The abduction of the former Kampala Lord Mayor, Mr Erias Lukwago, the lead counsel for four-time presidential candidate and Opposition politician Dr Kizza Besigye, by armed men clad in military uniform has sent shockwaves through the legal fraternity and the nation, raising fears that the ghosts of past regimes have come back to haunt the country.
The Chief of Defence Forces (CDF), Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, yesterday posted photographs of Mr Lukwago; one showing him blindfolded with a keffiyeh, and another capturing him face-palming in an undisclosed location. Last week, Mr Lukwago secured a court order on behalf of his client (Dr Besigye), requiring Gen Muhoozi to appear in court to defend himself against allegations that he threatened to kill Dr Besigye. The court allowed Dr Besigye’s lawyers to serve the CDF, the Attorney General, and two other Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF) soldiers within a week.
By press time, neither the police nor the military had issued any statement clarifying Mr Lukwago’s whereabouts or why he was abducted and by whom. Mr Lukwago now joins dozens of Ugandans and foreigners allegedly abducted by armed men in vans popularly known as ‘drones’. On May 23, 2026, Amuria District Woman Member of Parliament Margaret Etilu was whisked away by security operatives after visiting former Speaker of Parliament Anita Among, who is under investigation for alleged illicit enrichment. She was released last week after Members of Parliament turned up the heat on the Executive to produce her. The Leader of the Opposition in Parliament, Mr Joel Ssenyonyi, urged the government to respect the rule of law in all arrests. ‘I am concerned about people missing to date.
Some belong to the NRM [ruling National Resistance Movement party], some belong to the Opposition side. One of our colleagues, the Honourable Margaret Etilu…is missing. I am concerned,’ Mr Ssenyonyi said in Parliament last week. He further revealed that his party member, Mr Christopher Gody, was picked up by the military in Kamwokya, a Kampala suburb, in April this year, and his whereabouts remain a mystery. ‘Why doesn’t the government want to follow the law? Even myself, even you, can be suspected of having committed an offence. What does the law say? Why don’t you produce people in court? When you abduct, we are calling it an abduction because you aren’t following the prescribed procedure of arrest,’ he said.
On April 9, an Opposition activist linked to the National Unity Platform (NUP), Ms Agatha Nazziwa, alias Blue Tick, was abducted while on her way to attend the burial of Edith Katende, wife of NUP deputy spokesman Mufumbiro Waiswa, and detained in an unknown location. Despite a habeas corpus order directing any security agency holding her to produce her dead or alive, the military denied having her in custody. Mr Lewis Rubongoya, the secretary general of NUP, said she was released more than a month later from a military facility where she was tortured and warned to cut ties with NUP activities. ‘In the evening, they released her from the DIS (Defence Intelligence and Security) Headquarters – Mbuya. As always, they ordered her not to ever again associate with NUP, else she would face dire consequences.
She was held at various detention places and subjected to incredible torture,’ Mr Rubongoya alleged. The NUP accused the government of abducting many of its supporters, including Mr John Bosco Kibalama and John Ddamulira, in 2019 and 2020. At first, government officials admitted holding them, but later they washed their hands of the matter, denying any detention. Before and during this year’s general elections, abductions were reported on several occasions. Mr Bob Njagi and Mr Nicholas Oyoo, both Kenyan nationals who were illegally detained for 38 days in Uganda, said they were held alongside 150 others, including Mr Amos Rwangomani, an NRM cadre, Mr Moses Kasiba, a former Flying Squad Unit operative, six Nigerians, and a South African, at Special Forces Command (SFC) facilities in Kasenyi, Wakiso District. President Museveni later confirmed holding them in a ‘fridge’.
He ordered their release after Kenya’s presidency stepped in to turn the tide. Mr Rwangomani was arrested at Mulago in Kampala City last year. His relatives reached out to the former Minister of Internal Affairs, Maj Gen (Rtd) Kahinda Otafiire, hoping he could help them find their loved one. During the Sam Kalega Njuba Memorial Lecture in Kampala City, Gen Otafiire said Mr Rwangomani’s relatives went to court to compel the government to produce him, but the Attorney General claimed ignorance of his whereabouts. Gen Otafiire remarked that the spate of disappearances in Uganda today was a chilling déjà vu, reminding him of Idi Amin’s regime.
Incidences in past regimes
In the book A State of Blood, authored by Henry Kyemba (now deceased), a former minister in Idi Amin’s government, he painted a grim picture of how people were disappeared, detained in ungazetted places, or killed, with their bodies dumped like refuse in forests. Among the prominent figures who vanished was Chief Justice Ben Kiwanuka. ‘He had angered Amin by releasing, for lack of evidence, a Briton arrested by Amin’s men. Amin subsequently criticised in public ‘a prominent Ugandan from Masaka’- Kiwanuka’s home,’ Kyemba wrote. He added: ‘At about 3pm on September 21, State Research personnel drove up to the High Court in a Peugeot 504 (registration UUU 171), seized Kiwanuka, removed his shoes to humiliate him, forced him downstairs in full view of other judges, pushed him into the car and drove off. He was never seen again, and his body has never been found.’
Abductions were so rampant that even foreigners found themselves caught in the crossfire. In 1971, two Americans; Nicholas Stroh, a journalist, and Robert Siedle, a sociology lecturer at Makerere University, who were investigating a massacre in Uganda, got into an argument and were both killed and reportedly buried in a shallow grave. Their bodies were later exhumed and taken to Mbarara Barracks, where they were burnt in a bid to destroy evidence. In the 1980s, then president Milton Obote, who was battling four guerrilla movements, extended the war of control for Uganda into neighbouring Kenya. In July 1982, unidentified persons stormed the Nairobi Jamhuri Estate home of Balaki Kirya, a former Obote I Cabinet minister, who was said to be the political head of the rebel Uganda Freedom Movement (UFM), and whisked him off.
Kirya was taken to Wilson Airport, from where he was flown to Kisumu and later driven to Uganda via the Busia border. He was subsequently arraigned before the High Court in Kampala and charged with treason. The Washington Post reported in the story ‘Kenyan police accused of complicity in kidnapping of Ugandans’, which was published on October 2, 1984. It pointed to possible collusion by the government of Kenya in several attempted abductions of many members of the Ugandan refugee community. ”Despite official denials, some refugees also fear that the Kenyan government has been involved in some abductions.
They cite the case of Balaki Kirya, head of the Uganda Freedom Movement, an anti-Obote organisation, who was taken from his suburban Nairobi home in July 1982. One refugee has said he saw Kirya being escorted in handcuffs by police officers at the headquarters of Kenya’s Special Branch here,” the publication reported. The findings of the Commission of Inquiry into Violations of Human Rights, covering the period from 1962 to 1986, unearthed thousands of cases of enforced disappearance during that time. During Idi Amin’s reign, political figures such as Joshua Wakholi, a former minister of Public Service and Cabinet Affairs in the Obote I government, were arrested and detained in a cell ominously dubbed ‘Singapore,’ which housed those condemned to death in Makindye prison. Today, Makindye Barracks remains a place where several military officers have been held for months on end without trial.