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There are books and plays that belong to their time, and there are those rare works that refuse to remain prisoners of the era in which they were written. Francis Imbuga's Betrayal in the City, first published in 1976, belongs to the latter category. Its fictional state of Kafira was never merely a geographical place. It was a political mirror. Through Boss, Mulili, Tumbo, Mosese, Jere, Doga, Nina, and the suffering citizens of Kafira, Imbuga constructed a dramatic portrait of a post-independence African society in which the promises of freedom had begun to collide with the realities of political power. The play examines dictatorship, corruption, patronage, nepotism, political violence, repression, incompetence, betrayal, and the destruction of public trust.
More than half a century later, one is tempted to ask a disturbing question: if Francis Imbuga were writing Betrayal in the City today, would Kafira still be fictional? Perhaps he would change the name. Perhaps he would call it Uganda.
This is not to suggest that Uganda is literally Kafira, nor that every character in Imbuga's drama has a direct Ugandan equivalent. Literature does not work through crude substitution. Its deeper power lies in recognition. A society recognises itself when the fictional world begins to resemble the political anxieties of its own streets, courts, Parliament, newspapers, prisons, and corridors of power.
In Kafira, the tragedy begins with a government that has ceased to understand the distinction between the state and the rulers of the state. The government becomes the personal property of those who occupy its institutions. Public office becomes a reward for loyalty. Political disagreement becomes disloyalty. Citizens are no longer regarded as the ultimate owners of political power but as subjects expected to demonstrate obedience. The result is what Imbuga calls betrayal: the betrayal of the people by those entrusted with governing them.
Uganda's contemporary political experience inevitably raises some uncomfortable comparisons. The January 2026 presidential election returned President Yoweri Museveni to power for another term, with the Electoral Commission declaring him the winner with about 72 percent of the vote, while opposition leader Bobi Wine rejected the result amid allegations of electoral irregularities, violence, and a government-imposed internet blackout. Wine subsequently went into hiding and later into exile.
Whatever one's political allegiance, an election should not merely answer the question of who won. It should also answer the more important question of whether citizens retain confidence in the institutions that declared the winner. Democracy is not exhausted by counting votes. It requires credible institutions, peaceful political competition, respect for dissent, an independent press, judicial independence, and the confidence of the defeated that tomorrow they may compete again without being destroyed for having lost today.
That is where Imbuga's Kafira becomes uncomfortably relevant.
In Betrayal in the City, citizens are not merely angry because government is imperfect. They are angry because the relationship between government and citizen has become poisoned by distrust. Betrayal produces fear, and fear produces silence. Silence produces political loneliness. Political loneliness eventually produces rebellion.
Uganda has, in recent years, witnessed precisely the kind of political confrontation that makes this warning worth examining. The continued prosecution and detention of Dr Kizza Besigye has become one of the most consequential examples. Besigye, a long-time opponent of President Museveni, has faced treason charges after being detained since late 2024. In July 2026, he collapsed during a court hearing and was taken to hospital in a condition described by his family as unresponsive. His supporters and rights advocates have argued that his prosecution is politically motivated, while the government maintains that he must answer serious criminal allegations.
The deeper question, therefore, is not whether an opposition politician should be above the law. No politician should be. The question is whether the law remains visibly neutral when it is applied to political opponents. A state does not demonstrate the strength of its law by imprisoning its opponents; it demonstrates the strength of its law by proving that the same law would be applied in exactly the same manner to the powerful.
This distinction is fundamental. For when the citizen begins to believe that criminal law has become a political instrument, the law loses its moral authority even before it loses its legal authority.
The situation becomes even more disturbing when the military enters the centre of political life. Human Rights Watch reported in July 2026 that security forces had unlawfully seized critics of President Museveni and Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, and alleged that some were held incommunicado before being handed over for prosecution. The organisation described the pattern as an attempt to silence critics and restrict opposition and independent media.
The United Nations subsequently expressed concern about what it described as increasing restrictions on dissent in Uganda, reporting arrests, disappearances, alleged torture, and pressure on opposition politicians, journalists, and civil-society actors. The UN Human Rights Commissioner warned that the atmosphere was encouraging self-censorship and deepening political polarisation.
Again, the comparison with Imbuga is not difficult to understand. In Betrayal in the City, repression does not merely destroy individuals. It gradually changes the psychological character of society. People begin to calculate what they can say, whom they can trust, and which political opinions are safe to express. A society may continue to have newspapers, Parliament, courts, and elections, yet democratic life can become hollow if citizens are permanently afraid of the consequences of speaking.
And then there is the question of the press. In June 2026, Nation Media Group reported that several of its Ugandan outlets — including Daily Monitor, NTV Uganda, KFM, Spark TV, and Dembe FM — had been shut down following an order associated with Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, with the military citing a security inquiry. The closure attracted criticism from rights organisations and international actors.
A newspaper may be wrong. A television station may be biased. A journalist may sometimes publish irresponsibly. But the answer to bad journalism in a constitutional democracy is normally law, regulation, correction, litigation, and professional accountability — not the transformation of the military into an arbiter of which media house may operate.
