentic assets.

The Facebook statement continued:

We found several clusters of connected activity where people relied on fake and duplicate accounts to manage Pages, impersonate at least one public figure in Uganda, comment on other people’s content, and post in multiple Groups at once to make their content appear more popular than it was. Some of these fake accounts had already been detected and disabled by our automated systems. In the fall of 2020, this network actively promoted StopHooliganism hashtag in response to protests against the arrests of the opposition candidate across social media services, including off Facebook.

This operation posted primarily in English. The first cluster of this activity focused on posting in support of the President of Uganda and the ruling party called National Resistance Movement (NRM). The second cluster posted about Lieutenant General Muhoozi Kainerugaba as a potential future presidential candidate. Finally, the last cluster focused on commenting on the opposition Pages, targeting the National Unity Platform in particular and the opposition candidate Robert Kyagulanyi [aka Bobi Wine], in addition to posting comments on the Pages of the government of Uganda. Much of this network’s posts were amplified by other fake accounts in the network. Some of these Pages reposted content from local news aggregators and pro-NRM blogs.

Three days following the takedown, Twitter removed a group of accounts corresponding to some of the accounts removed by Facebook. In response to the removal of NRM-linked assets on both social media platforms, the Ugandan government implemented a social media lockdown on January 12, preventing users from accessing social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as messaging applications such as WhatsApp. According to Museveni, the social media giants were not acting “equitably” and therefore would not be allowed to operate in the country.

The verified account of the government of Uganda stated that social media platforms would be banned in the country after NRM-linked accounts were taken down. (Source: @GovUganda/archive)

The DFRLab identified at least five user profiles associated with Government Citizens Interaction Center (GCIC) that were removed during the takedown. GCIC is a department of Uganda’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Ministry. Also included in the list were aspiring NRM politicians, an opposition member of parliament, and journalists working for pro-Museveni news organizations. The DFRLab found no evidence that the two PR firms included in the set were connected to the government for the purposes of promoting Museveni.

Government accounts

After Facebook announced that Ugandan government employees were implicated in the inauthentic network, the verified Twitter account associated with the government media center posted a tweet confirming that accounts “lost” in the Facebook takedown belonged to employees of the government.

WATCH: We demand that @Facebook & @Twitter write directly to the individuals that lost their accounts. Since @Facebook cited @MoICT_Ug in their statement, let them write to us so that there’s a chance for a fair hearing.
Accounts lost on Facebook belong to @GovUganda employees. pic.twitter.com/gGSDYkfgWI

— Uganda Media Centre (@UgandaMediaCent) January 12, 2021

A video posted by the government’s Media Centre demanding that Twitter and Facebook restore the removed accounts of government employees. (Source: @UgandaMediaCentre/archive)

The DFRLab identified five GCIC members whose accounts were removed during the takedown. Another account claimed to work for the ICT Ministry and Kampala Post in its Twitter bio.

Of the five accounts, three of them consistently posted pro-Museveni content and amplified the NRM ahead of the January 14 election, using the NRM slogan #SecuringYourFuture at the end of posts praising Museveni and his government. During the November anti-government protests, two of them used the hashtag #StopHooliganism, which had been inauthentically amplified on Twitter using old images of protests in the country as evidence of Bobi Wine supporters acting like hooligans. A page corresponding with the name of one of these employees was inactive during the lead-up to the election, though was primarily used to promote a campaign to become guild president of a Ugandan university and president of the Ugandan National Student’s Association.

The accounts actively promoted Museveni and worked to denigrate opposition candidate Bobi Wine. In early December after Wine started wearing protective gear to political rallies, one of the GCIC employees shared a post questioning why Wine had not been shot in the head after removing his helmet.

One government employee shared a post questioning why opposition candidate Bobi Wine was not shot in the head. (Source: Facebook)

However, GCIC and the ICT Ministry were not the only government organizations represented in the takedown — two Instagram accounts and 11 duplicate Facebook accounts associated with a spokesperson for Museveni’s son were also removed.

The majority of the accounts using the name of this individual contained a small handful of photographs, or else had not posted new content in years. From the profile pictures uploaded to the accounts, it appeared the accounts were split between two people — an official spokesperson for Muhoozi, and a young man using the same name.

Mysterious PR firms

Included in the takedown were two PR firms, with a combined following of over 10,000 accounts at the time they were removed. Despite the fact that they promoted Museveni and his government, the DFRLab found no indication that they were directly connected to the Ugandan government.

