On Sovereignty

Mr. President.

On Being Addressed As Bazzukulu

We are not Bazzukulu. We are sovereigns. The word may carry affection in a home, but it cannot carry the governing status of citizens in a Republic. You have written to us again as if we sit at your feet awaiting bedtime instruction, and the time has come to answer you line by line, in your own format, so the Ugandan record holds both your claim and our correction.

You greet us as grandchildren because the grandchildren framing is your regime's first instrument of control. Grandchildren listen, receive what they are given, and do not vote out the elder. Yet the Constitution you yourself wrote and promulgated on October 8, 1995 under the Movement system that suspended multi party politics names us as sovereign in Article 1(1) and locates all power in the people. You cannot rename us Bazzukulu while keeping that Article alive. One of those positions is false, and your own letter helps us decide which.

On the Bill You Now Disown

You write that there is orwaari about the Sovereignty Bill, and you ask which Sovereignty Bill the orwaari is about, since the bill stopping FDIs, religious remittances, and diaspora transfers is, in your words, not the bill you initiated. The bill before Parliament has a name and a date. The Protection of Sovereignty Bill 2026 was tabled on April 15, 2026 by your own Internal Affairs State Minister, General David Muhoozi, and was referred by Speaker Anita Among to the Committees on Defence and Internal Affairs and on Legal and Parliamentary Affairs. Clause 22 caps foreign funding to any person or organization at UGX 400 million in any twelve months without written approval from the Minister. Multiple offences carry up to twenty years in prison and fines of up to UGX 2 billion. The definition of foreigner reaches Ugandan citizens living abroad.

The retreat in your letter came from below, not above. The Uganda Bankers Association wrote to the Attorney General on April 13, 2026, two days before the bill reached Parliament, warning of a chilling effect on correspondent banking and remittance flows. On April 28, 2026, Bank of Uganda Governor Dr. Michael Atingi-Ego told the joint parliamentary committee that a country without reserves is not sovereign. Bankers, the central bank, civil society, faith communities, the diaspora, and citizens forced this clarification.

A disowning is not a constitutional remedy. The remedy is withdrawal of the bill, publication of the revised text, fresh committee scrutiny, and a public clause by clause account of what was removed and why. Until those four steps occur, the disowning is rhetoric. Our test is exact. When the amended bill returns to Parliament, does the text still criminalize foreign funding of opposition parties, civil society organizations, independent media, and faith based organizing. If the answer is yes, your letter was not a clarification at all. It was executive misdirection, signed and dated.

On Liberation As Cover, and the Narrow Definition of Sovereignty

You walk us through Marcus Garvey, the ANC of 1912, the African Resistance, the Socialist Countries of the USSR and China, and South Africa in 1994. The recitation reads as history and works as moral cover. By placing a 2026 bill inside the lineage of continental liberation, you turn every domestic critic into a successor of the colonizer. The move is old. Mobutu used it, Mugabe leaned on it in his late phase, and Bongo never let it go. The grammar repeats across regimes, only the surface vocabulary adjusts to local taste. A Ugandan who reads the bill and asks where the money goes is not a foreign agent. That Ugandan is exercising Article 38 of the Constitution you yourself signed.

You define sovereignty as policy decision making on women representation, UPDF representation in Parliament, the promotion of homosexuality, privatization, return of Asian properties, and neutrality on the Ukraine and Russia war. Read what you left out. Sovereignty over the UGX 84 trillion national budget did not make your list. Sovereignty over the Electoral Commission did not make your list. Sovereignty over the security sector, the central bank, and the UGX 131.2 trillion in public debt now sitting at 52 percent of GDP, none of these reached the page. The category was selected with care, because it protects your regime from criticism while keeping every extraction channel open. Sovereignty in your definition is the right of one man to decide. Sovereignty in the Constitution you wrote is the right of the people to decide, and we are the people.

On the Institutions You Have Hollowed

You cite Mwalimu Nyerere on the right of independent nations to make their own mistakes and learn from them. The citation is fair, the application is not. Mwalimu spoke about a sovereign people learning from collective error, but we have not been allowed the dignity of collective error since 1986, because the institutions through which a country learns from error have been removed one by one. The Constitution Amendment Act of 2005 removed presidential term limits. The Constitution Amendment Act of 2017 removed the presidential age limit. On September 27, 2017, Special Forces Command soldiers, some in plainclothes, entered Parliament during the age limit debate and physically ejected at least 25 opposition Members of Parliament from the chamber. Several MPs were hospitalized. A country cannot change its mind through institutions that answer to one office.

You invoke Article 1(4), Article 59, and Article 68 as evidence that we exercise sovereignty through elections and referenda. Article 60(1) of the same Constitution provides, in plain language, that the Electoral Commission shall consist of a Chairperson, a Deputy Chairperson, and five other members appointed by the President with the approval of Parliament, a Parliament your party controls by supermajority. A people cannot fully exercise sovereignty through an electoral machine structurally appointed by the incumbent seeking renewal. We call this Constitutional Theatre.