The press is not sacred because journalists are always right. It is important because government is never always right.
That is one of the lessons Imbuga understood remarkably well.
Yet perhaps the most fascinating part of Uganda's present political story is not what is happening between government and opposition. It is what increasingly appears to be happening inside the political establishment itself.
For years, Uganda's succession debate has largely been discussed in whispers, speculation, political calculations, and public denials. But the political landscape of 2026 has produced something more revealing: disagreements among people operating within or close to the centres of power.
Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the Chief of Defence Forces, has publicly clashed with government figures and political actors. In May, reports emerged of his dissatisfaction with aspects of President Museveni's new Cabinet, particularly the exclusion of some of his allies.
More strikingly, in September, The Observer reported an open confrontation between Muhoozi and presidential adviser Odrek Rwabwogo, the President's son-in-law. Muhoozi publicly threatened to arrest Rwabwogo and accused him and officials associated with the Presidential Advisory Committee on Exports and Industrial Development of corruption.
Rwabwogo himself had earlier spoken publicly about the dangers of silencing citizens and warned about alleged torture, killings, electoral malpractice, and military involvement in politics.
This is perhaps the most fascinating development of all.
When political disagreements are between government and opposition, the establishment can easily describe them as the normal contest between power and those seeking power. But when people inside the ruling political architecture begin publicly confronting one another, the question becomes more profound: what exactly is being contested?
Is it policy? Is it corruption? Is it institutional authority? Is it succession? Is it access to the President? Is it control over the machinery of government? Or is it something deeper — namely, a struggle over what Uganda's political future should look like?
These questions should not be answered hastily. But they deserve to be asked.
The reported confrontation between Muhoozi and Rwabwogo is particularly significant because both figures occupy positions within the wider political ecosystem surrounding the presidency. Their disagreement therefore cannot simply be dismissed as an ordinary social-media quarrel. It raises questions about competing centres of influence around the state and about what happens when personal, familial, military, and political networks overlap.
And here Imbuga again offers us an uncomfortable lesson.
In Betrayal in the City, Boss's greatest weakness is not simply that he is authoritarian. It is that his system depends upon people whose loyalty is connected to personal benefit rather than institutional principle. Mulili prospers because of his relationship with power. Others manoeuvre around the system because proximity to authority brings opportunity.
That is the architecture of patronage.
And patronage is dangerous not merely because it rewards friends. It is dangerous because it gradually changes the meaning of public office. Government ceases to be a mechanism for serving citizens and becomes a marketplace in which loyalty is exchanged for access.
Uganda's own government has repeatedly acknowledged corruption as a serious problem. President Museveni's administration has recently spoken publicly about corruption, absenteeism, failures in the Parish Development Model, shortages of medicines, and weaknesses in local government service delivery. Parliament, meanwhile, has been dealing with allegations of corruption and institutional accountability.
The contradiction is therefore striking.
A government can sincerely announce anti-corruption campaigns while corruption continues to appear deeply embedded within public administration. A president can condemn lazy officials while citizens continue to encounter absent health workers, missing medicines, poor roads, and weak public services. Parliament can legislate against corruption while political influence continues to shape the distribution of public opportunity.
This is not necessarily proof that the entire government is corrupt. That would be an irresponsible conclusion. But it does demonstrate that the existence of anti-corruption rhetoric is not the same thing as the existence of an anti-corruption system.
Institutions must be stronger than personalities.
Uganda's recent debate over the Protection of Sovereignty Bill illustrates the same tension. The original proposals attracted significant public concern, particularly over provisions that critics feared could criminalise ordinary association with foreign organisations. Parliament subsequently amended the Bill, narrowing several controversial provisions and removing some of the provisions that had attracted criticism.
This is actually an important democratic lesson.
A government is not weakened because citizens criticise its legislation. A government is strengthened when criticism forces it to improve legislation.
That is what constitutionalism is supposed to achieve: not the permanent triumph of government over citizens, but a continuous negotiation between power and the limits imposed upon it by law.
The tragedy begins when government starts regarding every criticism as an attack on the state.
The state is not the government.
The government is not the President.
The President is not the Constitution.
And the Constitution is not the ruling party.
These distinctions are the foundations of a republic.
Without them, political disagreement becomes treason, criticism becomes subversion, journalism becomes hostility, protest becomes rebellion, and opposition becomes an enemy category.
That is the road to Kafira.
But perhaps Uganda's most painful question is historical.
President Museveni and the men who went to the bush in the National Resistance Army's struggle presented their revolution as a project to remove dictatorship, restore constitutional government, eliminate sectarianism, establish democratic governance, and build a state in which Ugandans would no longer be ruled through arbitrary violence.
The historical context of that struggle matters. Uganda had experienced coups, political violence, authoritarian rule, and institutional collapse. The National Resistance Movement emerged promising a different political order.
