KAMPALA, Uganda—Cheeks glazed with tears and her face a map of worry, Ugandan political dissident Olivia Lutaaya pled guilty to charges of “treachery,” or plotting against the government, along with 15 other co-defendants in a court hearing in October 2024. The group had been in jail for nearly four years, always swearing their innocence. Some of Lutaaya’s co-defendants had shed the red clothing they’d worn to display their support for opposition leader Bobi Wine, instead donning bright yellow t-shirts emblazoned with the face of President Yoweri Museveni, who has ruled Uganda for some 38 years.
Since her arrest in May 2021, Lutaaya had become a national figure—an emblem for Wine’s National Unity Platform, or NUP, and its jailed supporters.
“Oliva Lutaaya is another young mother that heard our message and rose to the occasion to play a positive part in this course that we are involved in,” Bobi Wine told World Politics Review from his home in Kampala, the Ugandan capital. “Olivia Lutaaya symbolizes opposition, symbolizes resistance, symbolizes the involvement and selflessness of young women who have nothing to fight with as a weapon other than their voices and their bodies. Now, her body is all she has, and it has been incarcerated painfully.”