You blame the politics of identity for Uganda's failure as a state. The diagnosis is half right and the omission is the giveaway. The politics of identity served as instruments. The hand that used those instruments was the colonial state, and after independence the elite class that inherited the colonial instruments without dismantling them. Article 274 of the Constitution you yourself signed preserved every existing law in force at the commencement of the Constitution and kept those laws in force until Parliament chose to repeal them, which Parliament has rarely done. We call this Continuity Contamination. The instruments you indict today are the instruments your own Constitution preserved.

On the Governance Confession

You write that the NRM has run a free economy for forty years, that forex is bought and sold in privately run forex bureaus, and that the freedom of the private sector compensates for the obstructions of the corrupt or non patriotic public servants and political opportunists passing for politicians. That single sentence does two jobs. With one hand it praises the private sector. With the other it admits, in writing and over your signature, that our public service is corrupt. You have now confirmed on the public record what we have said for forty years.

You then write that the NRM cannot countenance interference with the freedom of movement of capital and money into or out of Uganda, because that freedom is your regime's insurance against the corrupt public servants and politicians. Read that twice. You have admitted, in your own paragraph, that private capital movement now performs the stability function the public state has failed to perform.

The numbers carry the indictment further. Diaspora remittances reached USD 2.5 billion in 2025, equal to 3.8 percent of GDP, across more than 16 million transactions averaging USD 152 each, with the United States alone contributing USD 702 million. Public debt servicing consumes about 17 percent of the FY2025/26 budget, debt to GDP sits at 52 percent, and multilateral creditors hold USD 10.32 billion of external debt. The remittances are private citizens carrying the country. The debt is the public state borrowing to stay alive. The bill you now disown would have criminalized the first while leaving the second untouched. What you frame as clarification reads, on the page, as a governance confession.

Even the Ankole anecdote shows the problem. You praise the breed and salute President Ramaphosa for taking 43 cows from Kisozi, in your own words, for nearly free. Public power, private property, foreign diplomacy, and personal commercial relationships keep appearing in the same paragraph. A Republic should not have to guess where family business ends and state symbolism begins.

On the Parliament You Instruct

You write that you have spoken to Hon. Hamson Obua and the Chairpersons of the relevant Parliamentary Committees to make the bill concentrate on the sovereignty of policy decision making and not to meander into private money transfers or church donations. That paragraph is the operational layer of your letter, and it is the most damaging paragraph in the document. Writing publicly about the instructions you have issued to the leadership of Parliament is publicly admitting that our Parliament receives instructions from the executive rather than deliberating on our behalf. Article 79(1) of the Constitution you wrote vests legislative power in Parliament, and Article 79(2) provides that no person or body other than Parliament shall have power to make provisions having the force of law in Uganda except under authority conferred by an Act of Parliament. You have written, in your own hand, that you edited a bill before Parliament through direct instruction to its leadership. The doctrine of separation of powers has been suspended in plain sight.

On the Gospel You Invert

You close with Matthew chapter 5 verse 16, on letting our light shine before men so they may see our good deeds and praise our Father in Heaven, and you advise that influence should come by example and not by coercion or manipulation. The verse is correct, and your application of it inverts it. Your regime has held power through soldiers in Parliament during the September 2017 age limit debate, through executive appointment of the Electoral Commission, through the 2005 removal of term limits, through the 2017 removal of the age limit, through the abduction of opposition supporters from the streets, and through the deployment of security forces against citizens during elections. You cannot quote Matthew 5:16 to us. The verse condemns you. We who are addressed as if we have not read Matthew have read Matthew, and we know the difference between salt that has kept its savor and salt that has lost it.

Six Contradictions, and the Restoration

You sign your letter Yoweri K. Museveni, Ssaabalwanyi, the chief fighter. Forty years after the bush, the title still rests on a war that ended before more than half of us were born. The chief fighter has become the chief contradictor, and the contradictions can be counted. You claim sovereignty while the public state carries USD 34.86 billion in debt at 52 percent of GDP. You claim independent referenda while appointing our Electoral Commission. You claim a free private sector while NEC and UDC operate as state linked commercial vehicles in sectors where private firms compete. You claim to defend our country against foreign influence while the USD 2.5 billion the diaspora sent home in 2025 is the very flow your bill would have criminalized. You claim policy sovereignty while publicly instructing our Parliament on what the bill must say. You cite Mwalimu's right to make our own mistakes while having removed in 2005 and 2017 the term limits and age limits by which a country corrects its mistakes. Six contradictions in one letter, written by your own hand for the Ugandan record.

The Restoration is not a man, not a movement, not a moment. It is a structure, written down, available to any Ugandan who reads, and it does not depend on your permission to exist.

And to my fellow Ugandans who read with me, we are not Bazzukulu. We are the citizens of a Republic. The Republic was promised to us in 1962, was retrieved from Idi Amin in 1979, was promised again in 1986, and is yet to arrive among us. The arrival is our work, not his.

The Mulungi Plan is that structure. The Plan restores independent constitutional institutions, returns presidential term limits and the presidential age limit, decentralizes revenue collection so that money raised in our communities serves our communities first, places the security sector under verifiable civilian control, and protects diaspora remittances and faith based work as constitutional rights rather than executive privileges. The Plan keeps Uganda open to honest investment, diaspora energy, and partnership with the world, while closing the channels of capture, extraction, and political laundering that the regime now defends as sovereignty. We read it. We test it. We improve it. We carry it together.