YVONNE'S TAKE: East Africa Trinity of Terror

There is a kind of silence that is louder than any official statement.

It’s the silence we’ve heard for nearly a month now over the disappearance of Bob Njagi and Nicholas Oyoo in Uganda — two Kenyans who crossed a border and vanished into a system that refuses to acknowledge they were ever in its grip. Their families wait. Their government watches. And the rest of us are left to wonder: how does a country misplace its own citizens?

Before them, there was Agatha Atuhaire in Tanzania. Boniface Mwangi, too, was held, brutalised, and tossed out like an inconvenience at closing time. Their stories were carried back across the border by their own bodies, marked with the kind of fear that is meant to be passed along. And when they looked to their governments for outrage, urgency, or even dignity, they found diplomatic niceties and lowered eyes — worse still, lectures about how to behave appropriately at the neighbour’s house.

And then there was Kizza Besigye — a man abducted not in the backstreets of Kampala but in Nairobi, on our soil, and ferried across the border to face a military court as a civilian. A civilian, in 2025, in East Africa, was tried by soldiers. And again, the script played out exactly as it wasn’t supposed to: muted concern, gentle phrasing, and a quick return to regular programming.

Not a treaty. Not a communiqué. Just a quiet, unwritten understanding among those in power: If your critic slips into my territory, I’ll handle them. If mine runs into yours, you’ll do the same. No questions. No noise. No diplomatic incidents. Just cooperation “for regional stability.”

East Africa has, without saying so, built a tripartite cross-border enforcement network — not for criminals, not for drug cartels, not for money launderers, but for critics. The people who ask uncomfortable questions. Who organises. Who write. Who exposes. The kind of people every government insists it welcomes — until it doesn’t.

Tanzania has just voted under the heaviest cloud in years. Uganda heads to the polls next. Kenya follows in 2027.

Three elections. Three leaders with everything to lose. Three governments are watching each other’s opposition, activists, journalists, and digital communities with more interest than they are in their own manifestos. Elections should open space for more voices. Instead, we are watching those spaces tighten, border by border.

And somewhere in this choreography of silence and force, the citizen is forgotten.

Maybe our foreign ministries think that staying quiet is staying friendly. Maybe they think safeguarding citizens is less important than safeguarding relationships. Maybe this is the cost of “good neighbourliness.”

But here is the uncomfortable truth: a state that cannot protect its citizens beyond its borders soon forgets how to protect them within them.

Bob and Nicholas are still missing.
Agatha is still recovering.
Besigye is still facing soldiers in a courtroom meant for war.

And every young East African watching is learning that dissent is a continental offence with regional consequences.

We don’t need another summit or another slogan. We need something simpler:

A commitment from Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania that critics will not be hunted across borders like contraband. That sovereignty is not an excuse to abandon accountability. And that elections are not a reason to mute the very voices that give democracy its meaning.