So, after all these years, the question deserves to be asked without hatred and without nostalgia:
Is this the government that Museveni and the other men who went to the bush were fighting to establish?
It is not a question that should be answered simply by saying yes or no.
If the answer is yes, then Uganda must explain why the political order that was supposed to defeat arbitrary power has repeatedly been accused of restricting dissent.
If the answer is no, then the architects of the revolution must confront the more difficult question of how a movement that began as a rebellion against the abuse of state power came to preside over a political system in which accusations of repression, military interference, corruption, and institutional capture have become recurring features of public debate.
Revolutions often face their greatest test not when they are fighting the old order, but when they become the new order.
The liberation movement eventually inherits the state.
The revolutionary becomes the establishment.
The fighter becomes the office-holder.
The rebel becomes the custodian of institutions.
And then history asks the most uncomfortable question of all: can those who defeated political power learn to restrain their own power?
That is the tragedy at the heart of many African political histories.
Independence promised freedom from colonial domination, but in many countries the post-colonial citizen eventually discovered that replacing the colour of the ruler did not automatically transform the nature of power.
Imbuga understood this tragedy.
His Kafira is therefore not simply a story about a bad president. It is a story about what happens when institutions become weaker than the individuals controlling them, when fear replaces trust, when loyalty becomes more valuable than competence, when political patronage becomes more profitable than public service, and when citizens begin to regard the state not as their protector but as something from which they must protect themselves.
That is why Betrayal in the City remains relevant.
Uganda today does not need another revolution of guns.
It needs a revolution of institutions.
It needs courts that do not fear political power, a Parliament that is more than an extension of executive preference, a professional military that understands its constitutional boundaries, police institutions that protect citizens regardless of their political affiliation, electoral institutions whose credibility does not depend upon who wins, media institutions that can investigate government without fear, and citizens who can criticise the government without being treated as enemies of the state.
Above all, Uganda needs a political culture in which disagreement is not betrayal.
For there is a strange irony in political systems built around the language of loyalty. The more loudly a government demands loyalty, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish genuine loyalty from fear.
A sycophant tells the ruler what the ruler wants to hear.
A patriot tells the country what the country needs to hear.
Those are not the same thing.
And perhaps this is where Imbuga's greatest lesson lies.
The real danger to a country is not simply the tyrant at the top. It is the society that gradually learns to accommodate tyranny. It is the official who sees wrongdoing but remains silent. It is the politician who knows that a policy is destructive but supports it because his appointment depends upon it. It is the intellectual who abandons truth for proximity. It is the citizen who becomes afraid to speak. It is the institution that chooses convenience over constitutional duty.
Dictatorship, therefore, is not always born in a single dramatic moment.
Sometimes it grows quietly.
It grows through appointments.
Through patronage.
Through selective justice.
Through fear.
Through the weakening of institutions.
Through the silencing of inconvenient voices.
Through the normalisation of the extraordinary as ordinary.
And by the time society realises what has happened, everyone has become accustomed to Kafira.
Uganda is not Kafira.
Uganda is larger than any government, any political party, any president, any general, any opposition leader, or any generation of politicians.
Uganda belongs to its citizens.
That is precisely why the question raised by Betrayal in the City should not be whether Museveni is Boss, Muhoozi is Mulili, Besigye is Mosese, Bobi Wine is Jusper, or any other politician can be fitted into Imbuga's fictional cast. Such comparisons would be intellectually shallow.
The real question is whether the system itself is beginning to reproduce the political conditions that Imbuga warned about.
And if the answer is even partially yes, then the responsibility does not belong only to those in State House.
It belongs to every Ugandan who believes that constitutional government should mean something more than elections every five years. It belongs to lawyers who must defend the rule of law even when the defendant is unpopular. It belongs to journalists who must continue asking uncomfortable questions. It belongs to Parliament when executive power becomes excessive. It belongs to judges when political pressure collides with judicial independence. It belongs to soldiers who must remember that the Constitution, not an individual, is the supreme law. And it belongs to citizens who must refuse to surrender their country to the politics of fear.
Francis Imbuga wrote Kafira as fiction.
But fiction sometimes possesses the strange capacity to tell the truth more safely than political speeches.
Perhaps that is why, almost fifty years later, Betrayal in the City still sounds less like an old African play and more like a warning arriving from the future.
The final question is therefore not whether Uganda has reached Kafira.
The final question is whether Uganda will recognise Kafira before Kafira recognises itself in Uganda.
About the Writer
Evan Sande Ndahura is a Ugandan political and legal commentator, columnist, poet, and social justice advocate whose writings focus on governance, constitutionalism, democracy, and the political economy of power in Africa. He is widely published on issues of judicial accountability, electoral justice, human rights, and institutional reform, with particular emphasis on Uganda's political and legal systems. Writing from a Pan-African critical perspective, he interrogates the failures of state institutions and the lived realities of ordinary citizens under entrenched systems of power. He strongly believes that the liberation of Africa will ultimately be achieved through the mighty pen.