The DFRLab previously identified one of the firms, called Robusto Communications, in its preliminary report into the network. The firm advertised its services on Facebook and Twitter, and even claimed to be hiring for a job as a Twitter administrator for the company. Yet the company lacked at dedicated website. And though it is an incorporated entity, the only offline presence the DFRLab could find for it was a phone number that was shared by an online outlet calling itself Kampala Times, which was also removed during the Facebook takedown.

Both the Twitter and Facebook pages dedicated to the PR firm worked to promote Museveni and members of his parliament. On Twitter, Robusto Communications was part of a smaller network within the large takedown that tweeted the same copy and pasted text promoting Museveni and other members of his party.

Robusto Communications’ Twitter account was part of a small network that tweeted the same content. (Source: top row, left to right, @AbrahamMwesigye/archive; @WerikheM/archive; @rashid_kakaire/archive; @MercyAsiimwe2/archive; bottom row, left to right, @dickens_okello1/archive; @RobustoUg/archive; @AkechOlivia/archive; @KampalaTimes_/archive)

On Facebook, Robusto Communications worked to promote Museveni by sharing positive posts from inauthentic news organizations included in the takedown, such as Chimp Reports and Kampala Times. The page also stole news stories from legitimate Ugandan news sites such as the Daily Monitor without crediting them, in an attempt to make it appear more legitimate.

The Robusto Facebook page (right) stole the text and image for a news story from a popular Ugandan news site (left) seven hours after the story was originally posted. (Source: Daily Monitor/archive, left; RobustoUg/archive, right)

The second PR firm, named White Bear Communications, also actively promoted Museveni and his campaign. They appeared to use their social media accounts to advertise and promote companies and services, and, like Robusto Communications, advertised a position to work for the company shortly after the creation of its social media pages.

On Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, White Bear Communications started off by promoting its services, creating posts about business and marketing strategies, and advertising other companies. Unlike Robusto Communications, which started off promoting Museveni and members of his government, White Bear Communications appeared to operate as a more general interest advertising firm until October 2019.

White Bear Communications posted advertisements for a plethora of different companies. (Source: Instagram, top right; Facebook, top left; Twitter/archive, bottom)

On Twitter, the account continued to post advertisements for hotels and game lodges until October 12, 2019. @WhiteBearCOMM then was inactive until March 18, 2020, when it started consistently retweeting tweets by Museveni, Chimp Reports and other pro-NRM accounts. Any original tweets by @WhiteBearCOMM included hashtags such as #SecuringYourFuture or #SevoLution. Securing your future was Museveni’s campaign motto, and “Sevo” is a nickname for the president.

During the period in which the Twitter account was inactive, the Facebook page dedicated to White Bear Communications posted fewer advertisements and more celebrity gossip and world news, interspersed with content about Museveni. By November 2, 2020, when Museveni was nominated as the NRM’s presidential candidate, the White Bear Communications page started tagging posts with the hashtags #SecuringYourFuture, and sometimes #Sevolution.

In some instances, the White Bear Communications page copied content directly from Museveni’s social media pages, government accounts such as the Uganda National Roads Authority, or pro-Museveni pages such as NRM Achievements. Two weeks before the election took place the White Bear Communications page created several posts using content copied directly from Museveni’s official website, firmly aligning itself with the president. Most of the tweets were signed off using the hashtag #SecuringYourFuture, or #IWillVoteM7.

The Facebook page for White Bear Communications copied a tweet for Museveni’s official Twitter account. (Source: Facebook, left; @KagutaMuseveni/archive, right)

White Bear Communications also consistently retweeted and tagged a pro-Museveni account advertising different services as well as more politically oriented tweets. Similarly, this account tagged White Bear Communications in political tweets and advertisements.

Inauthentic Franks

In 2020 a number of anonymous Facebook accounts were set up to promote Museveni and his son, Muhoozi. The accounts contained no personal information about the users operating them and used stock images of Museveni or his son as profile pictures. Many of them used the surname “Frank.” While some contained the occasional generic status update, such as “I am thinking,” the majority were used exclusively to post pro-Museveni content or share posts from Museveni’s official page and other NRM-related pages.

Many of the accounts were also friends with one another and engaged with each other’s content. The content itself garnered significant engagement — even the first stock profile pictures of Museveni or Muhoozi uploaded to the some of the “Frank” accounts received over 100 likes.

Some of the content posted by the inauthentic “Frank” accounts received significant engagement. (Source: Facebook)

Politicians

Included in the takedown were accounts belonging to politicians and political aspirants.

