On Saturday, Kampala city witnessed disturbing scenes as hundreds of youth, clad in NRM T-shirts, reportedly accompanied President Yoweri Museveni to pick his nomination forms for a 7th term as NRM party chairman and presidential candidate. The spectacle, intended to symbolize grassroots support, devolved into violent chaos.
Eyewitnesses and media reports pointed to looting, assaults on civilians, and terrorizing of city dwellers acts attributed to these so-called “supporters.” This episode raises critical concerns not just about lawlessness, but about a calculated political strategy with dangerous precedents in history.
What appears to be unfolding in Uganda bears resemblance to scenarios Mahmood Mamdani explores in Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. Mamdani dissects how U.S. imperial policy during the Cold War fostered extremist groups to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, creating what he describes as “terrorists in the making.”
Initially praised as “freedom fighters,” these groups — including Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda — eventually turned against their sponsors. Mamdani’s central argument is that violence, once instrumentalized for political ends, becomes autonomous and uncontrollable. This historical analogy carries urgent lessons for the current Ugandan situation.
The reported deployment or tolerance of violent youth groups by the state or ruling party to counter opposition movements such as the National Unity Platform (NUP) especially in its Buganda strongholds reflects a similarly short-sighted political tactic.
The logic is simple, if the state cannot win popular legitimacy through delivery of services, democracy, or accountability, it will attempt to dominate through fear. But this tactic is profoundly unsustainable.
Firstly, such groups, once empowered, rarely stay within the bounds of their original function. They are not professional security forces accountable to a constitutional order. Rather, they are loosely coordinated actors driven by patronage, ideology, or simply the opportunity for economic survival through violence.
Their loyalty is contingent and volatile. As seen in Liberia under Charles Taylor or Sierra Leone’s RUF, armed youth militias often spiral into autonomous actors, destabilizing the very state that created them.
Secondly, the use of violence to suppress legitimate political dissent only deepens grievances and radicalizes the opposition. NUP’s rise in Buganda stems from long-standing socio-political and economic concerns — unemployment, inequality, land grabs, and political marginalization.
Addressing these through violence rather than reform only hardens public opinion against the state and further erodes its legitimacy. When citizens lose faith in peaceful political engagement, they begin to view violence as a necessary countermeasure, plunging the nation into a cycle of retribution.
Thirdly, the strategy undermines the credibility and cohesion of state institutions. When gangs operate with impunity under state protection, the police and military are seen not as guardians of public order but as partisan tools. This delegitimizes the judiciary, disempowers civilian governance, and accelerates the breakdown of the rule of law.
Uganda, like the U.S. in Afghanistan, may find that today’s “friendly” political militias are tomorrow’s insurgents or warlords. Mamdani’s critique is clear: states that instrumentalize violence for short-term political advantage often sow the seeds of long-term instability. The state’s primary responsibility is to protect all citizens equally not to divide them into camps of “good supporters” and “bad opposition.”
The government’s use of gang violence as a counterforce to legitimate democratic expression is not only ethically and legally wrong it is politically suicidal. Real security lies not in terrorizing the population into submission, but in engaging with their concerns, providing services, and respecting democratic norms. Uganda risks turning a political contest into a battleground with no winners, only victims.
Editor
