By Lawel Muhwezi
During a recent podcast shoot with Eron Kizza and Aloikin Praise, something small but unsettling happened. A moment that replayed in my mind with the stubbornness of a memory that wants to teach you more than you’re ready to learn. We were discussing political prisoners in Uganda: the terror, the complacency of the justice system that has become commonplace.
Before the shoot, my mind was still stuck on a moment that had happened during the preparatory stages—the chit-chat before getting on set, Eron was sharing his experience in Luzira, and Aloikin turned to me with a light smile, saying, “Unlike Eron and me, you haven’t been to prison.” I smiled it off, but inside, something cracked open. It wasn’t shame or fear of missing out on a shared rite of passage. It was the realization that in Uganda today, imprisonment has become a mark of consciousness, not criminality.
Disturbingly, I began wondering why some of Uganda’s most alive, morally awake, and socially conscious individuals end up behind the walls of Luzira and Kitalya? Kizza Besigye, Eron Kizza, and Sarah Bireete recently. Why do our bravest, not our worst, rot in places designed for the condemned? Paulo Freire (1970) once wrote that systems of domination fear the “humanization of the oppressed” more than rebellion itself. I left the studio that day convinced that our prisons have evolved from places of separation into places of sequestration, where the state quarantines the danger of an awakened citizenry.
This is why I find myself disagreeing respectfully with Spire Ssentongo’s evocative title “What Died When We Lived.” It assumes we remained alive when everything was collapsing. I see it is a country that decayed with its people. When governance crumbled, institutions eroded, and civic space shrank, we didn’t stand untouched; we shrank too. We died with the systems. We adjusted. We adapted. We bent. Some of us even became interpreters of the very structures that deformed us. Our silence became participation.
Consider the civic space. As it narrowed through laws like the Public Order Management Act and administrative embargoes on assembly, Ugandans retreated voluntarily. When electoral malpractice intensified, instead of directing frustration at the architects of manipulation, we deflected it onto those who dared resist. We blamed Dr. Kizza Besigye for “failing to remove the dictatorship.” We blamed Robert Kyagulanyi for “strategic mistakes.” It was a tragic psychological misfire, a phenomenon common in oppressed communities, as noted by scholars of resistance psychology, Freire (1970). We internalized the architecture of power, turning on our own, and in doing so, validated the very system we claimed had broken us.
And this is why I argue that the accurate title for our condition is not “What Died When We Lived”, but “What Remained When Everything Died”. The answer, stripped of poetry, is chilling: very little. And what did remain were our few conscious citizens who are now swiftly identified, isolated, and delivered to Luzira. The state, facing no ideological threats, no institutional resistance, and no widespread civic awakening, has reduced the struggle to a simple logic: identify life, remove it. Identify consciousness, confine it. Identify moral clarity, arrest it.
My argument is that prisons in Uganda have become homes for the living. Unlike what they were meant to be, a place where the criminals are isolated from society, they are now places where the conscience is isolated and taken. On release, they either abandon their conscience at the prison gates or return, as seen with Kizza Besigye and Olivia Lutaaya.
Increasingly, our prisons have become what Chinua Achebe (1983) once called the “house of the living dead,” except in our case, ironically, they are the houses of the living. They are the last remaining sites where moral vitality can be found in unfiltered form. Luzira has become more than a correctional facility; it has become a political shrine, a place where citizens transform into embodiments of national conscience.
Those who have kept the flame alive, Besigye and countless others, remain not because they refuse comfort, but because they refuse to die inside. Fanon (1963) warned that oppressed societies often reach a point where “life becomes indistinguishable from submission.” Those who resist the merging and those who insist on remaining alive become intolerable to the system.
And so, prison awaits them.
If Uganda’s struggle is to mean anything, then the work ahead is what Freire termed conscientização, the slow, deliberate reawakening of a population that has been conditioned to accept decay as normal. This awakening must cut across divides: opposition, NRM, apolitical youth, religious communities, and civil servants. Everyone. A dead population cannot resist. Only the living can. And perhaps our task is to bring so many Ugandans back to life that they cannot possibly fit into all the prisons.
That afternoon in the studio, at the end of the shoot, I realized that Aloikin’s remark unsettled me because it carried an unspoken truth: in today’s Uganda, the moral geography is inverted. Imprisonment is a badge of presence, not absence; of life, not death. The prisons confer bravery, teach citizenship, and, unintentionally, shelter the country’s remaining conscience.
What remains, then, when everything has died? Only the conscious. And because they remain alive, they are taken away.
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