Music was everywhere in Kampala and when Denis Matovu was growing up he loved it all, his family says. The dancehall rhythms. The lilting Afrobeats. The stars, from Mowzey Radio to Eddy Kenzo.
His favourite was Bobi Wine, the self-anointed “ghetto president”, who sang of the hardships and the hustle of daily life. Bobi Wine owned a beach resort close to Matovu’s home in the Ugandan capital, where a dusty road drops to Lake Victoria. There was work there in the school holidays, washing cars or cutting the grass. On Sundays, Matovu would plunge into the waters and swim.
Politics was everywhere too, but Matovu did not think much about that. Even when Bobi Wine became an MP, and then decided to run for president, Matovu was more worried about his own dreams: saving money from his taxi job so that he could go and work in Dubai. He was a man of simple habits, almost “like a child”, says an old friend. He still lived at home at 21. His friends would sometimes leave him out of their hustles, knowing how he feared trouble.
But in Uganda politics had a way of catching you. On December 8, 2020, according to half a dozen witnesses Al Jazeera spoke to, Matovu was sitting at a taxi stop in Lukuli, a suburb of Kampala. Election campaigns were in full swing. A posse of men was putting up posters for the president, Yoweri Museveni. They wore canary yellow shirts, the colour of the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) party.
The locals were not happy. Museveni had ruled for nearly 35 years, longer than four-fifths of Ugandans have been alive. “We are tired of yellow,” someone shouted. “Give us your glue and we will put up a poster of Bobi Wine.”
An argument broke out. A crowd gathered. Swear words were exchanged. Then the men in yellow hitched up their shirts. There were pistols in their waistbands. There was something else too: a minivan, of the type known in Uganda as a “drone”, which pulled up on the other side of the road.
The crowd scattered. In the chaos, armed men grabbed Matovu. His friend, Richard Sonko, tried to intervene; they seized him too. Then they beat them: with fists, say some witnesses, with pistol butts, say others. Matovu and Sonko were bundled into the drone and driven away.
Uganda held presidential and parliamentary elections on January 14. In the months before, armed men in “drones” abducted people from markets, taxi stops, petrol stations, roadsides, and homes. Hundreds of disappearances have been reported in the press and on social media. President Museveni himself, discussing what he described as “so-called disappearances”, said last month that the army had arrested more than 300 people. Most of those taken are young men with links to the National Unity Platform (NUP), the opposition party Bobi Wine leads.
For this story, Al Jazeera spoke to the relatives of 17 people who have allegedly been abducted in central Uganda since November 2020, as well as witnesses, activists, local political leaders and lawyers. We also spoke to 10 more people who say they were taken by security forces and released, after periods of detention ranging from a few hours to two months. Where possible, we cross-checked stories with official documents such as court filings and police bonds. Although the details of individual accounts are difficult to independently verify, they are consistent with other testimonies collected by Ugandan media.
These reports paint a chilling picture of extrajudicial detentions and enforced disappearances by state actors operating outside of Ugandan and international law. Sometimes the kidnappers are in police uniform; in most cases, they wear army fatigues or plainclothes. The number plates on their vehicles are often absent or obscured with tape. They typically target NUP organisers, but they have also swept up others who are only mildly involved in politics. The relatives of the missing do not usually know where their loved ones are being held or if they have been charged with a crime. When abductees reappear, they often report beatings, harassment or torture.
On February 13, in response to public outcry, Museveni gave a televised address on the matter. “The talk of disappearances should be ignored because it can’t happen under the NRM,” he said. “We never cover up, there’s nothing which we do and hide.”Yet, in the same speech, the president said that a commando unit, previously deployed as part of the African Union mission in Somalia, had arrested 76 people in Kampala and neighbouring Mukono district during the build-up to elections. He also said that the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI) – the army’s own intelligence agency – had arrested 242 suspects, of whom 177 had been granted bail or released. Two weeks later, the security forces have still not released a list of those in detention.
Jeje Odongo, the minister for internal affairs, had previously acknowledged that many of the “alleged kidnaps” were perpetrated by “numberless, tinted vehicles”, adding that “in some instances, it is true that there is overzealousness on the part of the soldiers that are carrying out these acts”.
Museveni says that such measures were necessary to stop “terrorists” and “lawbreakers” who planned to stop the elections and destabilise the country. But in Uganda, arbitrary arrests and forced disappearances stir up memories of past dictatorships. Under the iron-fisted rule of Idi Amin and Milton Obote, political opponents disappeared and the army rounded up civilians in “panda gari” (“get in the truck”) operations.
“Panda gari is back,” says Bobi Wine, the singer and presidential candidate, who was himself held under house arrest for 11 days after the vote. “The regime is in overdrive, kidnapping, abducting people, many of them never to be seen again … The regime is targeting not only those that are close to me but every Ugandan that has ever agitated for change.”
He was speaking to the media on February 17, the same day he delivered a petition about the abductions to the Kampala Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Military police caned journalists covering the event, leaving some reporters bleeding from the head. Seven needed hospital treatment.Although Bobi Wine has spoken out strongly on the issue, few of the families we spoke to had received much legal or financial support from his party. Most of the top lawyers in Wine’s circle have been preoccupied with a court challenge to the election result, which they have now withdrawn, saying the court system is hopelessly rigged
Denis Matovu’s mother, Solome Ssemakula Nakibuuka, did not see her son get taken. When a relative told her what had happened, she fell to the floor in a cold sweat. Matovu was her firstborn child. “I was very scared,” she recalls, “because I had already heard that cars were coming and abducting people.” That night, she did not sleep.
In the following week, the family went to all the police stations in the area where Matovu had disappeared. Nobody knew where he was. When the family mentioned the “drone”, many officers were nervous about opening a file. One policeman eventually registered the disappearance but was unable to help much.
So the family searched on their own. They went to Luzira prison. The Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID) headquarters in Kibuli. The Special Investigations Unit in Kireka. The army barracks in Mbuya and Makindye. Three times to the new prison in Kitalya, which had only opened that year but was said to be already heaving with political prisoners.
One day they heard about two young men who had been dumped at a hospital in handcuffs. One of Matovu’s relatives, who asks not to be named, rushed to the ward. Could it be Matovu and Sonko?
The young men were too shaken to talk. Their fingernails had been pulled out. It was not Matovu and Sonko
On January 29, 1986, a slim Yoweri Museveni stood on the steps of Parliament and was sworn in as president of Uganda, promising “a fundamental change in the politics of our country”. He wore polished boots and army fatigues. The rebel leader had spent the last decade-and-a-half either mobilising for a guerrilla war or fighting one.
