Mr Chris Ma[gezi], I wish I were vulgar enough to call you an anus, but that would be a grave injustice to an innocent anatomical institution. The anus, unlike you, understands its biological mandate. It receives waste, expels excrement, releases the occasional fartulence and never pretends that these essential services constitute a salary or bribe. You, on the other hand, are a military officer entrusted with defending the territorial integrity of our country, yet you appear to have abandoned that solemn responsibility to become Muhoozi’s personal toilet paper, travelling wherever his reputation requires wiping and polishing whatever political mess he leaves behind. Oryomuhehi wamazzi (scooper of faeces) and if you cannot be ashamed of it, then you are Masiru, not Magezi. Do you remember Janos Slynt in Game of Thrones? That miserable specimen of opportunism mistook proximity to power for power. He made a career of serving powerful men without developing the inconvenient burden of independent judgment. His loyalty was available to whoever could guarantee his survival and advancement. Your conduct reminds me of him. You seem determined to reduce an entire military career, with all its professional obligations and supposed honour, to a financial transaction in which dignity is surrendered as collateral. Even Janos eventually discovered that the powerful do not necessarily retain their servants once those servants become a liability. There was once another character in our political circus, Sadolin Anitah Among, whom I have criticised over the mabaati scandal and the extravagant public display of stolen wealth. Around her gathered an industrious collection of defensive political wet wipes, each convinced that proximity to her privileges conferred permanent importance. They spent their days polishing her image, attacking critics and confusing sycophancy with statesmanship. What none of them appeared to understand was that a wet wipe is a disposable commodity. It may enjoy a brief moment of intimate proximity to the anus of power, but once it has performed its unpleasant assignment, nobody frames it and hangs it in the sitting room. It goes into the rubbish bin. The tragedy of political sycophants is that they imagine themselves indispensable while their employers regard them as replaceable cleaning materials. You do not become powerful by building a career around the dirty work of powerful yet weak and violent people. You become useful, and usefulness is not the same as security. The moment your services become embarrassing, expensive or unnecessary, the people whose reputations you have spent years laundering may discover an urgent need to distance themselves from you. They will not convene a ceremony to honour your sacrifice. They will simply appoint another cleaner of their shitty anus. And yes, Mr Magezi, Muhoozi and I have met. You can read my account of those encounters in The Savage Avenger, my second prison memoir. I have described how, during my torture, pliers were used to tear flesh from my thighs, wires were used to mutilate my body, and clubs were used to inflict injuries upon my legs, ankles and internal organs--which are all evidenced in pictures and medical reports. Perhaps while I was enduring that brutality, you were somewhere preparing an application to become the official toilet paper of his hairy and malodorous anus, complete with a curriculum vitae boasting exceptional competence in wiping away accountability. I refused the package he offered to secure my silence. When his senile Museveni subsequently sent @OdrekRwabwogo to me, I refused that approach too. There are things money cannot purchase from a lanky person like me when I decided that my conscience is not a commodity. You may find that difficult to understand because you appear to approach principle as though it were an item in a government procurement catalogue, available for purchase by whichever powerful man signs the requisition. That, Mr Magezi, is the difference between us. You have opinions supplied by your masters. I have convictions formed through experience, thought and suffering. I decide what I believe and accept responsibility for what I say. You appear to wait for instructions about whose anus to wipe, whom to attack and which disgrace must be repackaged as an achievement. My principles have cost me my freedom, my health and my home. Your own public interventions suggest a weak and useless man prepared to discount his dignity for the temporary comforts of political patronage. I would rather remain an exiled novelist with convictions than become a uniformed court jester whose conscience must report for duty whenever his master requires applause. A military uniform should signify service to the country, not a lifelong apprenticeship in cleaning the reputational backside of a powerful cannibal family. And Mr Magezi, toilet paper may enjoy extraordinary proximity to the most powerful buttocks in Uganda, but proximity does not confer dignity. Once the wiping is finished, nobody mistakes the paper for the person sitting on the throne. @nytimes and @Megankstack did a great job of holding a mirror to your hideous pumpkin face, but you are denying yourself and how you really look like. If that is not the meaning of stupidity, what, then, is?

A few days ago in Berlin, I met a Muslim colleague whom I first met in Canada in the winter of 2013. At the time, she had recently left Saudi Arabia and migrated to North America and got ballooned. She celebrated her departure with the enthusiasm of a freed Ugandan political prisoner. She spoke passionately about escaping the conservative religious and cultural restrictions in which she said she had been encapsulated. She became a radical feminist, liberated her mouth from compulsory silence, and developed the confidence of an evangelist who had recently discovered a new gospel called liberalism. She embraced her new freedom comprehensively. There were no half-measures. She drank alcohol, wore whatever pleased her, and allowed her glistening thighs and juicy cleavage to participate freely in public life without seeking permission from any religious committee. Pork, previously treated almost as an edible criminal offence, found its way onto her plate and into her stomach. She occasionally smoked weed. She debated liberalism on panels and spoke about individual autonomy with the conviction of someone who had personally crossed the Red Sea and left Pharaoh shouting from the opposite bank. She called all this freedom, and anybody who questioned it risked receiving a free postgraduate seminar on patriarchy. Thirteen years later, in 2026, we spoke again. Time had performed one of its favourite practical jokes, ie, the revolutionary was now the mother of three teenagers, twin daughters and a son, and suddenly liberalism had developed complications. She complained that the children had become troublesome. They were too independent. They challenged her rules. They apparently possessed opinions in quantities their mother considered medically excessive. Then came the sentence that has probably been uttered by every former rebel since human reproduction began.....'I was not raised like that'. Here was the woman who had spent years explaining precisely why she was delighted not to have been raised differently now invoking the manner in which she had been raised as evidence for the prosecution. Then she disclosed the remedy. She had sent the children back to Saudi Arabia for cultural sensitisation, acclimatisation and communal haranguing. I laughed. My dear, I reminded her, when we met in Canada thirteen years ago, you were celebrating your escape from the very cultural factory to which you have now returned your children for refurbishment. You escaped Saudi conservatism, arrived in North America, removed the cultural speed governor, and drove happily down the motorway of personal liberty. Now your children have inherited the vehicle, discovered the accelerator, and you are screaming from the passenger seat that everybody should respect the speed limit. Apparently, freedom is a magnificent philosophy until your own children read the footnotes of it. This is one of the great comedies of adulthood. When your father prohibited something, he was a patriarchal dinosaur obstructing human progress. When your daughter does the same thing you once fought for the right to do, you suddenly remember that your grandfather was a remarkably wise man. The rules you escaped become the rules you retrieve. Rukirabachwezi