By Dr. Daniel Kawuma
The public debate in Uganda this week, following the death of Edith Mufumbiro, has largely focused on whether Alex Waiswa Mufumbiro, the National Unity Platform’s deputy spokesperson should be granted bail to bury his wife.
It is a painful and urgent question. But it is also an insufficient one, because it reduces a far more consequential truth; he should never have been there in the first place. Prisoners of conscience are not meant to bargain for temporary freedom, they are meant to be free.
The real story is not about bail. It is about fabrication. It is about a system in which prosecutorial authority is weaponized to neutralize political opposition. A system in which the mere act of participation in opposition politics outside the ruling establishment can result in charges so elastic they require no proof, only compliance.
And in that system at the center of the state legal machinery stands Lino Anguzu, the Director of Public Prosecutions entrusted with upholding justice, yet increasingly associated with its distortion.
Alex Waiswa Mufumbiro today sits behind bars, not because he has been proven guilty of any crime, but because he has been accused. The charge? “Unlawful drilling,” allegedly committed on February 12, 2025, at the National Unity Platform headquarters.
It should come as no surprise that available accounts place Alex Waiswa on the day of the alleged crime elsewhere by his wife’s side at the cancer institute, tending to a woman fighting for her life.
This is a contradiction so glaring that even a legally untrained Ugandan might reasonably ask whether Lino Anguzu and his team of legal mercenaries are aware that the accused was not even at the alleged scene of the crime.
And yet, the contradiction does not matter. Because in today’s Uganda, accusation has become a substitute for evidence, and detention a substitute for justice.
The office of the DPP, under Lino Anguzu, has become less a temple of justice and more a workshop of charges where legality is manufactured, not established. The objective is no longer to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt, but to ensure prolonged incarceration beyond reasonable relief.
Bail, once a constitutional safeguard, has been reduced to a mirage, particularly for those whose only offense is political dissent. Applications are filed. Arguments are made. Rights are cited. And still, the answer is the same, denied. Not because the law demands it, but because power prefers it.
Lino Anguzi does not need to secure convictions to fulfill his role. The punishment is already achieved in the process, months, even years, spent behind bars without trial. Families separated. Livelihoods destroyed. Lives paused indefinitely.
Edith Mufumbiro did not just lose her life. She lost the presence of her husband in her final days. Alex Waiswa did not just lose his wife. He lost the right to stand beside her, to comfort her, to say goodbye. This is not the byproduct of justice. It is the consequence of its absence.
Across Uganda, thousands of families are living variations of this same story. Sons, daughters, husbands, and wives detained under questionable charges, their cases stagnating in a legal limbo that serves political ends.
And a question that remains unanswered. How many more must suffer before justice is restored?
Bantu MEDIA 