SHE arrived at President Yoweri Museveni’s seventh-term inauguration on 12 May 2026, draped in a UGX 42.5 million Oscar de la Renta ensemble — yellow-gold, embroidered, imperial. It was, unmistakably, the outfit of a woman who believed herself untouchable. Four days later, her Nakasero home was surrounded by armed police officers, CID investigators, and plainclothes intelligence agents, as a joint security team executed a search warrant in connection with a corruption probe into alleged illicit enrichment and money laundering.
The raid was sanctioned by Museveni.
The fall of Anita Annet Among – Speaker of Uganda’s 11th Parliament, National Resistance Movement (NRM)’s 2nd National Vice Chairperson (Female), and one of the most formidable political operators in the country’s post-independence history – has been as swift as it has been spectacular.
It is a fall written not in whispers but in the roar of a Rolls-Royce Cullinan engine.
“I have been Mzee’s son for 52 years but I have never sat in a Rolls-Royce ever. I don’t think Mzee has sat in one either.”
Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Chief of Defence Forces
The Cullinan Moment
Approximately three weeks before the inauguration, reports emerged that Among had acquired a Rolls-Royce Cullinan – one of the most expensive luxury SUVs on the planet, owned globally by royalty, billionaires and entertainment royalty. In Uganda, according to the Daily Monitor, official records placed the vehicle’s cost at UGX 3.4 billion (approximately US$440,000) after taxes – paid, reportedly, by the Ugandan taxpayer.
Among pushed back publicly. In a conference call that included the Commissioner General of the Uganda Revenue Authority, John Musinguzi Rujoki, she confirmed ownership but insisted the car was a birthday gift. Uganda, one of the 47 least developed countries on earth, with a nominal GDP per capita oscillating between US$1,093 and US$1,374, had a new Rolls-Royce on its soil – and a Speaker who said it was a present.
Social media did not forgive the optics. The backlash was immediate and ferocious. For many Ugandans struggling with a healthcare system in arrears – Mulago National Referral Hospital alone owed NW&SC UGX 8 billion in outstanding water bills – the image of the country’s second-most senior constitutional officer stepping into a vehicle that cost more than most Ugandans would earn in 3,000 lifetimes was radioactive.
And then Muhoozi Kainerugaba – the President’s son, Chief of Defence Forces, and chairman of the Patriotic League of Uganda – lit a match.
The General’s Verdict
Writing on X, Muhoozi made his contempt for the Cullinan symbolism publicly explicit. He declared he had never sat in a Rolls-Royce despite being Museveni’s son for 52 years and did not believe his father had either. He spoke of redirecting parliamentary funds to the millions of Ugandans living in shacks, with no water or power.’ He said, pointedly: ‘I cannot support corruption.’
The same day – 12 May 2026, the day of Museveni’s swearing-in – PLU General Secretary David Kabanda issued a formal statement cancelling the endorsement PLU had issued on 11 March 2026 for Among and her deputy Thomas Tayebwa as candidates for Speaker and Deputy Speaker in the incoming 12th Parliament. The endorsement was retracted “with immediate effect.”
Muhoozi then pointed his support to Jacob Marksons Oboth-Oboth, the Minister of Defence and West Budama Central MP. Within 24 hours, the political architecture that Among had built – and in which she had invested heavily, reportedly bankrolling numerous MP campaigns across the country – was collapsing.
State House Seals Her Fate
On Thursday, 14 May, two meetings at State House – one involving ministers, one involving the first family – delivered the final verdict. The Daily Monitor reported that those present extensively discussed how Among had used the incumbency to paper over mounting criticism. The unambiguous conclusion: the optics of her retaining the Speakership were untenable.
Among was directed to step down from the Speaker’s race. The reason cited was the controversy over her accumulated wealth during her tenure – an accumulation that had drawn not merely domestic reproach but formal sanctions from two of the world’s most powerful governments.
