By Sophie Neiman, World Politics Review (WPR)
Cheeks glazed with tears and her face a map of worry, Ugandan political dissident Olivia Lutaaya pled guilty to charges of “treachery,” or plotting against the government, along with 15 other co-defendants in a court hearing in October 2024. The group had been in jail for nearly four years, always swearing their innocence. Some of Lutaaya’s co-defendants had shed the red clothing they’d worn to display their support for opposition leader Bobi Wine, instead donning bright yellow t-shirts emblazoned with the face of President Yoweri Museveni, who has ruled Uganda for some 38 years.
Since her arrest in May 2021, Lutaaya had become a national figure—an emblem for Wine’s National Unity Platform, or NUP, and its jailed supporters.
“Oliva Lutaaya is another young mother that heard our message and rose to the occasion to play a positive part in this course that we are involved in,” Bobi Wine told World Politics Review from his home in Kampala, the Ugandan capital. “Olivia Lutaaya symbolizes opposition, symbolizes resistance, symbolizes the involvement and selflessness of young women who have nothing to fight with as a weapon other than their voices and their bodies. Now, her body is all she has, and it has been incarcerated painfully.”
But Lutaaya’s long detention—and ultimate guilty plea—is also symbolic of the challenges faced by the Ugandan opposition and its precarious hopes ahead of the country’s next general elections in 2026.
Wine’s rise through politics gave a human face to the frustrations felt by Lutaaya as she tried to make a living and raise her family, just as the popstar-turned-politician did for so many young Ugandans. Braving volleys of rubber bullets and tear gas from government security forces, she joined the throngs of young people who followed Wine on the campaign trail ahead of Uganda’s January 2021 presidential election. Museveni claimed yet another victory after the polls, despite evidence of fraud in addition to the violent intimidation tactics used against Wine and his supporters.
Unlike Ugandan political parties before it, which had treated young people as an afterthought, Wine’s NUP made youth the very center of its struggle. This also forced the ruling National Resistance Movement to rethink its own historical strategy of coopting opposition parties through clientelism and patronage, explains Michael Mutyaba, a Ugandan writer and doctoral student at SOAS.
“The government felt like it needed to tackle this problem, because it meant in practical terms that you had way too many opponents and you couldn’t buy off the party,” he said. So it “expanded and even innovated on older methods” it also used, Mutyaba added, such as abductions, killings and trumped-up charges against opposition activists. The result, he said, is that “there is a much vaster technology of control.”
Lutaaya was first arrested with 48 other opposition supporters in the Kalanga Islands in December 2020, but she was subsequently released. On the eve of Museveni’s inauguration in May 2021, however, Lutaaya received a bizarre phone call from someone claiming to be with the police, who needed her help with regard to a robbery. Lutaaya left her youngest son with her aunt and headed to the station.
It was the last time she would walk free. “She is a law-abiding citizen, a good person who would go out of her way to help,” said Agather Atuhaire, a Ugandan human rights defender who has been reporting about Lutaaya and advocating for her release. During Lutaaya’s incarceration, the pair also become friends.
Lutaaya’s long detention culminating in a guilty plea stands to demoralize Wine’s youthful supporters, especially with another presidential election just two years away.
According to Atuhaire, Lutaaya was held incommunicado for about a month. She then appeared in a military court along with 31 other exhausted opposition supporters, the only woman among the defendants. They were charged with the illegal possession of 13 explosive devices: glass bottles and petrol that they supposedly intended to use to make bombs. After two years in detention, the charges were amended to include treachery, which is similar to treason and can carry a death sentence. They were also accused of planning to engage in “warlike activities” against the government, according to a charge sheet seen by WPR.
According to Benjamin Katana, a lawyer working for the National Unity Platform who helped defend Lutaaya, the charges against her were without basis. “The case of Olivia Lutaaya is just an example of so many other cases that are politically motivated, that have targeted the opponents of General Museveni,” he said, referring to the Ugandan president by his military rather than civilian title, as members of the opposition often do. The point of these cases, added Katana, is to “disorganize [us] politically, hamper [our] movements and make sure that [we] don’t get the opportunity to mobilize.”
