A Wife’s Cry for Justice: Winnie Byanyima calls for the release of seriously ill Kizza Besigye

For more than a year, Dr Kizza Besigye has been behind prison walls, held on treason charges his family insists are politically motivated. Now, his continued detention has taken on a new and urgent dimension: a rapidly deteriorating health condition that his wife, Winnie Byanyima, says is being deliberately concealed and neglected.

In an emotionally charged statement issued on Tuesday, Byanyima painted a troubling picture of a man she says is seriously ill, isolated, and denied adequate medical care while in custody. She described a tense night in which Dr Besigye was hurriedly taken from prison to the clinic of his personal doctor after what she called a sharp decline in his condition.

“When I saw him, he was extremely weak, shaking, running a high temperature and suffering from severe abdominal pain,” Byanyima said.

According to her account, prison authorities did not notify her of the medical emergency. She says she only learned of it through informal channels and rushed to the clinic in the middle of the night. By the time she arrived, Dr Besigye was under heavy guard. Six prison officers and a plainclothes military intelligence operative, whom Byanyima says concealed her identity, later fled when questioned.

What followed, she alleges, was a return to prison under conditions that deepened her fears. After treatment, Dr Besigye was escorted through a basement car park and forced into a prison pickup truck, squeezed between warders, before being driven back to his cell late at night.

For Byanyima, the episode marked a dangerous turning point.

“I am deeply concerned that he is now effectively in the hands of the army rather than under civilian prison authority,” she said, adding that his medical care appears to be tightly controlled and intentionally limited.

She further alleges that she has been warned against informing the public about her husband’s condition and threatened that speaking out would result in Dr Besigye being denied access to his personal doctor. She describes this as blackmail and a calculated effort to hide his true state of health.

The concerns intensified the following morning when, despite her account, a prison spokesperson publicly stated that Dr Besigye was not ill. Byanyima flatly dismissed the claim as false.

Later developments, she says, only reinforced her fears. Following public statements by herself and the People’s Front for Freedom (PFF), the political party associated with Dr Besigye, the Commissioner of Prisons reportedly restricted his access to external medical facilities, allowing only limited consultations at the prison sick bay, an arrangement Byanyima describes as dangerously inadequate.

Beyond his current illness, she outlined a year marked by what she calls harsh and degrading detention conditions. Dr Besigye, she says, has been denied bail four times, held on remand for over a year, and confined in isolation.

He is allegedly barred from interacting with other prisoners, prevented from attending communal worship, and denied basic physical activity. His cell, she says, is small, poorly lit, and infested with bedbugs.

Last week’s election period, during which prisons were closed to visitors and the internet shut down nationwide, appears to have compounded the situation. Family members were unable to see him, and it was during this time of isolation, Byanyima says, that his health sharply declined.

At the heart of her statement is a direct demand: the immediate release of Dr Kizza Besigye.

“His continued detention, mistreatment and denial of medical care place his life at grave risk,” she said, warning that those responsible would be held accountable.

Dr Besigye’s case has long been a lightning rod in Uganda’s political landscape, emblematic to his supporters of a broader struggle over dissent, justice, and the rule of law. With his health now at the center of the debate, pressure is mounting, not only from political allies, but from family members who say time is no longer on their side.