In April 2024, the United Kingdom’s Foreign Office invoked the Global Anti-Corruption Sanctions regime against Among – the first time the UK had used it against Uganda — citing her involvement in ‘significant corruption’ tied to the Karamoja iron sheets scandal, in which aid materials meant for vulnerable communities were diverted. A travel ban and an asset freeze followed. The following month, the United States State Department followed suit, formally designating Among and seven other Ugandan officials – including her husband and Budiope East MP Moses Magogo – over ‘significant corruption tied to her leadership of Uganda’s Parliament.’
Among described both sets of sanctions as politically motivated, attributing them to Western hostility toward Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023, which she had championed. The argument found political traction domestically but did little to rehabilitate her standing internationally, nor – as it has now transpired – within the ruling NRM establishment itself.
The Raid
By Saturday, 16 May 2026, the denouement arrived in the form of uniformed officers at her gate. A joint security team led by the Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID), with operational support from the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF) and other security agencies, conducted what Daily Monitor confirmed was a ‘rigorous search’ of her Nakasero residence.
Armed police cordoned off entry and exit points to the upscale suburban home. Plainclothes intelligence officers moved through the property. Police leadership offered no public statement on the specific motivation behind the operation, but multiple sources connected the action to the widening fallout within the NRM establishment and a corruption probe examining allegations of illicit enrichment and money laundering.
Among’s allies condemned the operation as political intimidation. The Inspectorate of Government had already confirmed receiving a formal petition against her earlier in the week. The Inspector General’s office stated publicly: ‘We received the complaint and we are processing it.’
A Decade of Ascent, Undone
The trajectory of Among’s political life makes her unravelling all the more dramatic. Barely a dozen years ago, she was an opposition MP for the Forum for Democratic Change, a member of Parliament whose personal wealth attracted no public commentary because there was nothing to comment on. She had joined the NRM, risen to Deputy Speaker of the 10th Parliament, and in March 2022, following the death of Speaker Jacob Oulanyah in Seattle, she ascended to the Speakership itself.
What followed was four years of extraordinary accumulation – of power, of wealth, of controversy. A Mercedes fleet. A mansion in Bukedea. The Nakasero home is now under police search. And then, most fatefully, a Rolls-Royce Cullinan – a vehicle that, in the wrong political moment, became an image of everything the Ugandan public most despised about the political class it had elected to serve it.
Among is not the first Ugandan official to be cut down by the machinery of a system that elevated her. Former Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa’s career in international diplomacy collapsed under the weight of US indictment. The Karamoja iron sheets scandal claimed minister Agnes Nandutu, convicted and imprisoned. In each case, the pattern was the same: proximity to power, then the moment when that proximity became a liability.
Oboth-Oboth, with the declared backing of the PLU and the tacit blessing of State House, enters the Speakership race as the establishment’s chosen successor. His thanksgiving ceremony on Saturday drew MPs and dignitaries in large numbers – a pointed statement about where power now flows.
For Among, the immediate questions are legal rather than political. The corruption probe is not a political manoeuvre she can survive through parliamentary lobbying. Nor can she paper over it with a birthday gift explanation. The weight of two international sanctions regimes, a petition before the IGG, a security raid on her home, and the withdrawal of support from the President’s own son and political movement constitutes a convergence of institutional and political force that very few Ugandan public figures have survived.
She retains her parliamentary seat – she was elected unopposed in Bukedea in October 2025 and took her oath on 13 May 2026. She retains her connections, her networks, and the loyalty of MPs whose campaigns she funded. She has survived before.
But the Cullinan – gleaming, imported, a birthday gift from an unknown benefactor to a sanctioned official in one of the world’s poorest countries – has become something larger than a car. It has become the symbol of an era of parliamentary impunity that Ugandans finally decided they were unwilling to pay for any longer.
Whether those who now move against Among do so out of genuine commitment to accountability, or out of the same calculus of power that drove every other political reckoning in Uganda’s post-independence history, is a question that will take time to answer. What is not in question is the verdict that has already been delivered — not in a court, but in the court of the political moment.
The Queen of the Hill has fallen. The hill itself remains.