In a one-room house in a slum on the edge of Kampala, Lutaaya’s aunt, Sarah Nambi, speaks about her niece’s long detention, which in addition to separating Lutaaya from her 7-year-old son, has also had a major financial impact on the family. Caring for Lutaaya’s son and her own three children means that Nambi has not been able to work. “Olivia was everything to the family,” Nambi told WPR. “I can’t do anything now.”
She tries to visit Lutaaya every second week at Luzira Maximum Security Prison. But because the prison is 7 miles outside of Kampala from her home, she can only make the trip when there is money for transport. When she does, she brings Lutaaya’s son with her. His mother was arrested when he was four, meaning she has been imprisoned for nearly half of his life. An older son is being cared for by another relative. “Olivia is always strong,” Nambi said simply of their truncated reunions.
Wine claims that Lutaaya and the 15 other NUP supporters who pleaded guilty were coerced into doing so, after remaining steadfast for nearly four years. On X, Wine specifically accused Youth Minister Balaam Barugahara Anteenyi of threatening the group with life in prison if they did not change their plea.
Katana said that Lutaaya and her co-defendants wrote letters dropping him as their lawyer before changing their plea. They were then sentenced to five years in prison for treachery. Counting the time they have already served, they will spend just under four more months in jail. Another nine NUP supporters from the original group who refused to plead guilty remain in jail.
Wine spoke to Lutaaya by telephone in the days after her plea. “She asked me to understand that she wanted to see, touch and hug her babies. She had decided to give up on everything just to be able to hold her babies. I told her, ‘I understand.’ I told her, ‘To me and to all of us, she’s still a hero,’” he said, somberly.
But the long detention culminating in a guilty plea by the opposition icon also stands to demoralize Wine’s youthful supporters, especially with another presidential election just two years away. “There will definitely be people thinking twice about going hard after the regime, posting things that might land them in the same situation as Olivia Lutayya,” said Mutyaba.
At the same time, however, the targeting of ordinary people stokes the existing fires of anger among Uganda’s youth, underscoring their criticisms of Museveni and making them all the more likely to throw in their lot with Wine. “It makes the opposition’s discourse clearer,” Mutyaba adds. “You are no longer pointing at the detention of big, presidential candidates, but day-to-day citizens.”
As the next vote approaches, Katana, the NUP lawyer, already finds himself mentally preparing for legal challenges, particularly with regard to the military courts the government has increasingly been using to try opposition supporters. “Our fear now is that because the [military courts] have been a very effective tool, they are going to use it more in the forthcoming general elections. Previously they knew they could arrest people, [and] we would go to court and get bail.” he said. After the ordeal faced by Lutaaya and her co-defendants, he fears more civilians will be brought before Uganda’s military courts where “they can keep them for as long as they want,” Katana added darkly.
Meanwhile, Wine has embarked on a national mobilization tour of the country, where he and his team are “sensitizing people and awakening them, re-energizing them, and trying as much as possible to assert the fact that we’ve not given up,” he said, his voice rising. “We’re still fighting.”
At times during the tour, police have blocked Wine’s marches and prevented him from speaking on the radio, reminiscent of the many violent crackdowns against his campaign rallies in 2021.
For Nambi, Lutaaya’s aunt, the challenges are more immediate. Lutaaya will live with her when she is released from prison in January, meaning another person sheltering in the small house. When asked what she hopes for following her niece’s long-awaited release, Nambi paused, unsure. “There is no hope,” she said at last. “The only hope is that when Olivia is released, she can start afresh.”
Sophie Neiman is a freelance reporter and photojournalist covering politics, conflict and human rights across east and central Africa. She is a grantee of the Pulitzer Center and holds a master’s degree in African Studies at the University of Cambridge. Follow her work on Twitter at @sophie_neiman