KAMPALA, Uganda — Erias Lukwago has spent the better part of two years standing in court as Dr. Kizza Besigye’s lawyer. This week, he stood in court as something closer to his client: a man accused of knowing about treason and saying nothing. The question dividing Kampala is whether that charge reflects genuine evidence against him, or whether Lukwago’s real offense was getting too close to a case the country’s military chief would rather not have scrutinized.
Lukwago, the former Kampala Lord Mayor and president of the opposition People’s Front for Freedom, was charged Wednesday with misprision of treason before the Makindye Chief Magistrate’s Court. The offense carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment if he is convicted. Unlike treason, which punishes active participation in a plot to overthrow the government, misprision punishes silence — knowing about such a plot and failing to report it. Lukwago denied the charge and was remanded to Luzira Prison until June 22, 2026, when the court is expected to rule on his bail application.
What the state has disclosed so far as evidence is thin. Court filings reviewed for this report show prosecutors allege that, sometime between 2021 and 2024, Lukwago learned that Besigye and several others were planning treason and failed to alert authorities. Some accounts of the charge place the alleged knowledge specifically in Nairobi, Kenya, during that period. The only witness statement disclosed to date that names Lukwago comes from Andrew Wilson, an American who told investigators he runs a firm involved in investigations and tactical training. Wilson’s statement describes a Geneva meeting where he says Besigye asked him to help build militant networks inside Uganda — but Lukwago is not placed at that meeting. His name appears only because, according to Wilson, opposition figure Salaam Musumba once mentioned wanting to invite him to a separate, planned meeting in Brussels — a meeting Wilson’s own statement does not say ever happened. Nothing in the disclosed evidence puts Lukwago in a room where treason was discussed.
The timing of his arrest has done as much to shape the narrative as the charge sheet itself. Lukwago was picked up from his Wakaliga home on June 15 while preparing to serve court summons on Chief of Defence Forces Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, in a case alleging threats against Besigye. A habeas corpus affidavit filed by his wife and reviewed by Uganda Radio Network states that armed men in UPDF uniform scaled the perimeter wall before dawn and seized him as he prepared to leave for a television appearance, without presenting a warrant or stating any charge. The affidavit says he was driven away in a Toyota Hiace minivan, a vehicle type Ugandans have come to associate with state abductions, and that his whereabouts remained unknown to his family and lawyers for nearly two days. The affidavit also alleges that police stations in Natete and the Criminal Investigations Directorate’s headquarters declined to register a kidnapping complaint when the family tried to file one, and that authorities gave the family no access to Lukwago, his doctors or his lawyers during that period.
Gen. Kainerugaba did not stay quiet about his role. He claimed responsibility for the operation on social media and, reacting to Lukwago’s attempt to serve him with court papers, wrote that “this fool will learn the lesson he has been begging for.” He later posted photographs of a blindfolded Lukwago that appeared to show him pleading for mercy, images his family has said left him humiliated and in visibly poor health. The Uganda Law Society responded by demanding Lukwago’s immediate release, calling the arrest contemptuous of court processes.
The clash sits inside a larger story about where power actually resides in Uganda. President Museveni was sworn in for a seventh term last month, but Kainerugaba has increasingly positioned himself as the country’s de facto leader and has said he intends to succeed his 81-year-old father, a prospect many see as likely given how much the elder Museveni now depends on his son’s military authority. Kainerugaba has separately threatened to hang Besigye over accusations that he plotted to kill Museveni, and has taken credit for Besigye’s abduction from Nairobi in November 2024, after which Besigye was jailed in Uganda without bail. Lukwago had told reporters before his own arrest that he intended to hold Kainerugaba accountable for that earlier operation — making the lawyer’s detention, days after he tried to formally serve the general with legal papers, hard for many observers to read as coincidence.
Lukwago’s defense team, led by Medard Lubega Ssegona, has focused on his health rather than directly litigating the treason allegation in public. At his bail hearing, his lawyers presented medical records and sureties and argued that continued detention risked triggering a stroke, citing his deteriorating condition since the arrest. The family’s earlier court filings describe him as suffering from gastritis and recovering from a herniated-disc operation, conditions they say were aggravated by the conditions of his confinement.
The case has also become a flashpoint in Parliament. Opposition Leader Joel Ssenyonyi has asked the Speaker to recall the House early, arguing that Lukwago’s arrest is part of an escalating pattern of abductions and unlawful detentions that he first raised on the floor months earlier without resolution. He has named several Ugandans he says remain missing or held incommunicado and pointed to the case of Eddie Mutwe, a Bobi Wine bodyguard who disappeared in April and resurfaced in detention after Kainerugaba publicly claimed to be holding him — a parallel that, for Ssenyonyi, suggests a method rather than a one-off.
None of this resolves the narrower legal question at the heart of the case: whether Lukwago actually knew something about a treason plot and chose not to report it. The disclosed evidence does not yet show that he did. What it shows, so far, is a lawyer who spent two years pressing the state on its handling of his client — and who was picked up, days after trying to hold the country’s most powerful general personally accountable in court, on a charge that punishes silence rather than action. Whether that is a prosecution built on facts the public hasn’t seen yet, or a warning aimed at anyone who keeps asking questions, is the part of the story still being written. Lukwago is due back in court June 22.
