In his recent essay, “The Theatre of Legitimacy: Why Muhoozi’s “Slow Coup” is the Climax of Uganda’s Gun Rule,” senior advocate and former Minister Asuman Kiyingi offers a direct rebuttal to my earlier analysis in “Uganda’s Constitutional Order Under Stress.”
He asserts that Uganda has reached “a point of no return” with a “slow coup”—“the systematic hollowing out of formal state institutions while decisive authority is concentrated within a personalized military vanguard led by Muhoozi Kainerugaba.”
Kiyingi’s essay is rhetorically colourful. He uses words like “regime” and “apologist” – labels that are a familiar rhetorical evasion that sidesteps substantive engagement.
However, his piece collapses under scrutiny. It mistakes the rough edges of power contestation within a hybrid constitutional order for the order’s outright replacement. It flattens history into inevitability and treats contested authority as proof that the 1995 Constitution has become decorative parchment.
A clearer reading, grounded in classical political thought and Uganda’s actual practice, reveals constitutionalism at work—imperfect, stressed, but resilient.
Constitutions are frameworks: documents that create offices, allocate powers, and set limits. Constitutionalism is the living spirit—the habits, debates, and institutional practices that make power answerable to law rather than the reverse.
Institutions (Parliament, courts, the executive) serve as guardians of the constitutional text through separation of powers and checks. Individuals—judges, legislators, citizens, and even presidents—act as vanguards by breathing life into those limits through argument, precedent, and public reason.
Madison, in the Federalist Papers, warned that “parchment barriers” alone cannot restrain ambition. Real restraint comes from structured competition: ambition countering ambition. Uganda’s 1995 Constitution, however imperfectly, established such a structure—more advanced than the Independence Constitution it replaced.
Kiyingi cites Professor Wangoola-Wangoola Ndawula’s work on "The Problem of Busoga in the Problem of Uganda" to portray the present as the inevitable triumph of gun rule since 1966. Yet the same intellectual tradition diagnoses Uganda’s crises as rooted in incomplete nation-building, ethnic-regional imbalances, and the challenge of subordinating coercive power to inclusive settlement.
Ndawula does not pronounce constitutional death; he calls for deeper constitutional remedies. To weaponize his analysis as evidence of irreversible climax to ‘gun rule’ in Uganda is to turn diagnosis into fatalism. The “problem” persists precisely because constitutional contestation continues—not because it has ended.
President Museveni’s recent national address (July 4, 2026) illustrates the distinction. Speaking as Head of State, he defended security operations involving his son Gen. Muhoozi as addressing justice system gaps, while pushing anti-corruption measures, wetland protection, and trade reforms. He engaged publicly on constitutional boundaries—security versus rights, institutional roles—rather than supplanting them. His earlier comments on bail were policy views offered for debate in Parliament and testing in courts.
In a constitutional framework, even presidential opinions remain subject to the “hard surface” of law, judicial review, and public scrutiny. Laws govern courts; speeches do not. Museveni’s participation in this debate demonstrates stewardship within the order, not abdication or replacement of it. His speech elicited fierce public debate – and that is a good hydrator for the constitution, constitutionalism and our democracy.
Kiyingi’s piece forms part of a louder, coordinated chorus that insists Museveni has stepped aside and that effective authority has migrated entirely to his son. The script is familiar: “Where is the President?”, “The son now runs things”, “Institutions are facades.”
These narratives serve succession politics by manufacturing a vacuum and then filling it with inevitability. The manufactured crisis seeks to delegitimize elected structures and normalize succession by assertion. It reduces hybrid governance—where military legacies coexist with constitutional forms—to pure personalist takeover.
In reality, actions such as media directives remain contestable in courts and public discourse precisely because the constitutional frame still supplies the enshrined vocabulary and arenas for challenge. No 1966-style rupture (suspension of the Constitution, abolition of Parliament and courts, rule by decree) has occurred. Elections, budgets, and judicial processes continue, however imperfectly.
Locke grounded legitimate power in consent expressed through standing laws, not personal will. Montesquieu located liberty in separated powers. Uganda’s order is hybrid and under stress, as my earlier analysis noted. Yet stress reveals the system’s contours, not its collapse.
Contested actions, parliamentary debates, and public argument are features of constitutionalism under pressure, not theatre masking its death. The slow, difficult work of subjecting power to law continues. Kiyingi declares victory for gun rule prematurely.
The constitutional project, defended by institutions, vanguards and more importantly the people of Uganda, remains the practical alternative—and the better path.
Morrison Rwakakamba, coffee farmer based in Rukungiri