Dixon Ampumuza, a member of the NRM, campaigned to be a member of parliament, however in August 2020 he pulled out of the race alleging his supporters were harassed by security personnel, according to Uganda Radio Network. However according to Chimp Reports, Ampumuza pulled out of the race because he did not agree with the mode of voting. Ampumuza went public with his account being taken down on Twitter, where he accused Facebook of criminalizing those who supported Museveni.

Ampumuza questioned Facebook’s decision to remove NRM-related content, asking if supporting Museveni was a crime. (Source: @dampumuza/archive, left; @dampumuza/archive, right)

Ampumuza’s LinkedIn page also claims he is the CEO of The Ugandan, a news website whose Facebook page was also removed in the January takedown for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior. The website itself stopped publishing new content after its corresponding Facebook page was removed on January 8.

The Facebook page allegedly belonging to opposition MP Cecilia Atim Ogwal was also removed. Ogwal has been a member of parliament since 1996 where she represents the Forum for Democratic Change, an opposition political party that received 35.61% of Ugandan votes in 2016, and only 3.24% in 2021.

Although it was not a verified account, Ogwal’s page appeared to be legitimately operated by the politician, regularly referring to discussions Ogwal lead in parliament shortly after the house adjourned. Unlike the other pages removed by Facebook, Ogwal’s page did not lobby for Museveni to be re-elected. It also vocally protested the application of COVID-19 regulations and standard operating procedures (SOPs) being utilized as tools to silence opposition candidates.

The page allegedly belonging to opposition MP Cecilia Atim Ogwal condemned police brutality and selective application of covid-19 SOPs to silence opposition. (Source: Facebook)

Although it did share one screenshot from a profile that was also removed, as well as one link to Chimp Reports, Ogwal’s page was a significant outlier in the takedown as it did not actively promote Museveni. However, the accounts included in the small network the DFRLab previously identified liked and amplified content from Ogwal.

Influencers and prominent accounts

Facebook and Twitter accounts that were particularly vocal during the protests after Bobi Wine was arrested in November 2020 were removed by both social media platforms. The accounts used old images of protests and riots in Uganda as evidence that Wine’s supporters were violent thugs, tagging each other in their posts in an attempt to amplify the hashtag #StopHooliganism.

Some of the influential accounts Facebook identified as part of the inauthentic network included a popular blogger and NRM supporter, another blogger who switched from supporting Wine to supporting Museveni ahead of the election, and the editor of Chimp Reports, one of the inauthentic news organizations included in the takedown.

Ultimately, the network of pages, accounts and groups worked together to amplify Museveni and his political party ahead of the January 14 election. The inclusion of prominent government employees in a network using coordinated inauthentic behavior to promote an incumbent president and the ruling party brings into question the authenticity of the National Resistance Movement’s campaign strategies.

–

This article was first published by Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. The DFRLab team in Cape Town works in partnership with Code for Africa.

When Yoweri Museveni was declared winner of the January 14 election in Uganda, the situation in Kampala and other towns and townships across the country remained calm. There were no spontaneous celebrations. His party’s secretariat would hours later organise a victory procession from the spot where the declaration was made to Kololo Airstrip, the venue where Museveni will take the oath of office for the sixth time on May 12. One could clearly see that the procession, which took place under tight security, was largely made up of paid participants.

The absence of spontaneous celebrations after Museveni is declared winner is not news; it has been like this before. Museveni being declared winner and his opponents disputing the results has been a ritual that has been repeated every five years since 1996. When Museveni defeated Paul Kawanga Ssemogerere in 1996 amidst accusations of rigging, Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, aka Bobi Wine, was 14 years old, too young to vote.

Much earlier – in 1980 – Museveni took part in his first presidential election as a candidate more than a year before Kyagulanyi was born. Museveni failed to win even in his own constituency on that occasion and the victory went to Milton Obote, the man who commanded the guns at the time. Museveni turned things in his favour when he started a war after that election and took control of the guns and the country’s leadership in 1986. He hasn’t looked back since.

Of course some Ugandans vote for Museveni, but perhaps they consider it too risky to openly celebrate. It is risky because many of their compatriots who vote against Museveni are angry at the establishment and do not understand how a Ugandan in full possession of their mental faculties can vote for Museveni in the year 2021. Many Ugandans have been attacked for showing support for Museveni, and when demonstrations take place, one would be well advised not to be caught wearing yellow, the colour of Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM).

