Is Uganda Next?
As M23 rebels advance, fighting in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo threatens to plunge the entire region into war. AFP/GETTY IMAGES
I write to you today from the shores of Lake Tanganyika, in a Congo still bleeding from wounds inflicted by armed groups that have turned Eastern DRC into a graveyard of hopes. As the great-grandson of Semei Kakungulu, a man who dreamed of unifying peoples across this region’s artificial colonial borders. I cannot remain silent when I see the identical recipe for catastrophe now boiling over in my ancestral homeland, Uganda.
Why turn my gaze northward today? Because of a single sentence recently pronounced by Frank Gashumba, a prominent leader of the Rwandese community in Uganda. A sentence that should send a chill down the spine of every Ugandan patriot or citizen. A sentence whose aftermath, the Congolese, know all too well.
Let me be direct, frustrated by what he describes as lack of recognition for his community, Gashumba dropped this bomb: “If it goes the way it is, trust me, we are headed for disaster. Beyond the Constitutional Court, we have another option. If this matter of Banyarwanda is not solved, trust me, prepare yourself for M23 in Uganda.”
Did you hear that correctly? “Prepare yourself for M23 in Uganda.”
For Ugandans who may not know and for those who have forgotten, the M23 is not a simple rebellion. It is a war machine, extensively documented as receiving Rwandan support, that has become synonymous with massacres, forced displacement, and “illegal” occupation (in a post colonial sense) in Eastern Congo. It is a tool of terror. As I documented in my recent article “Tears of the Sun” on the Global Peace Warriors website, the human cost of this machinery is measured in shattered villages, orphaned children, and generations traumatized by violence.
Even more concerning, Gashumba evoked the idea of “going back to Rwanda with their lands.” Do you recognize this Scent of Historical Trauma? This is the exact scenario of balkanization that is failing in the Congo, regardless of popular resistance. Seeing this failure in the DRC, this declaration suggests they are now attempting to shift this alleged “project of land theft and annexation” to Uganda.
To understand why this threat carries such weight, we must examine the volatile mixture I outlined in my recent article “Tribal Recipe for Genocide: Uganda’s Boiling Broth” on the Global Peace Warriors website. The ingredients for mass violence are already in the pot:
Ethnic identity has been deliberately weaponized, fused with political power, military intimidation, and regional proxy wars. The January 3 “Abavandimwe” (Meaning Rwandese people of Ugandan descent) Carnival at Lugogo Cricket Oval in Kampala Capital, promoted as a cultural celebration, revealed itself as an ethnic political rally where the President appeared via video to thank the community for their unwavering support of the NRM Party. A community already entrenched in positions of wealth, influence, and governmental favor does not rally under banners of exclusion only to be personally be commended by the head of state for partisan loyalty.
The guns are in the hands of those making the threats. A dangerous illusion dominates NRM thinking: because the party controls the army, a genocide level event is impossible. History teaches the opposite. Every major genocide in modern times has been enabled precisely by state monopoly over weapons. The guns do not prevent slaughter; they make it logistically feasible.
The regional fuse is already lit. M23 seized Uvira on December 9-10, 2025 just days after the U.S. brokered Washington Accords were signed. Their immediate violation prompted U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio to label it a “clear violation.” The General Uganda’s CDC – Chief of Defense Forces repeated statements expressing sympathy for M23 positions heighten fears that ethnic solidarity could import cross border violence into Uganda. The urgency behind Gashumba’s threat stems from a simple biological reality that no amount of political manipulation can overcome.
The President has maintained power for decades through elections often judged as rigged. He has outmaneuvered political opposition, but he now faces age, an adversary that can neither be deceived, imprisoned, nor bribed. We may rig ballot boxes, but we cannot rig biology. He has one, maybe two terms left.
As long as the President is there, the Banyarwanda are assured of protection because he is one of them as the Late Milton Obote alleged or close relative to their ancestral lineages to speak respectfully. But his inevitable departure means the end of guaranteed impunity. It is panic on board.
This panic is amplified by the uncertainty of succession. His son the CDF shows signs of notorious political capacity, his erratic media outbursts worry even his own camp. It is hard to see him as someone capable of protecting their interests long-term or maintaining the equilibrium in the face of colonial alienation. On the other hand, Bobi Wine’s opposition remains an unknown factor. If power shifts to the national majority, the Banyarwanda community fears they will be held accountable for what is known and what is assumed. This political vacuum pushes them to force the issue now, even if it means threatening the country with civil war.
The institutional decay that makes such threats possible was laid bare recently by Dr. Sarah Bireete, whose powerful rebuke of Uganda’s parliament confirms the gravity of our moment. Her words, which I cite here, expose how the failure of oversight creates the conditions for catastrophe:
“A normal functioning parliament should have stopped the work of the executive until missing persons are produced. But because we have a tyrant of numbers, and we have people whose understanding even of the constitution is in doubt… there are some MPs who don’t understand the actual work of parliament.
