Uganda opposition leader and National Unity Platform presidential candidate Robert Kyagulanyi arrives to casts his ballot in Kampala on Jan. 15. Mr. Kyagulanyi came in second in the election, and escaped from house arrest on Jan. 17.RIAN COPE/AFP/Getty Images
The camera pans slowly across the skyline of Uganda’s capital and then pulls back to reveal a man in a hoodie: the country’s most wanted fugitive, opposition leader Robert Kyagulanyi, who is taunting the authorities from his latest hiding place.
Uganda’s police and military have been scouring the country for Mr. Kyagulanyi ever since he escaped from house arrest on Jan. 17, but he continues to elude them, travelling undercover and issuing defiant video messages to his supporters from a different location every day.
“Another day of hiding, another day of injustice,” he said in a message released Monday. “Thankfully, our people are still keeping me safe.”
The hunt for Mr. Kyagulanyi, a former pop singer known as Bobi Wine, has gripped the country. For weeks, his campaign rallies had attracted huge crowds across Uganda, but official results relegated him to second place in the Jan. 15 election. Since then, the crackdown on opposition activists has escalated dramatically, with thousands arrested and dozens killed.
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General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the Ugandan military chief and son of long-ruling President Yoweri Museveni, has vowed to capture the opposition leader. “Our troops have orders to bring him in dead or alive!” he said in a social-media post Sunday. Gen. Kainerugaba has repeatedly threatened to kill Mr. Kyagulanyi and members of his political party, the National Unity Platform. “So far we have killed 30 NUP terrorists,” he said in earlier posts. “Most NUP terrorist leaders are in hiding. We shall get them all.”
The authorities have not disclosed any criminal charges against Mr. Kyagulanyi or any other reason for arresting him. But a previous opposition leader, Kizza Besigye, was charged with treason after he was abducted in Kenya in 2024 and forcibly returned to Uganda. He has been in prison for the past 14 months.
Mr. Besigye’s wife, Winnie Byanyima, who is the executive director of the United Nations AIDS agency, said she visited him in prison last week and found him extremely weak. “I had to hold back tears as I watched him slowly make his way back afterwards, clinging to the walls to avoid falling, returning to an oven-hot, dark, bedbug-infested cell,” she said Monday.
In their hunt for Mr. Kyagulanyi, a large group of soldiers broke into his home Friday night and terrorized his wife, Barbara, choking her and ripping her shirt off, according to reports by the opposition leader and his wife on the weekend.
Barbara Kyagulanyi is seen resting on a hospital bed at Nsambya Hospital in Kampala on Jan. 24.Getty Images/Getty Images
“Where is your husband?” the soldiers asked Ms. Kyagulanyi during the assault, she said in a videotaped interview from her hospital bed, posted on social media. She fainted during the attack and was brought to the hospital for treatment.
Gen. Kainerugaba denied the reports. “We do not beat up women,” he said. “They are not worth our time. We are looking for her cowardly husband, not her.”
Mr. Kyagulanyi released his latest video Monday from his mother’s ancestral home in Gomba, about 100 kilometres west of Kampala, but the video was recorded a day earlier.
He said he had passed through many roadblocks by security forces as he travelled to the home. “The inconvenience on road users is terrible,” he said. “I advise the regime to stop looking for me – I will resurface at an appropriate time.”
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The attacks on Uganda’s opposition party have sparked concern from lawmakers in the United States, who have called for possible sanctions against Ugandan leaders, including Gen. Kainerugaba.
“Its ruling regime prioritizes domestic control through political violence, abductions, imprisonment, intimidation of opponents, and the misuse of state resources to maintain its grip on power,” said Senator Jim Risch, a Republican who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“The administration should reassess the U.S. security relationship with Uganda, beginning with a review of whether sanctions are warranted,” he said in a statement Friday.
Two Democratic senators, Jeanne Shaheen and Cory Booker, issued a similar statement. They said the U.S. administration “must use all tools available, including a review of U.S. security assistance, to hold individuals in Uganda accountable for undermining democratic principles and endangering the lives of citizens seeking to freely participate in the election.”
Global Affairs Canada has not commented publicly on Uganda’s crackdown on the opposition and did not provide answers to questions sent to it by The Globe and Mail on Monday.