President Museveni, the message is clear: it is time to release the 18 missing NUP supporters and Sam Mugumya.
Recently, you finally released our Kenyan brothers, Bob Njagi and Nicholas Oyoo, after 39 days of incommunicado detention. For weeks, the police denied holding them, the army denied it, the Attorney General denied their existence in any Ugandan detention facility, and the judiciary seemed to cover up, ruling that further demands for their production would be “akin to squeezing blood from a stone.”
And yet, as we all suspected, you confirmed the truth yourself: “We arrested them because they are experts in riots and are associated with Kyagulanyi’s group!”
During their detention, they were denied access to family, lawyers, or medical personnel. Their constitutional rights were ignored, as they were kept isolated, interrogated, and, undoubtedly, tortured, until you decided they could go home.
Now, the same denials are being made about the 18 missing NUP supporters and Sam Mugumya. Most of these individuals were taken in broad daylight between 2019 and 2021.
Sam Mugumya was abducted by military personnel in front of witnesses. Yet the police, the army, the UHRC, and the courts claim ignorance.
President Museveni, the point has been made. Your regime’s ruthlessness is no secret. Every Ugandan, and indeed East Africa, now knows how easily you can disappear people for weeks, months, or even years, without fear of accountability.
Everyone knows that neither the police nor the judiciary will protect ordinary citizens from the fangs of a state that has become indistinguishable from a criminal enterprise.
Unlike our Kenyan brothers, these missing Ugandans have no foreign country to advocate for them. They are ordinary citizens whose lives have been paused, some for years, by a regime that has already demonstrated its power.
You have made your point. Now it is time to let them live their lives. Release the 18 Ugandans. Release Sam Mugumya. Show that there is still humanity left in your governance. Let them go.
By David Lewis Rubongoya, Secretary General, National Unity Platform (NUP)