But if they did, and they were committed to fulfilling their work as envisaged in the constitution, they should paralyze the work of the executive until when the act of torturing Ugandans stops, the work of kidnapping Ugandans stops, because it is the armed forces that are kidnapping Ugandans.
What would you do if you were in that parliament? Halt debate and halt even the budget; refuse, suspend the budget until the executive is accountable. That’s why parliament is given these powers: powers to appropriate, oversight powers over executive and judiciary, and its main mandate, core mandate, is protection of the constitution.
So when they fail to protect fundamental rights and freedoms of the people, then there is no reason why Ugandans should spend money on this parliament that cannot protect and guarantee its rights.”
Dr. Bireete’s words cut to the heart of the matter. When a parliament refuses to hold the executive accountable, when kidnapping, torture, and the disappearance of citizens go unchecked, the social contract dissolves. Into that vacuum step those who would use ethnic mobilization and the threat of armed rebellion to achieve what politics denies them.
We must also speak truth about the role of external actors. The West’s silence in the face of these threats is not innocent. It is purchased.
Eastern Congo’s minerals; coltan, gold, tin, tungsten, fuel the global technology industry. The same armed groups that massacre civilians facilitate the extraction and smuggling of these resources. Western companies benefit. Western consumers benefit. And Western governments, rather than enforcing their own laws against conflict minerals, look away.
If the same scenario unfolds in Uganda, if M23 style violence crosses the border, ask yourself: what resources might Western interests secure? What mining concessions might be granted to those with guns? The pattern is established. The template exists. We ignore it at our peril.
To understand what Uganda faces, you must understand the post colonial survival strategy adopted by certain elements across the Great Lakes region. It is identical everywhere:
In the DRC, to claim lands, they became marginalized Banyamulenge.
In Rwanda deliberately given small borders, they assume the identity of Tutsis.
In Uganda, to fit into colonial borders or protect themselves, they juggle between Banyankole, Bahima, and now Banyarwanda; Abavandimwe.
It is the same matrix. When the colonized host becomes hostile, they switch labels, to broadcast their victim status, and if that doesn’t work, they pull the card of armed rebellion. This is the Congolese scenario being prepared in my country, Uganda.
Compounding this is the narrative, promoted by high-ranking figures including the Chief of Defence Forces and prominent media personalities, that the Banyarwanda descend from ancient Jewish bloodlines originating in Ethiopia, a narrative that subtly fosters a sense of superiority over other Ugandan tribes. Such assertions, rooted in speculative historical links, inject a perilous undercurrent of exceptionalism into already fraught ethnic dynamics.
The most insidious ingredient in this toxic broth is the state’s recent assault on the national flag itself. As I documented in my Global Peace Warriors article, police declared on December 29-30, 2025, that displaying or using the flag requires prior approval from the Minister of Justice under the National Flag and Armorial Ensigns Act, citing “misuse” in political campaigns.
This crackdown targeted the opposition National Unity Platform (NUP), which har embraced the flag as a symbol of authentic patriotism after the 2021 ban on their red berets. Thousands waved it at rallies, tied it to vehicles, and displayed it publicly; simple acts of national love now criminalized. Bobi Wine insisted the flag belongs to all Ugandans, not the regime.
Denying citizens the unrestricted right to carry their own flag is psychological dispossession on a national scale. It severs people from shared consciousness, from belonging, from the very idea of the country as theirs. When the emblem of sovereignty becomes a controlled privilege rather than a universal birthright, the state proclaims that patriotism is the ruler’s private property.
As the great grandson of Semei Kakungulu, a man who navigated the treacherous waters of colonial expansion and attempted to forge unity among warring peoples, I believe we must anchor our response in making historical wrongs right.
The colonial borders that carved up Africa without regard for ethnic realities created the conditions for the conflicts we suffer today. The solution, however, is not to redraw them through violence and ethnic cleansing. It is to decolonize borders by liberating ethnicities; to create political arrangements that respect identity while transcending it, that acknowledge historical grievances while building shared futures.
This requires:
First, acknowledging that the Banyarwanda community’s presence in Uganda is not illegitimate. Precolonial migrations, colonial displacements, and the mass refugee influx after the 1994 Rwandan genocide created demographic realities that cannot be wished away. The January 2025 Executive Order addressing citizenship documentation was a step toward regularizing status. But paperwork alone does not create belonging.
Second, recognizing that threats of armed rebellion are never acceptable. The M23 is not a liberation movement; it is a criminal enterprise that has raped, killed, and displaced hundreds of thousands. To invoke it as a political option is to declare oneself an enemy of peace.
Third, demanding that all communities be treated equally before the law. The selective tolerance shown to the Abavandimwe Carnival, while in 2016, UPDF forces massacred over 150 people in the Rwenzururu Kingdom during autonomy related tensions, an operation internationally condemned as extrajudicial yet rewarded with promotion shatters trust across Uganda’s more than sixty ethnic groups.
