KAMPALA, Uganda—Cheeks glazed with tears and her face a map of fear, Ugandan political dissident Olivia Lutaaya pled responsible to costs of “treachery,” or plotting towards the federal government, together with 15 different co-defendants in a court docket listening to in October 2024. The group had been in jail for almost 4 years, all the time swearing their innocence. A few of Lutaaya’s co-defendants had shed the pink clothes they’d worn to show their help for opposition chief Bobi Wine, as an alternative donning vibrant yellow t-shirts emblazoned with the face of President Yoweri Museveni, who has dominated Uganda for some 38 years.
Since her arrest in Could 2021, Lutaaya had turn out to be a nationwide determine—an emblem for Wine’s Nationwide Unity Platform, or NUP, and its jailed supporters.
“Oliva Lutaaya is one other younger mom that heard our message and rose to the event to play a constructive half on this course that we’re concerned in,” Bobi Wine instructed World Politics Assessment from his dwelling in Kampala, the Ugandan capital. “Olivia Lutaaya symbolizes opposition, symbolizes resistance, symbolizes the involvement and selflessness of younger girls who don’t have anything to struggle with as a weapon apart from their voices and their our bodies. Now, her physique is all she has, and it has been incarcerated painfully.”
