By Praise Aloikin Opoloje
Uganda’s elections are routinely described by state authorities as “peaceful,” a claim repeated with such regularity that it has come to function less as a factual assessment than as a narrative shield. Violence, in this telling, is either denied outright or reduced to “isolated incidents” or “lawful arrests” involving “indisciplined elements.” Yet a closer examination of the pre-election period reveals a pattern of coercion, intimidation, and physical violence that rarely enters official tallies.
January 4th, 2025. It is the mid-hours of the afternoon.
The sonorous sounds of pre-recorded kadodi beats, now signature to Robert Kyagulanyi’s campaign trail, ring intermittently in the air. The chants that ride those beats, “Eh Bobi, Bobi,” create an atmosphere that almost pulls you in, invites you to surrender to the moment.
But if you place any premium on your life, if the smell of blood unsettles you, you might want to stay away.
The air in Sironko hangs heavy with dust from traffic, stirred endlessly by roadworks along the Nalugugu–Namagumba road.
For Kyagulanyi and his supporters, however, this road would soon smell of something else entirely. Blood. Just as the campaign trail has smelled of blood in so many other parts of the country before.
A few hours later — predictably — a doctor part of the campaign, Dr. Hamza Lubulwa, is shot at close range.
He is travelling in a Toyota Wish, registration number UBM 430K, together with Dr. Uthman Wetaaka, the Mayor of Mbale Industrial Division. Dr. Wetaaka later recounts the events that led to the ordeal.
“We were coming from Buyaga Town Council. When we reached Nalugugu, police were trying to stop boda boda riders from following the Kyagulanyi convoy. Our vehicle was the last. As soon as our car passed, they crossed their vehicle to block the road and started beating the boda boda riders very badly.
We were forced to open our car and ask the police not to beat them. To just tell them they don’t want them to continue. One of them came and hit our car. That’s when we knew we were in danger.”
On their way to Budadiri Town Council, police officers cornered the vehicle being driven by Dr. Lubulwa. They beat all the occupants, dragged Hamza out, and began kicking him repeatedly. Then one officer drew a pistol and shot him at close range.
Clad in NUP red, Dr. Lubulwa collapses unconscious. He is rushed into an NUP ambulance.
The cries of supporters rupture the air.
“We have been peaceful. Why are you killing us?” “Why are you killing us?”
“What have we done?”
“The state takes us as enemies.”
“We are just moving. We are campaigning. We are peaceful.”
Dr. Wetaaka stands nearby, the Uganda flag draped across his body now with Dr. Hamza’s blood. He is visibly traumatised. He demands answers from the police officers. He shouts, “We will remain strong,” but the strength sounds borrowed, distant, forced.
He tries — and fails — to stop the tears.
His comrades hold him back. They keep saying, “Calm down.” “Hold him.” And almost reflexively, as though they know that even grief might be construed as provocation, they keep adding, “He is just traumatised.”
As if pain itself has become a crime.
What follows scenes like Sironko is not investigation, accountability, or acknowledgment of harm. It is paperwork.
Within hours of the shooting, the Uganda Police Force issued an official account through the Regional Police Spokesperson, Rogers Taitika. The statement did not reference a shooting. It did not acknowledge the use of live ammunition. It did not identify any officer involved.
Taitika stated that Dr. Hamza’s injuries resulted from a struggle after resisting lawful arrest. According to police, he overtook the convoy at speed, ignored orders to stop, nearly collided with a security vehicle, and was intercepted. During the ensuing scuffle, police said, he sustained a head wound and was taken to hospital. The shooting, in this version, disappears entirely.
The language was familiar. Words that carry authority, but absorb responsibility. And this pattern, is not unique to Sironko. As with Sironko, the emphasis police accounts is not on the act of violence but on context management: crowd control, indiscipline, disorder, provocation. The violence itself is rendered incidental.
In Mbarara, a peaceful campaign rally descended into violence marked by arrests, beatings, and the disappearance of supporters and journalists. More than 100 people, including parliamentary candidates, foot soldiers, and media workers, were arrested and detained. Police later claimed the arrests targeted suspects linked to earlier campaign crime. What was described officially as “law enforcement” functioned, in practice, as intimidation and disruption of legitimate political activity.
Speaking on The Big Talk with Canary Mugume, the Defence and Military Spokesperson Felix Kulayigye asserted that the state does not abduct individuals but only carries out lawful arrests, adding that no one is arrested for belonging to a different political party.
For many opposition supporters and candidates, this claim rings hollow. The experience on the ground suggests patterns that fall squarely within the lived meaning of abduction and violence regardless of official terminology.
As election day approaches, threats have also extended to opposition leadership. Kyagulanyi publicly warned of a plot to arrest him before polling day, alleging that the aim would be to provoke unrest similar to November 2020, justify mass arrests, and enable widespread military deployment. He further alleged plans to provoke violence in eastern Uganda, including Mbale City, through senior police officers, and accused security agencies of infiltrating his party with civilians dressed in NUP colours to manufacture incidents.
The Uganda Police Force dismissed these allegations as baseless and inflammatory, insisting that all operations would be conducted within the law to ensure tranquil elections. The Uganda Peoples Defence Forces echoed this position, warning that it was monitoring what it described as opposition “machinations.”
Meanwhile, violence has not been confined to candidates and supporters. Journalists covering electoral events have faced assaults, arrests, and harassment by security agencies. On 27 March 2025, after two weeks of attacks by masked anti-terrorism operatives, police, and soldiers, three major media houses withdrew their reporters from by-election coverage in Kampala, citing safety concerns. The Committee to Protect Journalists described election coverage in Uganda as “alarmingly dangerous,” warning that the integrity of the January 2026 elections depends on ending impunity for attacks on the press.
Civil society actors have also been targeted. In Kampala, police arrested Sarah Bireete, a prominent human rights lawyer and director of the Centre for Constitutional Governance, after surrounding her home with security forces. Bireete, a vocal critic of the increasing militarisation of civic space ahead of the elections, was taken into custody without immediate disclosure of charges. She was later charged with disclosing personal data contrary to section 35(1) and (2) of the Data Protection and Privacy Act, Cap 97.
Alongside this physical and psychological violence runs a parallel administrative process that quietly achieves the same end. Opposition candidates are nominated, verified, and gazetted, only to be disqualified later on technical grounds including, but not limited to, alleged deficiencies in nominators. These disqualifications, occurring after campaigns have begun, strip candidates of participation without a single baton being raised, yet their effect is equally exclusionary.
Violence, as these practices reveal, is not confined to election day or measurable fatalities. It is embedded in threats, arrests, disappearances, forced withdrawals, media suppression, and administrative erasure. Official Police language reduces these acts to “isolated incidents” and “lawful operations,” but repetition normalises abuse, and denial renders it invisible.
Peace, in this context, is not the absence of violence. It is the success of a system that ensures violence does not appear in the final count.
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