The diplomatic row between Kenya and Uganda has taken a personal turn. Martha Karua, Kenya’s former justice minister and a prominent opposition figure, was denied entry into Uganda over the weekend, blocked at Entebbe Airport and placed on an immediate return flight to Nairobi. No official reason was given.
But the timing is everything. Karua was en route to a legal forum in Kampala, part of her work with the Katiba Institute, a rule-of-law advocacy group. She is also a fierce critic of Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, having previously described his 38-year rule as “dictatorial”.
The Ugandan authorities are keeping quiet. But the British Foreign Office is not. London issued a strongly worded statement, calling the move “a further erosion of the rule of law in East Africa”.
For those watching the region, this is not an isolated incident. It is a pattern. Uganda has increasingly clamped down on opposition figures, journalists, and activists.
The barring of a former Kenyan minister, a senior lawyer, from attending a legal conference sends a chilling signal: dissent has no borders here. On the ground, the mood is bleak. Ugandans I spoke to this morning expressed a weary resignation.
“We are used to this,” one Kampala-based lawyer told me. “But when they start blocking a former minister from another country, it shows how deep the fear runs.” The human cost is not just about one woman’s travel plans.
It is about the slow, quiet death of regional cooperation. East Africa’s promise of open borders and shared legal standards is fading. And Britain, for all its past colonial entanglements, is now one of the few voices left to call it out.
Let us be honest: this is not really about Martha Karua. It is about what her blocked passport reveals. A region where the rule of law is no longer a shield but a target.
And where a conference on justice cannot even get its speakers through the door.
