She built the weapon they used to destroy her. King Melvin (@melvinnasasira) explains how Anita Among walked straight into the regime’s trap.
King Melvin (@melvinnasasira) posted a thread that I think everyone needs to read. Here it is in full:
I have a theory. The regime had been tired of Anita Annet Among long before this year. She was accumulating too much wealth, too much power, and too much respect inside the NRM structures. She looked too ambitious, and that is one thing you do not want to be with this regime. These people prefer you quiet, predictable, and busy minding your own corner. Edward Kiwanuka Ssekandi is the model. He sat in that same chair for ten years and nobody outside Uganda knew his name.
Anita, by contrast, was loud, flashy, and her long hands were busy announcing to the world exactly what the NRM looks like from the inside. The international image the regime has spent decades covering with makeup, that of a calm, religious, gentlemanly leadership working hard for a poor country, was being undone every time she opened her mouth, posted from another five-star hotel abroad, or appeared in a new ten thousand dollar dress flown in from Paris. Every Anita appearance was a press release the regime never wanted issued.
So they wanted her out, but they wanted to do it with a little entertainment and drama along the way, because that is how this regime handles people who become too ambitious for its liking. Why let go of such a person quietly when you can squeeze a public spectacle out of her exit and use her as a lesson to anyone else thinking of getting too big for the system?
So they came up with the Protection of Sovereignty Bill. On the surface, it was a national security law aimed at NGOs, opposition parties, and any Ugandan or organisation receiving foreign funding. It threatens 20 years in prison for anyone caught taking foreign money to “destabilise” the state, criminalises a whole range of legitimate civic activity, and gives the executive sweeping powers over civil society. Anita Among, of course, championed it loudly on the floor of Parliament, calling it a bill to protect Uganda’s sovereignty from foreign interference. She bragged about it and made it her flagship project.
What she may not have realised, or maybe she did and assumed she was untouchable, is that the bill’s broad clauses on foreign funding, illicit financial flows, and undermining the state through external resources actually fit her own situation more snugly than anyone else’s in the country. She is under UK sanctions. Her assets have been frozen abroad. Her name keeps coming up in cross-border corruption investigations. She has connections to foreign accounts, foreign properties, and “foreign benefactors” that, read strictly under the bill, look exactly like the conduct the law was supposedly designed to punish.
So here is the trap. The regime gave her the satisfaction of pushing it through parliament. They watched her brag. They watched her insult Ugandans and the donors who criticised it. And then, once the bill was passed, they sat back with it on the table, knowing they had not yet assented to it but the option was now permanently in their hands. They probably called her in afterwards and explained the situation in plain language: step aside from the speakership race quietly, or we sign this thing and you become the first headline.
The irony of it is the part the regime loves the most. They could have eased her out the boring way, a silent transfer, a soft landing in a ceremonial role, the usual. Instead, they let her build the very weapon they intended to point at her. They let her brag about the law she did not realise she was passing for her own funeral. And the public, the same public she has insulted, looted from, and ruled over with contempt these last few years, gets to watch the woman who said “the bazzukulu can do nothing” find out that the senior bazzukulu in State House have been strategically preparing her exit for months.
This could be one of the most darkly entertaining political traps the regime has ever set. She walked into the room thinking she was the architect. They were always the architects, of course; they always are. She was just the bricklayer.
But do we ever learn? Another Anita will rise through the ranks. A different name, a different region, a different wig, but the same hunger, the same arrogance, the same belief that the system will always protect her. And a few years down the road, we will be back here, watching the same theatre, with the same regime quietly setting up the same trap. The names change but the play does not.