Genuine forgiveness in Uganda requires a comprehensive transitional justice process

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OPINION

By Christopher Okidi

Uganda’s political present is haunted by its historical past, and no number of presidential apologies—however well-meaning—can substitute for the structured reconciliation that a comprehensive transitional justice process would offer. The recent apology to Buganda by President Yoweri Museveni and First Lady Janet Museveni, though a symbolic gesture, has stirred mixed reactions.

While Museveni’s son, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, dismissed the move as "Maoist political shenanigans," the First Lady struck a more earnest tone, acknowledging Uganda's political fragility and the uncertainties surrounding succession.

This is not the President’s first attempt at public contrition. Years earlier, during a prayer crusade in Gulu organised by his daughter, Pastor Patience Rwabwogo, he extended a similar olive branch to the people of Northern Uganda.

Both instances, however, were met with lukewarm receptions, reflective not of national healing, but of deep, unresolved grievances. The public's muted response—and in some cases, open resentment at the misfortunes of regime loyalists—should compel Uganda's first family to reflect not just on what they are apologising for, but how and to whom.

Genuine national healing cannot come through episodic, isolated apologies. It demands a formal, inclusive, and participatory transitional justice process rooted in institutional reform and historical acknowledgment. Such a process must go beyond personal atonement to confront the systemic injustices—political, economic, and social—that have defined Uganda’s postcolonial trajectory.

Uganda’s foundational challenge has been its failure to forge an inclusive nation-state. From the Bataka Movements and pre-independence nationalist agitation to the post-independence struggles against Amin and the NRA’s own liberation war, the demand has always been the same: democracy, dignity, and equal opportunity.

Ironically, President Museveni was part of the youthful intellectual wave in the 1960s alongside Nabudere, Raita Omongin, Mujaju and Chango Macho that resisted the Obote-Nadiope-Magezi axis for undermining democratic ideals. Today, he must ask whether his own—Muhoozi’s generation—stands for those same values.

A comprehensive transitional justice process must reckon with Uganda’s fragmented historical memory. Many communities feel intentionally marginalised by his regime.

In the Teso sub-region, restocking programs have stalled. In Acholi and Northern Uganda, survivors of the Lord’s Resistance Army insurgency remain uncompensated, their healing derailed by corruption and state neglect. In the Rwenzori sub-region, ADF victims remain largely forgotten. Even the Luwero Triangle, the epicentre of the NRA’s guerrilla campaign, remains economically deprived. These neglected grievances return like clockwork in every electoral cycle, weaponised by opposition actors, but never comprehensively addressed by the state.

Land remains one of the most politically explosive issues today. As poverty and unemployment deepen—especially among youth—land is increasingly seen as the last asset for survival.

In Bunyoro, large-scale oil investments have displaced thousands without adequate compensation under Museveni’s superintendence. In Acholi, West Nile, and other areas where communal land systems historically protected access, the presence of the Balaalo—wealthy cattle keepers from the south—has ignited conflict. President Museveni’s Executive Order No. 3 of 2023, which called for their eviction, was a rare concession to popular pressure. Yet, the debate reveals deeper fractures about citizenship, land rights, and identity under Uganda’s Constitution.

Meanwhile, land values are surging in previously marginal regions like Karamoja, Northern Uganda, and refugee-hosting districts, driven by mineral discoveries and the expansion of agricultural and mineral capital associated with the first family. With this comes a rise in land grabbing, elite accumulation, and intra-family tensions, especially among young men who sell off communal land to start businesses, fracturing kinship ties in the process.

In such a context, forgiveness cannot be performative. It must be anchored in distributive and restorative justice. Transitional justice must address the trauma and dispossession of conflict-affected communities and class deprivation. It must also tackle the structural inequalities that continue to marginalise large swathes of the population—rural and urban, young and old, north and south.

Uganda is at a crossroads. The question is not whether the President or his family can apologise, but whether they are prepared to institutionalise justice as part of the country’s national DNA. This involves truth-telling, reparations, institutional reform, and guarantees of non-recurrence. Only then can Uganda move from the politics of symbolic gestures to a future of genuine reconciliation and shared nationhood.

The writer is a Political Economist and Lawyer : Advocate of the High Court of Uganda