Those Ugandans who don’t vote for Museveni believe that elections are habitually rigged in Museveni’s favour. And there is another group of Ugandans who have grown too despondent to participate in any election in which Museveni is a candidate. A regular commentator has over the past few months repeatedly wondered why Ugandans are keen to participate in polls whose outcome is known in advance.

The country is deeply divided and very few believe that the government is committed to democracy. An opinion poll that was conducted by Afrobarometer, whose results were released two days to the election, showed that whereas 78 per cent of Ugandans want their leaders to be chosen through periodic free and fair elections, only 36 per cent of the citizens are satisfied with how democracy works in Uganda. (Afrobarometer describes itself as an Africa-wide survey research project that measures citizen attitudes on democracy and governance, the economy, civil society, and other topics.)

That is the setting in which Kyagulanyi took on Museveni. The popstar-cum-politician whipped up emotions and motivated many – especially the youth – and ran a campaign against Museveni in particularly difficult circumstances. He had 64 days to campaign in 146 districts in what was his first ever countrywide tour as a politician. He had attempted to tour the country before the campaigns – and the law allows a presidential aspirant to conduct such a tour one year to the election – but the authorities blocked him. His music concerts were banned over three years ago when he made it clear that he harboured presidential ambitions.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to drop like manna from heaven for Museveni, and it was quickly seized upon to ensure that Kyagulanyi’s campaign activities in dozens of districts were blocked, while those in the districts he visited were over-policed and strictly controlled. To say that Kyagulanyi campaigned in the actual sense of the word would be to stretch matters. 

The same thing happened to the other candidates in the race. Museveni did not personally address rallies and limited himself to fairly small meetings with leaders of his party in different areas in observance of the rules that the electoral body had put in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19. But he has interacted with the same voters for decades and as in all previous campaigns, he again had the entire state machinery doing his bidding in every village, paid for by the taxpayer.

Like Kizza Besigye, who before him had challenged Museveni at the polls four times, Kyagulanyi ran his campaign through defiance and made it clear at the outset that he would not abide by the rules set by the electoral body ostensibly to control the spread of COVID-19;  he would only abide by the electoral laws as set out in the constitution and the relevant statutes. Although Kyagulanyi acknowledged that COVID-19 is real and had sent out messages asking Ugandans to protect themselves, he also pointed out that by the time the campaigns started, Ugandans were interacting freely and such restrictions were almost nonexistent in markets and other areas, and argued that it was not logical that the government should think that people could only contract COVID-19 at political events.

In any event, he added, the government had not showed a commitment to the fight against COVID-19 and, as an example, pointed out that whereas money had been appropriated to supply all Ugandans with masks six months before the campaigns started, millions of Ugandans still hadn’t received them.

Kyagulanyi would be vindicated when after the election – and having been declared winner – Museveni drove from his country home hundreds of kilometers from the capital, making several stopovers along the way and addressing crowds of people who were not observing the preventive measures that had been strictly enforced during the campaigns. The veil was off and the lie was laid bare the moment Museveni obtained the result he was after.

Kyagulanyi disregarded the regulation to have a maximum of 200 people per meeting and called mass rallies. The authorities held their breath for a moment, hoping that the popstar would fail to draw crowds in areas away from his native Buganda region and his efforts would collapse on themselves. When the campaigns kicked off on 9 November 2020, Kyagulanyi started with a bang in an area far away from his native land. The crowds kept growing bigger and the narrative that he was only popular in his native Buganda region collapsed as quickly as it had been been constructed by regime propagandists. As the days wore on Kyagulanyi continued to pick up steam as he went through the districts and his tour of Buganda region drew closer. The regime ran out of patience.

Kyagulanyi had scheduled rallies in the east on 17 November 2020, to be followed by his first rally in Buganda the following day. He visited Masaka –  the epicenter of anti-Museveni activities – on his first day in Buganda. The authorities couldn’t allow that so on the morning of 17 November, Kyagulanyi was arrested as he arrived at the venue of his scheduled rally. It took something like a garrison of the army and the police to arrest him, and after a mini scuffle the presidential candidate was whisked away like a hardcore criminal. The abduction was relayed live on social media and some of it was on television. Kyagulanyi’s supporters violently protested in Kampala, Masaka and other towns and after two days of rioting the security agencies had shot and killed at least 52 Ugandans. According to official records, two others were run over by vehicles that were caught up in the melee.