Fourth, restoring the national flag to all Ugandans. No government should control access to the symbol of national unity. The flag belongs to the people, not the regime.
Fifth, holding parliament accountable to its constitutional mandate. As Dr. Bireete powerfully argued, when parliament fails to protect fundamental rights, Ugandans should question why they fund an institution that cannot guarantee their freedoms.
I address Ugandans directly now; Do not take Gashumba’s words lightly. This is a serious warning. What starts with administrative demands and ends with threats of M23 and land annexation or alienation (however we may define it) is the beginning of the infernal cycle that destroyed Eastern Congo.
In my article “Tears of the Sun,” I documented the human cost of that cycle: villages burned, women raped as a weapon of war, children recruited into militias, families displaced repeatedly, never able to plant crops or send children to school because peace never lasts long enough.
That is what “prepare yourself for M23 in Uganda” means. It means your daughters taken as spoils of war. Your sons forced to carry guns. Your grandmothers left to die in the bush. Your churches turned into killing fields. This is not alarmism. This is the testimony of thousands who have buried the victims.
It is precisely because I have witnessed this horror that I have committed my work to Crossing Lines Africa – Peace Catalyst. Our mission is to build bridges where others dig trenches, to facilitate dialogue across the very ethnic and national lines that warmongers seek to harden into battlefronts.
We believe that the conflicts of the Great Lakes region are not insoluble. They are manufactured by elites who profit from division, sustained by populations trapped in narratives of victimhood and revenge, and enabled by external actors who prefer pliable clients over peaceful neighbors. But they can be solved. They must be solved. The alternative is unthinkable.
Through Crossing Lines Africa, we seek to:
· Facilitate track-two diplomacy between communities that have been set against each other by political manipulation
· Document human rights abuses and amplify the voices of victims who are too often silenced
· Build cross ethnic coalitions for peace and justice that can resist the pull of tribal mobilization
· Engage with traditional leaders, including those from my own family’s lineage to revive the peacemaking traditions that kept our ancestors from descending into the kind of violence we now see
· Challenge the resource exploitation that fuels conflict, by naming the companies and countries that profit from our suffering
The work is slow. The work is dangerous. But the work is necessary. The world must act before the broth turns to blood. President Trump’s January 3, 2026 decisive military action in Venezuela (which sits not so well with my consciousness) capturing Nicolás Maduro and his wife, followed by a declaration of temporary U.S. administration until transition, but demonstrates readiness to confront broken commitments and threats with decisive force.
With Rwanda’s Washington Accords violations still fresh, and Uganda entangled in ethnic favoritism, electoral coercion, regional proxy risks, and symbolic repression, the moment of truth has arrived.
The United Nations, African Union, and human rights mechanisms must intervene immediately before the psychological rupture turns into physical bloodshed. The ingredients for genocide are already in the pot. The fire is lit.
But intervention must be intelligent. It must address root causes, not just symptoms. It must engage with the legitimate grievances of all communities while rejecting the illegitimate methods of those who would use discombobulation style violence to address those grievances. It must support local peacemakers including those of us at Crossing Lines Africa who are working every day to build alternatives to war.
What happens next is not predetermined. History does not repeat itself; people repeat history by failing to learn from it.
The question before Uganda is whether our people will recognize the recipe being cooked in their name and refuse to eat from that poisoned dish. Whether civil society, religious leaders, cultural institutions, and ordinary citizens will demand that their leaders choose unity over division, justice over impunity, peace over profit.
As our friends in Congo watch with hearts heavy with knowing. They have seen this film before. They know how it ends when warnings go unheeded.
But we also know that it doesn’t have to end that way. The M23’s advances have been halted before by popular resistance. The balkanization project has failed in Congo because Congolese people refused to accept it unfortunately with exclusionary results which are a betrayal to our pre-colonial settlements. Ugandans can refuse too but with full inclusion beyond and above colonial borders. We can refuse the ethnic division being sold as cultural celebration or succession. We can refuse the threats of armed rebellion dressed as political advocacy. We can refuse the criminalization of our own flag. We can refuse to let our country become the next chapter in the Great Lakes region’s tragic history.
Through Crossing Lines Africa – Peace Catalyst, we extend our hand to all Ugandans who choose the path of peace. We offer our experience, our networks, our platforms, and our hearts. We believe that another world is possible; a world where the colonial borders that divide us become bridges rather than battlefields, where ethnic identity is celebrated without being weaponized, where the flag belongs to everyone and the future belongs to all.
Cry for Uganda. Cry for our children and grandchildren. We should have been better than this. But crying is not enough. Action is required. Vigilance is required. Solidarity across ethnic lines is required.
We have been warned. Remain vigilant, for history risks repeating itself before your very eyes.
Read more about the Author: Philip Kakungulu
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