How Uganda’s Regime Turns Patriotism Into a Weapon » The Hoima Post –

By Alexander Luyima | The Hoima PostIn Uganda today, waving the national flag can result in arrest, while blocking a major highway for a ruling party campaign attracts state protection. This is not contradiction by chance. It is the outcome of a deliberate political strategy that has turned patriotism into a tool of control and dissent into a punishable offense.As the country edges toward another election cycle, national symbols and public infrastructure have become contested terrain. The Ugandan flag and the nation’s highways, once shared civic assets, are increasingly treated as the exclusive property of the ruling National Resistance Movement and its presidential candidate, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni. Through selective law enforcement and open displays of force, the state has collapsed the distinction between party and country.The symbolic front of this strategy became clear in 2025 when the Electoral Commission issued directives invoking the National Symbols Act to prohibit political parties from using the national flag in campaign activities. Officials framed the move as a defense of the flag’s dignity. The timing, however, followed the National Unity Platform’s effective use of the flag within its People Power movement, where the symbol had been reclaimed as an expression of citizen ownership rather than state authority.Dr. Sarah Bireete, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Governance, views the directive as part of a broader pattern. “Authoritarian systems seek to monopolize national identity,” she explains. “When an opposition movement succeeds in presenting itself as patriotic and citizen driven, the state responds by criminalizing that expression. Patriotism is redefined as loyalty to the regime, not to the nation.”The selective nature of this enforcement is difficult to ignore. For decades, ruling party campaign materials have freely blended the national flag with images of Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, often minimizing or omitting the Grey Crowned Crane, Uganda’s official emblem. Across the country, billboards visually merge leader and nation, reinforcing the idea that political authority and national identity are one and the same. Yet opposition supporters carrying the same flag face arrest, intimidation, or dispersal by security forces.Human rights lawyer Nicholas Opiyo describes this as a distortion of both law and constitutional principle. “The National Symbols Act was never intended to suppress political competition,” he says. “Its selective application reveals fear, not respect for the flag. When a national symbol empowers citizens instead of the state, it becomes dangerous to those in power.”This symbolic crackdown has been matched by a far more disruptive assertion of control over physical space. In December 2025, state security agencies blocked sections of the Kampala Masaka Mbarara highway, Uganda’s most important economic corridor, to facilitate a campaign address by Museveni. Traffic was halted for hours. Thousands of civilians were immobilized, including patients traveling for medical care and traders transporting goods during the peak holiday season.Opposition leader Kyagulanyi Robert Ssentamu documented the incident, reporting journeys that stretched from two hours to nearly twenty. His footage showed Museveni addressing supporters from the middle of the highway as armed personnel enforced the blockade.Political analyst Yusuf Serunkuma interprets the incident as the physical extension of the flag ban. “This is the same logic applied to public space,” he argues. “Just as the regime claims exclusive ownership over national symbols, it asserts ownership over public infrastructure. The message is clear. The country belongs to those in power. Citizens use it only with permission.”Public roads are not campaign venues. They are national assets funded by taxpayers and governed by laws meant to protect free movement and economic life. Their conversion into partisan platforms underscores how deeply state resources have been absorbed into regime survival.This absorption is institutional. The police and military units enforcing these measures are financed by the same citizens whose rights they curtail. Agencies such as the National Secretariat for Patriotic Corps receive public funds to promote a state approved version of patriotism that equates love of country with political compliance.The contrast in state priorities is stark. During the 2021 election period, security forces responded to opposition protests with lethal force, resulting in dozens of deaths and widespread allegations of torture. Accountability remains limited. Yet enforcement intensifies when a flag becomes a rallying symbol for political mobilization.“The threat is not disorder,” Opiyo observes. “The threat is an idea. When citizens assert ownership over national identity outside regime control, it undermines authoritarian power.”As a result, Uganda’s national symbols now exist in a state of forced contradiction. To the regime, the flag represents obedience and continuity of rule. To many citizens, it has become a restricted emblem of resistance, its meaning strengthened by prohibition. Public roads alternate between serving national life and acting as private stages for political spectacle.These actions do not signal strength. They reveal insecurity. A government confident in its legitimacy does not fear a flag in the hands of its people, nor does it need to paralyze a nation to amplify a campaign message.By criminalizing symbolic expression and appropriating public space, Uganda’s regime exposes its deepest anxiety. That citizens are increasingly separating the idea of the nation from the individual who has ruled it for decades. And that idea, once firmly held, is far harder to suppress than any rally, arrest, or roadblock.In attempting to own the flag and the road, the state may ultimately achieve the opposite of its intention. It reminds Ugandans and the world that neither belongs to a party or a candidate. They belong to the people, finally and without permission.

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