THERE is a particular kind of courage that belongs almost exclusively to those who have nothing left to prove and nothing left to lose. At 72, Dr Miria Rukoza Koburunga Matembe has spent more than three decades demonstrating exactly that kind of courage. On Tuesday, that courage carried her, frail and in visible pain, supported on the arms of friends, into a Luzira courtroom, where she was formally charged with promoting sectarianism and ordered held at Luzira Prison.
Matembe had disappeared after security operatives raided her Luzira home while she was out on her regular morning walk. Days of uncertainty followed, marked by an emotional televised appeal from a former member of parliament and a formal petition from the Uganda Law Society demanding she be produced before a court or released. It later emerged she had been found at a hotel along Gayaza Road, where she had gone into hiding. Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the army chief whose conduct she had just finished criticising on national television, announced her arrest on social media himself, first citing “impersonation” before an entirely different charge appeared on the sheet placed before the magistrate.
A Daughter of Bwizibwera
Matembe was born on 28 August 1953 in Bwizibwera, a farming village in Kashaari, Mbarara, the fourth of nine children. Her early education took her through Rutooma Primary School, Bweranyangi Girls for her O-Levels, and Namasagali College, before she went on to Makerere University, where she trained in law, the discipline that would shape the rest of her public life.
She belongs to the generation of Ugandan women who came of age politically in the upheaval of the 1980s, and who went on to do something few of their counterparts elsewhere on the continent were given the opportunity to do: help write a new constitution from first principles. As a delegate to Uganda’s Constituent Assembly in the early 1990s, Matembe was among the women who fought to entrench gender equality provisions and protections for women’s political participation in the 1995 Constitution, work that earned her recognition as one of the founding mothers of Uganda’s modern women’s movement.
She went on to serve as Uganda’s Minister of Ethics and Integrity, a portfolio that placed her, often uncomfortably for those in power, at the centre of the country’s fight against corruption. Colleagues and admirers describe her today as the matriarch of Uganda’s women’s movement, the moral authority whose decades of consistency and personal cost have opened space for younger generations of women in politics and civil society.
From Insider to Conscience
Matembe’s journey from a trusted figure inside Museveni’s ruling movement to one of its most consistent critics has unfolded gradually and publicly. In recent years, she has used television interviews and public platforms to warn, repeatedly, that Uganda’s institutions, Parliament, the judiciary, and the police are being hollowed out by the growing political and personal power of one man: Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the Chief of Defence Forces and son of President Museveni.
Her central argument, made on camera in the days before her disappearance, was a constitutional one rather than a personal one, even though it landed as deeply personal. She argued that nothing in Uganda’s constitution, the same constitution she helped draft, gives an army commander the power to order the arrest of any citizen without even the knowledge of the Inspector General of Police, whose mandate that constitutionally is. The growing pattern of abductions and detentions carried out at the apparent instruction of the military chief, in her telling, represents the de facto suspension of the rule of law by a man who has never been elected to anything.
She was equally direct about what she saw as the roots of Kainerugaba’s conduct. Matembe argued that he had never known want, having been a child of roughly eleven or twelve when his father seized power in 1986, and that everything he has commanded since, the soldiers, the resources, the platform, was built on the country’s wealth rather than his own. That lifelong absence of hardship, she suggested, had produced a man who respects no one, because he has never had to earn anything he holds.
She addressed President Museveni directly in the same interview, asking him to recognise her not as an unstable provocateur but as a longstanding comrade whose record in Uganda’s liberation movement and whose sacrifices for the country he himself knew well. It was, in effect, an appeal from one elder of the movement to another, made on the record, days before soldiers came looking for her at home.
Not Afraid of Death
Asked whether she feared the consequences of speaking so openly against the country’s most powerful soldier, Matembe gave an answer that has since circulated widely on Ugandan social media: that death comes to everyone regardless of what they do or say, and that fearing it was therefore pointless. She framed her own silence, by contrast, as the only thing genuinely within her control, and said she saw no reason to practise it inside her own home about matters she has spent her adult life fighting for.
That posture, more than any single policy position, is what has made her a reference point for Ugandans frustrated with the deepening militarisation of political life. A former opposition leader of Uganda’s national assembly described her, in the days following her disappearance, as one of the most consistent voices the country has produced, someone who has challenged injustice for decades without regard for the political cost to herself. Civil society leaders and former officials across the political spectrum, including figures who have themselves clashed with the current government, joined calls for her unconditional release, framing her detention as a test of whether Uganda’s constitutional protections against arbitrary arrest still mean anything in practice.
The Raid
According to her husband, Nehemiah Matembe, the operation against their home unfolded with a deliberate absence of explanation. A mixed team of uniformed soldiers and plain-clothed operatives arrived in a vehicle that residents have taken to calling a “drone”, found Matembe already gone for her walk, and proceeded to search every room of the house, including the couple’s bedroom, before leaving without identifying themselves, without an arrest, and without a word to the family left standing in the wreckage of their own privacy.
Her phones went silent soon after. For days, her family said they had no way of confirming whether she was alive, in custody, or simply hiding. It later emerged she had taken refuge first with relatives and then at a hotel along Gayaza Road, before security operatives located and arrested her. Gen. Kainerugaba announced her arrest on his personal X account, initially describing it as being over “impersonation”, a charge that bore no relation to the one his prosecutors would eventually place before a magistrate.
“Still Praising Her God”
On Tuesday, Matembe was produced before Grade One Magistrate Sheilla Gloria Atim at the Luzira Magistrate’s Court and formally charged with promoting sectarianism under Section 38(1)(d) of Uganda’s Penal Code Act, over remarks prosecutors allege she made on DK TV Uganda about tax money being spent on “Banyankole women ministers”. She denied the charge and pleaded not guilty.
Those who saw her arrive described a woman visibly diminished by the ordeal. Dressed in an orange prison uniform, she was supported into the courtroom by two women as she struggled with what she told the court was severe back pain. National Unity Platform spokesperson Joel Ssenyonyi, who joined supporters keeping vigil outside the court, said he found her visibly weak and frail, yet despite the ordeal, she was still praising her God. “What a country!” he wrote afterward, a line that captured, for many Ugandans, the distance between Matembe’s decades of service to the nation and the manner in which the nation was now treating her.
Her lawyers, led by Uganda Law Society Vice President Anthony Asiimwe, asked the magistrate to grant bail on medical grounds, citing her age and condition. The magistrate ruled there was no evidence before the court that the accused was unwell, and that it was in any event too late in the day to consider a bail application. Matembe was remanded to Luzira Prison, with her bail hearing set down for Wednesday, 1 July. Amnesty International called for her release and that of others it considers arbitrarily detained, while the Uganda Law Society renewed its warning that constitutional due process is being treated as optional in cases involving the government’s critics.
Matembe’s standing, built across decades of public service, constitution-making and outspoken advocacy, means her detention has become something larger than a personal ordeal. It has become a measure of how far Uganda’s institutions have drifted from the document she helped write, and a test of whether public outrage, however genuine, can still constrain a military commander who answers, by his own account, only to his father.
