When you study the root causes of genocide, you begin to see a disturbing pattern in Uganda.

When you study the root causes of genocide, you begin to see a disturbing pattern in Uganda. It is almost always a case of one group, often united by ethnicity or tribe, capturing state power and using that power to subjugate others with impunity. Oppression becomes institutional, violence becomes routine and definitely resentment becomes generational. We are witnessing something similar in Uganda. A particular unit within the UPDF--the Special Forces Command (SFC)--operates as an ethnically-weighted presidential guard instead of a national army constitutionally mandated to protect the territorial integrity of our country.

The SFC is not recruited randomly from Ugandan society. It is deliberately curated. A significant number of its operatives come from areas associated with the Hima ethnic identity--Sembabule, Kyankwanzi, Kiruhura, Kazo, Nyabushozi, among others. Recruits from other regions are included, but largely as symbolic diversity. Predictably, those deployed to protect cultural figures, religious leaders, and chamchas of the rogues are usually drawn from this symbolic representation. The others are trained, often abroad in China and Russia, for suppression--street combat, crowd control, and coercive enforcement.

Our country is not suffering from abstract misgovernance, it is suffering from a deliberate concentration of coercive power in the hands of a ruling family, reinforced by a military structure that is not representative of the country it claims to protect.

Even as Kakwenza, a Muhororo from Rukungiri, I reject the idea that identity predetermines loyalty. Many of us were raised on discourse, negotiation, and debate--not the instinct to neutralise disagreement through force and archaic brutality. Those who lose arguments, historically, are the first to resort to violence. It is a cognitive dysfunction for one to resort to violence. A human being must never exhaust thinking.

Ugandans know who holds the instruments of force, who has been shielded from accountability, and who has been protected by the state simply by virtue of ethnicity and proximity to power. Silence now is complicity. Whoever imagines that they will speak at a later and safer moment must understand that by then, the damage will have solidified.

Uganda is a union of nations. None of them--regardless of ancestry, district, or clan--hold a lawful right to dominate the others for political continuity. Oppression justified as security is still oppression. Power applied tribally is still illegitimate power. The unity of Uganda cannot coexist with structural favour, militarised ethnic insulation, or selective citizenship. If the country is to endure, equality must stop being a theoretical abstraction and become an enforceable reality.