Dear reader, I shall not waste your time with the tedious pieties of ‘deep concern’ and ‘grave implications’. Let us have the honesty to call this what it is: General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, son of the President, has simply dispensed with the charade. The Ugandan army’s closure of leading media outlets is not a clumsy blunder; it is a deliberate, medieval assertion of control.
And the UK’s condemnation, while welcome, feels like a faint echo from a Victorian drawing room, tut-tutting at a distant colony’s indiscretion as if the world had not already witnessed the Roman Praetorian Guard’s antics in miniature. History tells us that press freedom does not die by a single blow but by a thousand small cuts, yet in Uganda, the blade has been drawn with theatrical flourish. The army chief’s order is a return to the undisguised autocracy of the 1970s, a period we intellectuals often romanticise for its brutal clarity.
I am not surprised. The pattern is as predictable as the fall of the Western Roman Empire. When the military becomes the arbiter of truth, the republic of letters is the first casualty.
The UK’s response, though necessary, is at best a symbolic gesture. One recalls how the British Empire’s moral indignation often masked its own strategic abdications. The real question, the one that will irritate the comfortable, is this: what does the West’s limp response say about the state of our own liberal institutions?
We wring our hands over Kampala, yet we have allowed our own media to be hollowed out by algorithms, advertisements, and the soft despotism of social media. Uganda’s army chief has merely done, with brute force, what our own corporate and political elites achieve with greater subtlety. This is not a crisis for Uganda alone; it is a mirror held up to our own intellectual decadence.
The vocabulary of freedom rings hollow when we have lost the will to defend it. Final thought: every age gets the tyrants it deserves. Uganda’s generals are simply playing the part written for them by history.
The rest of us sit in our comfortable studies, penning critiques, and pretend not to notice that the script is being rehearsed in our own capitals.