The effects of the events of 18 and 19 November are still in evidence all over Uganda. While Kyagulanyi has been under house arrest since election day and he disputes the results of the election – Museveni was declared winner with 58.64% with Kyagulanyi garnering 34.83% – his supporters have not raised their heads to protest. There are armed soldiers walking in single file every few hundred meters in Kampala and other urban centres, and Ugandans only have to look back at the events of two months ago to know that these armed men could kill them with little provocation.

President Museveni left no doubt at all whatsoever that this could when he spoke about the November protests and killings: “According to the police report, for instance, the five persons who died in Nansana were part of the rioting group. They had, apparently, “overpowered” the police. I will get the details of “over powering” the police. What actually happened? It is criminal to attack security forces by throwing stones or attempting to disarm them. Police will legitimately fire directly at the attackers if they fail to respond to the firing in the air. Many of the up-country police groups are not equipped with anti-riot equipment (shields, batons, water cannons, rubber bullets etc.) and should not be.  We should not have a country of rioters. It is the duty of everybody to keep the peace.”

It is therefore back to square one. The emergence of Kyagulanyi as his principal challenger excited many and ignited hitherto apolitical constituencies to rise up against Museveni. These groups include artistes with whom Kyagulanyi has interacted for decades and young Ugandans who were excited by the prospect of having a youthful president. But the optimism that was whipped up by Kyagulanyi’s superstar status has since dimmed. He is locked up in his own home and not even the American ambassador succeeded in meeting him when she tried last week. His lawyers and party officials have been pleading to meet with him so that, they say, they may prepare a petition against Museveni’s re-election.

After the 2016 election, Besigye was where Kyagulanyi now finds himself. He was locked up in his home from the day after the voting until the eve of Museveni’s inauguration – a period of three months – when he escaped and unexpectedly showed up in the busiest area of Kampala. Besigye was then arrested and flown in a military chopper to the remotest part of the country where he was charged with treason because he had declared himself winner of the election. The treason case has not been tried for five years and the state is clearly not interested in following through.

The objective – which was achieved – was to keep Besigye out of circulation and prevent him from organising a mass uprising, which Museveni’s government seems to believe is the only thing that can remove it from power. After the 2011 election, which Besigye again disputed, the opposition leader inspired what were dubbed walk-to-work protests, bringing Kampala to a standstill for months. Museveni is keen to ensure Kyagulanyi does not inspire such protests and his government has literally banned demonstrations; whoever tries to protest is met with brute force. On the other hand, those Ugandans who would perhaps like to protest against what they call a rigged election wouldn’t dare – the events of November are still very fresh in their minds.

Museveni has thrown at Kyagulanyi every weapon that he thinks might work. In an interview with an international television channel during the campaigns, he accused Kyagulanyi of being backed by foreigners and homosexuals and has repeated these claims many times over. Museveni made the same claims against Besigye, never mind that his stranglehold over Uganda for the last 35 years has been made possible in large measure by foreign funding.

A new accusation that has cropped up against Kyagulanyi is that he is promoting tribalism and sectarianism. Kyagulanyi is an ethnic Muganda and his tribesmen have for the first time since 1996 rejected Museveni and voted for Kyagulanyi. Museveni, however, has on each occasion since 1996 been overwhelmingly voted for by the Banyankole – his kinsmen – and most of western Uganda, but this does not come up in the tribalism talk that he and his spokespeople have now ignited. The import of what is happening is simple: Kyagulanyi, just like Museveni’s every opponent before him, will be fought by all means possible.

When all other methods fail, Museveni resorts to the use of force. In a video clip that went viral, Museveni vowed to obliterate Kyagulanyi’s group. A few days later, security forces arrested dozens of Kyagulanyi’s followers, accusing them of all sorts of crimes. Some of them are locked up by the military, accused of illegal possession of military equipment. The pressure exerted on Kyagulanyi was so intense that about a week to polling day he sent his children out of the country. He cut an isolated figure going into the election, only enjoying the company of his wife at home, with whom he now remains under house arrest. You can call it a home or a barracks, whichever you choose.

In the end, all the theories about whether Kyagulanyi would be a different proposition to Museveni collapse. It was always going to come to this; the history, age, religion, tribe or whatever other characteristic of whoever challenges Museveni doesn’t matter. When everything else fails Museveni resorts to the use of force. With his military strength still visibly intact, he will perhaps keep his foot on the gas peddle for as long as he can. Or maybe he will surprise us and engineer a negotiated exit.