By Praise Aloikin Opoloje
Every January 26th, Uganda pauses to celebrate Liberation Day, marking the National Resistance Movement’s (NRM) victory in 1986 and the end of dictatorship and civil unrest. State ceremonies are organised, speeches delivered, and patriotic music fills the air. The day is framed as a national rebirth, a moment when Uganda shook off tyranny and stepped into freedom under President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni.
For many years, this narrative has been repeated with confidence and conviction: that liberation saved the country, restored dignity, and laid the foundation for democracy.
However, nearly four decades later, questions arise about what Uganda was liberated from and what it was liberated into.
President Museveni has often explained that his decision to go to the bush was triggered by electoral fraud in the 1980 elections. The liberation war was framed as a moral and political necessity — a fight against stolen votes, repression, and the silencing of the people’s will.
It was presented as a struggle to restore democratic governance and ensure that power truly belonged to citizens rather than to a small, violent elite. Many Ugandans supported or sympathised with that cause because it promised something fundamental: that never again would the state turn against its own people.
Today, the ideals that justified the armed struggle – free and fair elections, political participation, and tolerance of dissent – feel increasingly hollow. The language of democracy remains, but the lived experience tells a different story.
Elections in Uganda have become high-risk affairs, not only for candidates but for ordinary citizens. Rather than moments of civic celebration, they often resemble security operations. Streets are patrolled by armed personnel. Opposition rallies are blocked. Internet access is restricted. Entire communities live under the quiet threat of surveillance and retaliation. Participation in politics, which should be a right, begins to feel like an act of courage.
Instead of ballots inspiring hope, they inspire fear.
Recent election cycles have been marked by heavily militarised environments, mass arrests, enforced disappearances, and routine intimidation of opposition leaders and their supporters. Stories of people being picked up in unmarked vans — the now infamous “drones” — have become disturbingly common. Families wait anxiously for news of loved ones who vanish without explanation. In many cases, there is no warrant, no formal charge, no acknowledgement. People simply disappear.
In the most recent election cycle, two deputy presidents of the National Unity Platform were abducted, while another was arrested and charged with terrorism. Such incidents would once have shocked the nation. Today, they barely register as breaking news. Abductions have become so normalised that they occur in broad daylight, sometimes followed by official confirmation or even thinly veiled boasting on social media by those responsible.
This reality sits uneasily alongside Museveni’s own earlier condemnation of Idi Amin’s regime, when he wondered how a person could simply “disappear like a needle.” That metaphor once captured the horror of state violence. Now, it feels like an eerily accurate description of present-day Uganda. The chains he promised to break seem not to have disappeared; they have merely evolved, becoming more sophisticated, more bureaucratic, and sometimes more subtle — but no less restrictive.
While speaking at Janani Luwum Day commemorations in 2014, President Museveni dismissed Idi Amin as an “idiot,” arguing that his downfall came from imposing his incompetence on the entire nation. Amin’s brutality, he has repeatedly said, is what pushed him and his colleagues to take up arms. The liberation struggle was therefore presented as a rejection of lawlessness and cruelty.
Yet, today’s Uganda increasingly invites troubling comparisons with the very past the NRM claims to have rescued the country from.
Human rights offer a sobering measure of this decline. Civil society organisations — critical spaces for accountability, advocacy, and citizen engagement — have been systematically restricted. Licences are suspended or cancelled, often just days before elections or during politically sensitive moments. Offices are raided. Bank accounts are frozen. Leaders are questioned or harassed. These closures are rarely about compliance or regulation; they are about control. Independent voices are treated not as partners in democracy, but as threats to be neutralised.
When civic space shrinks, citizens lose more than organisations. They lose platforms to speak, to organise, and to demand accountability. Silence becomes safer than participation.
The human cost of this environment is even more disturbing. Hundreds of Ugandans have lost their lives in episodes of politically linked violence. Protesters have been shot. Bystanders caught in crossfire. Families shattered without justice or closure. Perhaps most chilling was the public remark by the Chief of Defence Forces, who is also the President’s son, lamenting that security forces had “underperformed” because the number of deaths was “too low.” Such a statement, made without apology or consequence, tells us just how far the country has drifted from the ideals of liberation and accountability. When death is measured as performance, something fundamental has broken.
In Uganda today, dissent follows a familiar and grim script. Critics of the government — whether well-known figures like Dr. Kizza Besigye and Dr. Sarah Bireete, or ordinary citizens whose names never make headlines — face arrests, prolonged detention, and endless court appearances. Prison has become a recurring destination for those who speak out. Court processes stretch for months or years, draining finances and morale. Even when acquitted, the punishment has already been served through harassment and exhaustion.
Bail, though guaranteed by the Constitution, increasingly feels like a privilege reserved for the politically compliant. Laws that were meant to protect rights are interpreted in ways that restrict them. For many, the justice system no longer appears as a shield for liberty, but as a tool for enforcing silence.
This transformation is perhaps the most painful irony of all. Liberation promised the rule of law. What many experience instead is the rule by law — where legal processes are weaponised to legitimise repression.
And beyond the headlines, the effects seep quietly into everyday life. Citizens begin to self-censor. Journalists avoid certain topics. Families warn their children to “stay away from politics.” Fear becomes normalised, woven into daily decision-making. When a society reaches the point where speaking freely feels dangerous, liberation begins to look like a distant memory rather than a present reality.
This situation forces a painful reckoning. If the liberation struggle was meant to restore dignity, freedom, and democratic governance, what remains of that promise today? Was liberation truly about freeing the country, or just replacing one power centre with another? Did Uganda escape dictatorship, or adopt a slower, more sophisticated version?
The deeper question isn’t whether liberation happened, but who benefited. Ordinary citizens face restrictions, while a small elite thrives. Power has concentrated, institutions defend authority, and leadership resembles family inheritance, blending into state structures.
History teaches that Liberation isn’t a single event; it’s a continuous process needing accountable institutions, active citizens, and leaders open to challenge. Without these, liberation becomes mythology, justifying power rather than questioning it.
As Uganda marks another Liberation Day, these questions demand honest reflection, not just patriotic slogans. Can a nation celebrate liberation while citizens live in fear, dissent is punished, and elections are battlefields? If liberation meant breaking chains, are Ugandans now dealing with new, less visible ones?
If liberation once meant breaking chains, then today many Ugandans find themselves asking whether those chains were simply replaced with new ones — less visible, perhaps, but just as heavy.
Until freedom is experienced not only in speeches but in everyday life, the celebration will always feel incomplete.
And the question will continue to echo each January:
Liberated — or merely transferred from shackles to chains?
No Comments yet!