The Tyranny of Impunity

In the shadowed corridors of power where law dissolves into the whim of the gun, the forcible abduction of Erias Lukwago on 15 June 2026 stands as a stark tableau of tyranny’s enduring dance. As soldiers of the Special Forces Command scaled the fence of his Wakaliga home—mere moments before he could serve High Court summons on Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba—one hears the echo of Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino: “The bull has fallen into the trap / And the hunters are dancing around it.” Here, the hunter wears military fatigues, and the trap is woven from impunity. This is not mere arrest; it is a jurisprudential wound inflicted upon the body politic of Uganda.

Article 23 of the 1995 Constitution, that solemn charter of personal liberty, declares with crystalline clarity that no person shall be deprived of liberty save “in accordance with procedures prescribed by law.” Yet Lukwago was bundled away without warrant, without immediate judicial oversight, and in brazen contempt of the 48-hour rule. The hooded photographs circulated by the CDF himself—evoking Kafka’s The Trial, where the protagonist is ensnared by opaque authority—transform a citizen’s attempt to invoke judicial process into a spectacle of humiliation. As Chinua Achebe warned in Anthills of the Savannah, when the powerful “begin to eat the people,” the republic itself begins to starve.

This incident lacerates the doctrine of separation of powers enshrined in Articles 79, 128, and 137. By targeting Lukwago—the lead counsel for Dr. Kizza Besigye—as he prepared to enforce a court order, the military chief did not merely defy a summons; he sought to decapitate the administration of justice. Shakespeare’s King Lear offers a prophetic mirror: “Handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?” When the enforcer of order becomes its violator, constitutionalism perishes. The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence in Ssemogerere v. Attorney General and Attorney General v. Tinyefuza has long affirmed that no office, however exalted, stands above the law. Muhoozi’s public boast—“Only Mzee can summon me”—inverts Article 210’s mandate of a professional, civilian-subordinate UPDF into a feudal declaration of personal sovereignty.

From the jurisprudence of human rights flows a deeper literary lament. Article 24’s prohibition on cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment finds haunting resonance in the Universal Declaration and the poetry of resistance. One is reminded of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross, where the powerful stage grotesque spectacles to cow the weak. The blindfold, the basement detention, the chilling social media taunts of “hurt and pain”—these are not anomalies but symptoms of a constitutional order under siege. They violate Article 21’s equality before the law and Article 28’s fair hearing rights, imperilling not only Lukwago but the treason proceedings against his client and the democratic space ahead of elections.

In the grand tradition of constitutional thought—from Locke’s Two Treatises to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights—power without accountability breeds despotism. Uganda’s preamble proclaims sovereignty resides in the people. Yet when a son of the President can abduct a former Lord Mayor and senior advocate with impunity, that sovereignty is mocked. As p’Bitek’s Lawino cries against cultural erosion, so must Ugandans now cry against the erosion of constitutional fidelity: “Let the people speak / Let the law stand tall.”

The Constitutional and Supreme Courts must now rise as guardians, invoking their interpretive authority under Article 137 to reaffirm that military might bows before judicial right. For in the words of the poet’s warning and the jurist’s duty, a nation that permits the powerful to trample the Constitution invites the long night of tyranny. Lukwago’s ordeal is a clarion call: Uganda must choose between the rule of law and the law of the ruler. The citadel of justice demands defence—lest the democratic order, like a once-proud bull, falls silently into the hunters’ trap.

Robert Byaruhanga(Fashion Lawyer)