For a couple of days now, there has been discontent among the Ugandan populace after the secret of John Bosco Kibalama’s whereabouts finally leapt out of the National Resistance Movement’s bag of lifeless bones.

Kibalama, a member of the National Unity Platform party, has been out of public sight for more than five years, having disappeared on 3 June 2019, after armed men in civilian clothes, affiliated with the Special Forces Command, intercepted his Toyota Prado TX and took him to an unknown place, leaving the car abandoned and all his belongings inside it.

On 2 February 2023, Robinah Nabbanja, the Prime Minister, openly confessed that the government was holding Kibalama on charges of the murder of police officers in Kiboga and other places, even without verifiable proof of his arrest or of the government presenting him before a competent court for a fair hearing. 

Alas, Honourable Nabbanja later swallowed her words. She said that she was referring to another Kibalama, amidst the mounting tension from the opposition. That is how the missing Kibalama was accounted for. No more queries by the government about a missing citizen whose whereabouts are unknown. No clear answers to his family. No government vitriol about the country’s security situation, that a citizen disappears without a trace.

However, a few days ago, author Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, the director of the Institute for Justice and Accountability, on his X platform, shared that he had received information with concrete evidence about Kibalama’s death.

Kakwenza’s informants within the Special Forces Command (SFC) confided in him that Kibalama was irreparably maimed and left for scavengers, and after several attempts to bring him back to his previous shape failed, they executed him.

Brigadier General Asaph Nyakikuru Mweteitse, the acting commander of the SFC, shot Kibalama dead with a PK light machine gun and buried him in a mass grave at the SFC headquarters, near the perimeter wall of the late Justice George Kanyeihamba’s residence, to erase any evidence that would lead the public to him.

The Museveni regime can rebut the grave accusation; it can exonerate itself, as it has always done, but this time with equally accompanying concrete evidence of Kibalama’s whereabouts. Otherwise, Ugandans might conclude that indeed Museveni and his son murdered Kibalama for his atypical political tenets, ate his body and drank his blood, then buried him to hide the evidence of his remains.